IBM Helps Ecosystem Partners Accelerate AI Adoption by Making it Easier to Embed and Scale AI Across Their Business

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2022  — IBM today announced an expansion to its embeddable AI software portfolio with the release of three new libraries designed to help IBM Ecosystem partners, clients and developers more easily, quickly and cost-effectively build their own AI-powered solutions and bring them to market. Generally available today, the AI libraries were developed in IBM Research and designed to provide Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) across industries an easily scalable way to build natural language processing, speech to text, and text to speech capabilities into applications across any hybrid, multi cloud environment.

The expanded portfolio provides access to the same AI libraries that power popular IBM Watson products. It is designed to help lower the barrier for AI adoption by helping partners and clients address the skills shortage and development costs required to build machine learning and AI models from scratch. Developer and IT teams also have the flexibility to embed the new Watson libraries of choice into their applications to help create customized and compelling products without data science expertise.

“Enterprises must commit to a significant investment in expertise, resources and time required to build, deploy and manage AI-powered solutions,” said Kate Woolley, General Manager, IBM Ecosystem. “By bringing to market the same portfolio of embeddable AI technology that powers our industry-leading IBM Watson products, we are helping Ecosystem partners more efficiently deliver AI experiences that can drive business value for their clients.”

With the three new software libraries, developers can easily access AI capabilities and choose the specific functionality, such as natural language processing, that they want to embed in different parts of an application. The libraries include innovations developed by IBM Research as well as open source technology and are designed to reduce the time and resources required for a developer to add powerful AI to an application.

The three new libraries available today include:

IBM Watson Natural Language Processing Library: designed to help developers provide capabilities to process human language to derive meaning and context through intent and sentiment.
IBM Watson Speech to Text Library: designed to enable speech transcription with speed and accuracy to help businesses improve customer service experiences.
IBM Watson Text to Speech Library: designed to enable developers to convert written text into natural sounding audio with accuracy in a variety of languages and voices within an existing application.
This release builds on IBM’s existing portfolio of embeddable AI products, which includes industry leading products such as IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Watson Discovery, IBM Instana Observability, IBM Maximo Visual Inspection and IBM Watson APIs. With IBM’s embeddable AI portfolio, CXOs and other IT decision makers can use AI to uncover business insights and build enhanced end user experiences.

Access Embeddable AI through the IBM Ecosystem
IBM Ecosystem partners and mutual clients are benefiting from IBM’s portfolio of embeddable AI products.

“We are thrilled with our ability to embed IBM Watson Natural Language Processing in our technology so seamlessly,” said Yatharth Gupta, SVP Products, SingleStore. “Helping our clients integrate and use capabilities such as sentiment analysis will be invaluable in driving real time analytics to help them better understand, engage and serve their customers.”

Other IBM Ecosystem partners like EquBot, CrushBank, and Sherloq are using embeddable AI technology in their solutions to make informed investment decisions, enhance help desk interactions, and identify marketing leads through web 3.0 compliance and intelligent website design.

As IBM Ecosystem partners build with IBM’s embeddable AI, there are partner programs to help them at every step of their journey, from building with IBM to go-to-market with IBM. Partners can access these valuable benefits including co-create, co-marketing, and co-sell resources to help drive market demand and grow their business. Today’s news follows IBM’s recent announcement to revamp its approach to skilling, offering partners access to the same badges and selling enablement materials as IBMers, comes at no cost and can be accessed through a simplified digital experience.

IBM Delivers Enhanced Data Resilience and Sustainability for “New Wave” Hyperscalers with the IBM Diamondback Tape Library

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 20, 2022 — IBM  is extending its comprehensive portfolio of data resilience solutions with the introduction of the IBM Diamondback Tape Library, a high-density archival storage solution that is physically air-gapped to help protect against ransomware and other cyber threats in hybrid cloud environments.

IBM Diamondback is for organizations needing to securely store hundreds of petabytes of data, both traditional and “new wave” hyperscalers – global enterprises aggregating massive customer data sets. It provides long-term storage and is designed to provide significantly smaller carbon footprint compared to flash or disk storage, and with a lower total cost of ownership. 1

“With data breaches and ransomware attacks now a constant threat, we are seeing hyperscale enterprises increasingly turning to the data resilience provided by IBM Tape solutions,” said Scott Baker, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of IBM Storage. “The IBM Diamondback Tape Library provides critical protection against a variety of threats, helping minimize data center floor space requirements and organizations’ carbon footprint. It’s part of the end-to-end data protection and security solution that IBM can deliver.”

“Driven by an explosion in data volume, ransomware, and increased regulatory and sustainability requirements, hyperscale cloud providers are among the biggest consumers of tape storage, and are predicted to drive tape capacity shipments to new levels in 2023,” said Phil Goodwin, research vice president, IDC. “IBM’s Diamondback Tape Library is the company’s latest solution for both traditional and cloud hyperscale enterprises. It is designed to deliver on customers’ needs for scalability, sustainability and security with simplicity and self-service.”

