Artificial Intelligence in your IT environment

According to IBM’s Global VP for IBM Services, Satheesh Kumar, many CIOs are looking to be service providers to their lines of business (LOBs). “But they have to be interoperable and work together in a secure manner. And a sustainable strategy requires a strong, stable platform to start with.”

He shared this opinion when addressing the audience at IBM’s event themed “IBM Power Your Future with AI”.

At the same event he had presented about how IT can deliver value in a world of complex innovation and massive disruptions.

“Disruption is opportunity,” he said and shared IBM’s perspective that there is opportunity to grow the business, engage customers better, give more efficient services, and differentiate from the competition, with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI-driven IT services

The global VP gave a brief introduction to IBM’s Service Platform with Watson, which was launched last July, and described it as an AI-based infrastructure which leverages IBM’s Watson, for better decision-making.

Satheesh had shared, “We recognise that there is going to be several parts where AI is used – whether managing or creating the IT environment or optimising the IT environment; this infrastructure serves the entire lifecycle of a services environment whether consuming automation, or consuming disaster recovery, or workplace support services, mobility, or interoperating network infrastructure, and so on.

“We have built a massive data lake and leveraged artificial intelligence, or Watson to deliver an IT-as-a-service model for better business outcomes.”

What makes the platform powerful, is that it is fuelled by experience and investment; besides USD6 billion that goes into research and development every year, over 30 years of operational experience have yielded thousands of engagements from over 800 managed services clients in all industries, across all geographies where there is IBM presence.

These engagements have generated operational data and this is what that populates the data lake, not transactional data.

End-to-end architecture and governance

The key thing about IBM’s platform is that clients will have the ability to consume IBM services in a pay-per-use mode, Satheesh pointed out.

“But data is key. Our clients are looking for some kind of transformation whether for traditional IT, or public cloud or private cloud, and they used to look at cloud for economic reasons. These days they are also looking for flexibility and scalability, and to deliver innovation faster.

“So, architecture has to be seamless; infrastructure, data and AI, and applications have to in a seamless way talk to each other and deliver value,” the global VP explained.

For example, a simple banking app with the tap of a button, has to talk to over 150 systems at the back end, and deliver a desired outcome to the end customer.

“So, clients are asking as they go into digital transformation, ‘How do I modernise my infrastructure?’ ‘How do I have an architecture so that my back end systems can talk to each other and deliver value?’,” Satheesh illustrated with questions about how businesses are viewing architecture in relation to AI.

He also pointed out governance as another element that is on top of clients’ minds as they embark on cloud and/or AI journeys. “People are still looking at how to have control.

“That’s why one of the key aspects of the platform is the client insights dashboard,” he said adding also that IBM has a cost and asset management solution which provides understanding into where money is being spent.

Unique

According to Satheesh, IBM’s platform is different because it is end-to-end lifecycle of IT services  – building, provisioning, migrating apps.

“In summary, what you have to think about is pick the business outcome you want to change, curate the data, and have it work for you,” Satheesh concluded.