IBM Works with Discover to Co-Create Technology Solutions and Migrate to a Hybrid Cloud Platform

ARMONK, N.Y., March 30, 2022 — IBM Consulting is working with Discover Financial Services to help the leading digital bank and payments company enhance its digital transformation of applications and existing systems to a hybrid cloud architecture using Red Hat OpenShift.

“Consumers demand faster access to integrated digital banking and payments more than ever, with the assurance that their data will be protected,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Embracing an open enterprise hybrid cloud strategy with a secure platform purpose-built for the financial services industry allows Discover to deliver differentiated new experiences.”

Discover plans to migrate and modernize its current systems and applications to an open and flexible hybrid cloud architecture. Red Hat OpenShift will help Discover leverage key capabilities such as security, automation and multicloud service integration to reduce operational costs, deliver better outcomes across business processes, enable faster application deployments, and bring agility with enhanced security and resilience.

“As we accelerate our digital transition journey as a leading direct bank and payments company, it is critical that we have technology solutions in place that help us improve the customer experience,” said Amir Arooni, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Discover. “Working with IBM will allow us to automate, react and deliver solutions more quickly, ultimately driving down costs and helping our customers.”

IBM Consulting also will collaborate with Discover’s teams to utilize IBM Garage and agile techniques to modernize existing applications and co-create new solutions to help Discover derive greater business and technical benefits.

Discover will use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for hybrid cloud automation and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM) to achieve end-to-end management visibility and control of its cluster and application lifecycle across its hybrid cloud architecture.

IBM Files Lawsuit to Protect its Intellectual Property Rights

Accuses LzLabs of infringing IBM patents and misappropriating IBM trade secrets

ARMONK, N.Y., March 21, 2022 — IBM today filed suit against LzLabs, saying the Switzerland-based company has violated IBM’s intellectual property rights by repeatedly infringing upon company patents protecting various aspects of IBM’s high-performance mainframe systems, a core technology that clients depend on for their most important workloads.

In the legal action filed in U.S. District Court in Waco, Texas, IBM asserts that LzLabs has also deliberately misappropriated IBM trade secrets by reverse engineering, reverse compiling and translating IBM software. IBM also alleges that LzLabs has made false and misleading claims about LzLabs’ products.

IBM is seeking relief that includes an injunction against LzLabs to prevent further unlawful use of IBM’s intellectual property and trade secrets.

LzLabs is owned and run by some of the same individuals who previously owned and ran Neon Enterprise Software, LLC of Austin, Texas. Neon previously attempted to free ride on IBM’s mainframe business, and prior litigation between IBM and Neon ended with a U.S. District Court permanently barring Neon and certain of its key employees from, among other things, reverse engineering, reverse compiling and translating certain IBM software, and also from continuing to distribute certain Neon software products.

IBM has made significant investment in research and development in this critical technology field and will aggressively defend its investments and resulting patents against those who violate them, as LzLabs has now repeatedly done.

Patents infringed by LzLabs include:

  • Two that describe methods embodied in IBM mainframe instructions that LzLabs must emulate with or translate into Intel x86 instructions,
  • Two that describe methods of increasing emulation/translation efficiency that LzLabs must implement if it is to achieve optimized performance objectives; and
  • One that describes a method related to the translation of IBM mainframe applications wherein IBM programs called by those applications are identified and an x86 substituted for each.