IBM Diamondback is designed to deliver three main benefits:

Sustainability: IBM database is designed to greatly reduce power and cooling requirements for a lower carbon footprint versus spinning disk storage, as tapes sit idle in automated libraries consuming no energy until accessed. Tape’s long-term endurance allows storage of data for up to 30 years. 2

Ransomware protection and cyber resiliency: Organizations worldwide are pressured to strengthen their defenses against malware and data breaches. Tape provides physically air-gapped isolation to increase resiliency against threats.

Data capacity and storage costs: IBM Tape is approximately one-quarter the total cost of spinning disk storage and public cloud archival services, creating a significant cost advantage.
According to a recent IBM IBV study, 48% of CEOs responding across industries say increasing sustainability is one of the highest priorities for their organization in the next two to three years. However, 51% also cite sustainability as among their greatest challenges in that same timeframe.

IBM’s sustainability strategy is driven by an approach that puts sustainability into action by advancing solutions that address climate change and support the transition to a low-carbon economy. As hyperscale cloud providers focus on reducing the environmental footprint of their facilities through lower power consumption, the IBM Diamondback Tape Library is an ally in managing energy efficient infrastructures, built with the same security, scalability, and reliability that is the hallmark of IBM infrastructure.

IBM Diamondback provides cost-effective archival storage for the massive capacity demand of the zettabyte era, supporting vertical markets such as big data, analytics, cloud storage services, the internet of things, healthcare, and life sciences. These organizations typically generate enormous amounts of high-value unstructured data, much of which is stored as archives awaiting future reference, and can often benefit from an active archive implementation leveraging high capacity, low-cost tape systems.

IBM Storage also made news recently with the announcement of the transition of Red Hat storage to IBM Storage, helping deliver a consistent experience from edge-to-core-to-cloud. IBM also recently announced new cyber resilience products, including IBM Spectrum Sentinel for SAP HANA and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Online Services for Salesforce. When combined with expanded IBM Spectrum Archive support for direct access to file and directories stored on tape, these innovations demonstrate IBM’s leadership in the storage market.

The IBM Diamondback Tape Library is generally available today, October 20, 2022.

Cleveland Clinic and IBM Begin Installation of IBM Quantum System One

Cleveland, OH and Armonk, N.Y. October 18, 2022: Cleveland Clinic and IBM have begun deployment of the first private sector onsite, IBM-managed quantum computer in the United States. The IBM Quantum System is to be located on Cleveland Clinic’s main campus in Cleveland.

The first quantum computer in healthcare, anticipated to be completed in early 2023, is a key part of the two organizations’10-year partnership aimed at fundamentally advancing the pace of biomedical research through high-performance computing. Announced in 2021, the Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator is a joint center that leverages Cleveland Clinic’s medical expertise with the technology expertise of IBM, including its leadership in quantum computing.

“The current pace of scientific discovery is unacceptably slow, while our research needs are growing exponentially,” said Lara Jehi, M.D., Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer. “We cannot afford to continue to spend a decade or more going from a research idea in a lab to therapies on the market. Quantum offers a future to transform this pace, particularly in drug discovery and machine learning.”

“A step change in the way we solve scientific problems is on the horizon,” said Dr. Ruoyi Zhou, Director, IBM Research – Cleveland Clinic Partnership. “At IBM, we’re more motivated than ever to create with Cleveland Clinic and others lasting communities of discovery and harness the power of quantum computing, AI and hybrid cloud to usher in a new era of accelerated discovery in healthcare and life sciences.”

The Discovery Accelerator at Cleveland Clinic upon a variety of IBM’s latest advancements in high performance computing, including:

Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery and other generative modelling capabilities that leverage AI to infer knowledge gaps and generate hypotheses, and ultimately aim to speed up the research process in therapeutics and biomarkers discovery;
RXN, a cloud-based platform that combines AI models and the ability to directly control robotic labs to enable end-to-end design and synthesis of new chemical compounds;
Deep Search, a next-generation AI tool for generating insight from large amounts of structured and unstructured technical literature; and
High-Performance Hybrid Cloud Computing technologies that enable researchers to “burst” their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they need at scale.
The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

Together, the teams have already begun several collaborative projects that benefit from the new computational power. The Discovery Accelerator projects include a research study developing a quantum computing method to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins; improving a prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery; and using artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases to find effective, existing drugs that could help patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

A significant part of the collaboration is a focus on educating the workforce of the future and creating jobs to grow the economy. An innovative educational curriculum has been designed for participants from high school to professional level, offering training and certification programs in data science, machine learning and quantum computing to build the skilled workforce needed for cutting-edge computational research of the future.

About Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. U.S. News & World Report consistently names Cleveland Clinic as one of the nation’s best hospitals in its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” survey. Among Cleveland Clinic’s 72,500 employees worldwide are more than 5,050 salaried physicians and researchers, and 17,800 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,500-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 22 hospitals, more than 220 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2021, there were 10.2 million total outpatient visits, 304,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 259,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic’s health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries. Visit us at clevelandclinic.org. Follow us at twitter.com/ClevelandClinic. News and resources available at newsroom.clevelandclinic.org.

IBM Study: Consumers are Ready to Celebrate and Spend for the Holidays but Uncertainty Looms

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 17, 2022  — According to the annual global holiday shopping and travel report released by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Institute for Business Value (IBV) today, many global consumers are ready to celebrate the holidays again and will be shopping earlier than in years past. However, as a wider set of economic and political issues took center stage this past year, new risks, and uncertainty loom over their plans.

The study found that 2022 shopping budgets are up 8% over 2021—in line with Bain’s economic forecast—and holiday travel budgets are up by almost half. However, factors including inflation and price increases have made economic concerns top of mind this holiday season. While 59% of consumers surveyed say they will be less concerned about COVID-19, two in three say they will be more concerned about the economy. 59% of respondents report worrying more about supply chain disruptions that could make holiday shopping harder or more expensive.

“According to the survey results, in 2022, consumers are hoping to re-embrace holiday traditions they’ve had to alter for the past two years,” said Karl Haller, Partner, Consumer Center of Competency Leader, IBM Consulting. “They’re starting their shopping and travel planning earlier but also want to hedge their bets with options like free returns or cancellations. To adapt to these changes in consumer behavior, retailers will need better visibility and traceability across product inventory, fulfillment, and returns. AI can help them understand, prioritize, and resolve critical issues in real time.”

Other noteworthy findings include:

Uncertainty around inflation, gas prices, and supply chain is driving consumer plans

As COVID-19 pandemic concerns abate for many consumers, worries are shifting towards uncertain economic and supply chain conditions this holiday season.

– Nearly half of consumers surveyed will spend less if inflation continues to drive price increases. If they’re forced to cut their holiday shopping budget, over 60% will cut the non-essential categories like apparel, footwear, jewelry, and accessories.
– If goods are not available due to supply chain issues, 41% of respondents say they will spend less – but 30% will spend more if they can find substitutions easily.
– If gas prices go down, 35% of consumers surveyed will do more in-store shopping.

Consumers are making travel and shopping plans earlier but they want to keep their options open
Continuing the shift away from the traditional Black Friday start of the shopping season, 58% of consumers surveyed plan to start holiday shopping before November, compared to 44% last year. Almost two in three plan to pre-order this holiday season to get their products on-time with guaranteed prices.

At the same time, consumers want to keep their options open. Nearly seven in ten respondents surveyed will opt for brands or retailers that offer free cancellations, order changes, and returns, as well as a COVID-19-safe environment this holiday season. The study findings seem to indicate these perks are often worth the price due to the continued worries around supply chain and product availability this season.

Travel is also an area where consumers are looking to get back to normal, while still mitigating any risk associated with potential price changes due to inflation and fluctuating gas prices. The study found that average travel demand will go up by 9% during the holiday season and 78% of consumers surveyed are planning to purchase their airfare before October (61%) or in October (17%).

Sustainability remains top-of-mind for majority of respondents despite economic hardships
Consistent with last year’s report, sustainability remains top-of-mind for consumers surveyed globally. “As more consumers align their purchases with their values, retailers and brands that can provide more environmentally-friendly options could potentially earn a greater share of holiday spend,” said Haller.

Three fourths (73%) of respondents said they are considering sustainability when shopping for the holidays. Twenty-nine percent of consumers surveyed will bundle multiple orders to help reduce carbon emissions, while 38% will avoid single-use plastics, and two in five will choose to shop nearby (42%), and buy products that are branded as being environmentally sustainable or socially responsible (41%). Notably, respondents surveyed are willing to pay an average premium of 41% for sustainable products, 34% for sustainable air travel, and 37% for sustainable lodging this holiday season.

IBV Study Methodology
To better understand consumer perspectives, as well as their plans to shop and travel this holiday season, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) surveyed more than 12,000 adults across nine countries (Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, United States) in August 2022.

The full study is available at: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/2022-holiday-shopping-travel

IBM Redefines Hybrid Cloud Application and Data Storage Adding Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2022 — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.

