IBM's Hybrid Cloud platform satisfying customer’s demand of control, speed, cost and performance

Believing in progress, IBM is enabling its Power E1080 server ecosystem to partners that will be uniquely positioned to help clients meet their needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing. The IBM Power E1080 server is the first server released based around the IBM Power10 processor which is the most scalable and reliable system with the highest performance per core in the IBM Power10 family of servers. The Power10 7nm chip is equipped with future-focused enhancements that are expected to provide up to 3x the energy efficiency and workload capacity of the POWER9 processor. Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the Power10 chip is an important evolution in IBM’s roadmap for Power. In a chat with VARINDIA, Lata Singh, Director - Partner ecosystem, IBM India & South Asia focuses on this partner ecosystem, moving up the value chain and helping them.

Helping partners to embrace an open strategy 

At IBM it is believed that its open hybrid cloud platform will serve as a powerful catalyst for innovation in this hybrid cloud era and hence early this year, it took bold and decisive moves which places the hybrid cloud ecosystem at the center of their growth strategy. This provides an opportunity for partners, to help their clients fully realize the benefits of an open hybrid cloud approach without being bound within the constraints of a single cloud provider.
Delving deep in this topic Lata said, “We understand that the technology adoption journey of each partner is unique and is closely linked to their business models. Hence our intent is to provide them with the right support to help them move forward with confidence. Some of our the key initiatives include:

•    Offerings: To provide enterprises with a consistent, streamlined experience,  we have developed IBM Cloud Paks which are AI-powered software that can help organizations build, modernize, and manage applications securely across any cloud. A growing number of ecosystem partners are joining IBM Cloud Ecosystem to help clients rapidly and reliably accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud.
•    Marketplace: Last yearRed Hat and IBM introduced Red Hat Marketplace, a one-stop-shop tofind, try, buy, deploy and manage enterprise applications across an organization’s hybrid IT infrastructure, including on-premises and multicloud environments.
•    Technical Support: IBM launched the Hybrid Cloud Build Team which offers hands-on assistance to help partners build, migrate or modernize their solution using IBM hybrid cloud solutions, upskill teams and co-create an MVP.
•    Skills Development: IBM has made significant investments in developing training modules based on job roles and aligned with market requirements to help partners build competency and deliver differentiated offerings to their clients more confidently.”

In aid of ISVs or ecosystem partners
IBM’s partners get access to its open hybrid cloud platform with advanced Data & AI and Security capabilities, resources and skills and technical guidance to build their solution.
“IBM Business Partner Tecnics Integration Technologies used IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, IBM Datacap and IBM Content Collector to develop an AI/ML based invoice automation platform that can quickly identify, route and pay vendor invoices. The solution helps businesses reduce operational costs,comply with e-invoicing, provides increased visibility, reduces invoice processing time, minimizes delay invoices penalty especially for MSMEs and improves vendor relations. IBM Hybrid Cloud Build team worked closely with the partner to migrate the solution on IBM Cloud Pak for Automation and incorporate new capabilities to deliver client value,” points out Lata.

To build more mission-critical workloads on the cloud 

IBM’s Hybrid Cloud platform is open, flexible, secure and offers benefits that clients need the most around control, speed, cost and performance.  In fact, clients find that choosing a hybrid cloud approach is 2.5 times more valuable than relying on the public cloud alone with benefits spanning across business value acceleration, developer productivity, infrastructure cost efficiency and reduction in regulatory, compliance, and security costs.  
Discussing about this, Lata comments, “We are also seeing organizations across sectors are at various stages on their Cloud journey and therefore our offerings and services help them navigate through the various stages while embedding cloud enabled technologies like AI, IoT etc to create an intelligent Hybrid Cloud environment."

For example:
•    IBM Cloud Paks are AI-powered software that can help organizations build, modernize, and manage applications securely across any cloud. Built on Red Hat Open Shift, Cloud Paks provide an open, faster and more secure way to move more workloads to Cloud and AI.We continue to introduce new capabilities into the Cloud Paks for example we recently launched Watson Orchestrate an AI-powered automation capability that connects with tools, data, applications likes Salesforce, SAP and Workday and history to perform routine or mission-critical tasks and help staff to focus on more strategic work.
•    IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to help clients address security, privacy and data sovereignty requirements based on their data governance requirements and address the client’s local regulations and compliance obligations by enabling them to deploy and manage applications with consistency for specific markets. Built on Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Satellite is engineered to give clients across industries like telecommunications, healthcare, banking and insurance the flexibility to bring their applications to environments where their data resides while leveraging the security of IBM Cloud.”    

Playing a significant role in hybrid cloud 
IBM, with its open architecture, sees itself playing a significant role in hybrid cloud and therefore the focus is on collaboration and co-opetition with the tech ecosystem to deliver value to the clients. 

On this role Lata comments, "In India, we work with a gamut of ecosystem partners including leading GSIs like TCS, Wipro, LTI and HCL to co-create and co-innovate go-to-market solutions for global clients across BFSI, Healthcare, Telecom, Media & Entertainment industries." 

To conclude 
In her conclding lines Lata says, "We are also enabling our traditional ecosystem partners to build skills and competency to pivot from a product based approach to a solution driven approach, thereby helping them increase their wallet share. Therefore our focus for smaller but equally significant ecosystem partners is to create awareness on newer technologies, build competency through enablement sessions and support them to go-to-market to drive client success."