IBM announces new hybrid cloud and AI capabilities

IBM has announced advances in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, and quantum computing at the company's Think conference today. These innovations by IBM's are to help in their role with assisting their clients and partners accelerate their digital transformations, return to work smarter, and build strategic ecosystems that can drive better business outcomes.

"In the same way that we electrified factories and machines in the past century, we will use hybrid cloud to infuse AI into software and systems in the 21st century. And one thing is certain: this is a future that must be built on a foundation of deep industry collaboration. No one understands this better than IBM, which is one of the reasons we are boosting investment in our partner ecosystem." said IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna.

A new IBM study on the adoption of AI for business reveals that the need to embed AI into business processes became more urgent during the pandemic. Of IT professionals surveyed, 43% said that their companies had accelerated their rollout of AI. And nearly half of global IT professionals surveyed said they evaluate AI providers in large part on their ability to automate processes.

New innovations to help businesses 

IBM has announced various new innovations to help businesses, and here are a few: 

• Mono2Micro to help with cloud migration - IBM has added a new capability into WebSphere Hybrid Edition that enables enterprises to optimise and modernise their applications for hybrid cloud. IBM Mono2Micro uses AI developed by IBM Research to analyse large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to the cloud.
• AutoSQL - AutoSQL (Structured Query Language) automates how customers access, integrate and manage data without ever having to move it, regardless of where the data resides or how it is stored. According to IBM AutoSQL solves ‘one of the most critical pain points customers are facing as they look to reduce the complexity of curating data for AI and eliminate the high cost of moving data, while also uncovering hidden insights to make more accurate AI-driven predictions.’ AutoSQL will be one of several new technologies woven into a new data fabric in the Cloud Pak for Data.
• Watson Orchestrate to helps professionals automate work to increase productivity - Watson Orchestrate is a new interactive AI capability designed to increase the personal productivity of business professionals across sales, human resources, operations and more. Requiring no IT skills to use, Watson Orchestrate enables professionals to initiate work in a very human way, using collaboration tools such as Slack and email in natural language. It also connects to popular business applications like Salesforce, SAP and Workday. Watson Orchestrate uses a powerful AI engine that automatically selects and sequences the pre-packaged skills needed to perform a task, and connects with applications, tools, data and history on-the-fly
• Qiskit Runtime software boosts quantum circuit processing speed by 120x - IBM is making it faster and easier for developers to use quantum software by introducing Qiskit Runtime. This software is containerised and hosted in the hybrid cloud, instead of running most of its code on the user's computer. Together with improvements in both the software and processor performance, this allows Qiskit Runtime to boost the speeds of quantum circuits, the building blocks of quantum algorithms, by 120 times

The announcements made during today's Think event come just days after IBM unveiled the world's first two nanometer chip, which will enable faster, more efficient computing.