With the move, IBM will integrate the storage technologies from Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) as the foundation for IBM Spectrum Fusion. This combines IBM and Red Hat’s container storage technologies for data services and helps accelerate IBM’s capabilities in the burgeoning Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM intends to offer new Ceph solutions delivering a unified and software defined storage platform that bridges the architectural divide between the data center and cloud providers. This further advances IBM’s leadership in the software defined storage and Kubernetes platform markets.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud storage architectures, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2022.1 IBM’s software defined storage strategy is to take a “born in the cloud, for the cloud” approach—unlocking bi-directional application and data mobility based on a shared, secure, and cloud-scale software defined storage foundation.

“Red Hat and IBM have been working closely for many years, and today’s announcement enhances our partnership and streamlines our portfolios,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems. “By bringing together the teams and integrating our products under one roof, we are accelerating the IBM’s hybrid cloud storage strategy while maintaining commitments to Red Hat customers and the open-source community.”

“Red Hat and IBM have a shared belief in the mission of hybrid cloud-native storage and its potential to help customers transform their applications and data,” said Joe Fernandes, vice president of hybrid platforms, Red Hat. “With IBM Storage taking stewardship of Red Hat Ceph Storage and OpenShift Data Foundation, IBM will help accelerate open-source storage innovation and expand the market opportunity beyond what each of us could deliver on our own. We believe this is a clear win for customers who can gain a more comprehensive platform with new hybrid cloud-native storage capabilities.”

As customers formulate their hybrid cloud strategies, critical to success is the emphasis and importance of infrastructure consistency, application agility, IT management and flexible consumption consistency as deciding factors to bridge across on-premises and cloud deployments.

With these changes to the IBM portfolio, clients will have access to a consistent set of storage services while preserving data resilience, security, and governance across bare metal, virtualized and containerized environments. Some of the many benefits of the software defined portfolio available from IBM will include:

A unified storage experience for all containerized apps running on Red Hat OpenShift: Customers can use IBM Spectrum Fusion (now with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation) to achieve the highest levels of performance, scale, automation, data protection, and data security for production applications running on OpenShift that require block, file, and/or object access to data. This enables development teams to focus on the apps, not the ops, with infrastructure-as-code designed for simplified, automated managing and provisioning.
A consistent hybrid cloud experience at enterprise levels of scale and resiliency with IBM Ceph: Customers can deliver their private and hybrid cloud architectures on IBM’s unified and software defined storage solution, providing capacity and management features. Capabilities include data protection, disaster recovery, high availability, security, auto-scaling, and self-healing portability, that are not tied to hardware, and travel with the data as it moves between on-premises and cloud environments.
A single data lakehouse to aggregate and derive intelligence from unstructured data on IBM Spectrum Scale: Customers can address the challenges that often come with quickly scaling a centralized data approach with a single platform to support data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, high performance computing, and others. Benefits can include less time and effort to administer, reduced data movement and redundancy, direct access to data for analytics tools, advanced schema management and data governance, all supported by distributed file and object storage engineered to be cost effective.
Build in the cloud, deploy on-premises with automation: Customers can move developed applications from the cloud to on-premises services, automate the creation of staging environments to test deployment procedures, validate configuration changes, database schema and data updates, and ready package updates to overcome obstacles in production or correct errors before they become a problem that affects business operations.
“IBM and Red Hat speaking with one voice on storage is delivering the synergies derived from IBM’s Red Hat acquisition,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Systems at IDC. “The combining of the two storage teams is a win for IT organizations as it brings together the best that both offer: An industry-leading storage systems portfolio meets an industry-leading software-defined data services offering. This initiative enables IBM and Red Hat to streamline their family of offerings, passing the benefits to their customers. It also helps accelerate innovation in storage to solve the data challenges for hybrid cloud, all while maintaining their commitment to open source.”

Preserving commitment to Red Hat clients and the community

Under the agreement between IBM and Red Hat, IBM will assume Premier Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation, whose members collaborate to drive innovation, development, marketing, and community events for the Ceph open-source project. IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain 100% open source and will continue to follow an upstream-first model, reinforcing IBM’s commitment to these vital communities. Participation by the Ceph leadership team and other aspects of the open-source project is a key IBM priority to maintain and nurture ongoing Red Hat innovation.

Red Hat and IBM intend to complete the transition by January 1, 2023, which will involve the transfer of storage roadmaps and Red Hat associates to the IBM Storage business unit. Following this date, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include OpenShift Data Foundation, sold by Red Hat and its partners. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack customers will still be able to buy Red Hat Ceph Storage from Red Hat and its partners. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack customers with existing subscriptions will be able to maintain and grow their storage footprints as needed, with no change in their Red Hat relationship.

Forthcoming IBM Ceph and IBM Spectrum Fusion storage solutions based on Ceph are expected to ship beginning in the first half of 2023.

Read more about today’s news in this blog from Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems: “IBM + Red Hat: Doubling Down on Hybrid Cloud Storage”

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. Red Hat, Ceph, Gluster and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

Posted by / October 4, 2022 / Posted in News