Category Archives: IBM

citizens bank, Enterprise IT, IBM, Ken Starkey, Managed services, News & Analysis, Philip Guido

Citizens Bank signs 5-year managed services deal with IBM

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM for a managed services deal

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM in a managed services deal

Citizens Bank is moving its back-end technology infrastructure to a managed services environment following the signing of  a five-year IT services agreement with IBM.

Using a hybrid IT approach, IBM will optimise the bank’s existing IT infrastructure by integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardise and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes, including core banking applications, branch operations and online and mobile banking.

“Information technology plays a key role in our ability to anticipate and meet the needs of every customer, across every channel,” said Ken Starkey, chief technology officer, infrastructure services, Citizens Bank. “This agreement with IBM will provide immediate access to new technologies and capabilities, enabling us to create greater efficiencies in support of Citizens’ growth objectives.”

Under the contract, IBM will operate Citizens’ existing and future IT systems located in the bank’s data centres in Rhode Island and North Carolina. The bank already uses IBM systems and technologies. IBM also will support Citizens’ voice and data networks and provide IT support for all Citizens colleagues.

Philip Guido, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services, North America, said: “This is part of a multi-stage transformation of Citizen’s IT environment that lays the foundation for integrating additional IBM solutions in the future, making the bank more agile and responsive to the growing needs of its customers.”

IBM, Internet of Things, Jai Iyer, News & Analysis, SiCAD

IBM partners with SiCAD on cloud-based IoT silicon design and test service

IBM is working with SiCAD to offer an IoT silicon design service in the cloud

IBM is working with SiCAD to offer an IoT silicon design service in the cloud

IBM is partnering with silicon design platform provider SiCAD to offer a cloud-based high performance services for electronic design automation (EDA) which the companies said can be used to design silicon for smartphones, wearables and Internet of Things devices.

The IBM Electronics Design Automation (EDA)-based tools will be delivered via SoftLayer infrastructure on a PAYG basis and provide on-demand access to silicon design tools.

IBM will initially deliver three key services: IBM Library Characterization, to create abstract electrical and timing models for chip designs; IBM Logic Verification, to simulate electronic systems and design languages; and IBM Spice, an electronic circuit simulator used to check design integrity and probe chip behaviour.

The company said deployment clusters will be segregated (both compute and networking), so clients won’t share any infrastructure.

“The proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) products has been the primary driver for increased demand for semiconductor chips. Companies are under pressure to design electronic systems faster, better and cheaper,” said Jai Iyer, founder and chief executive of SiCAD. “A time-based usage model on a need basis makes sense for this industry and will spur innovation in the industry while lowering capital and operations expenses.”

The companies said the partnership will help enable startups designing silicon for IoT applications, a venture not only increasingly attractive because of the explosion of activity around IoT and the need for purpose-built chip architectures but the sheer size of the silicon land-grab in the sector.

Big Data, David Stokes, Europe, IBM, Jo Johnson, News & Analysis, Public Sector, STFC, uk government

IBM, UK gov ink $313m deal to promote big data, cognitive compute research

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

The UK government has signed a deal with IBM that will see the two parties fund a series of initiatives aimed at expanding cognitive computing and big data research.

The £313m partnership will see the UK government commit £113m to expand the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, a publicly funded facility geared towards reducing the cost and improving the efficiency and user-friendliness of high performance computing and big data for research and development purposes.

IBM said it will further support the project with technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200m, including access to the company’s cognitive computing platform Watson. The company will also place 24 IBM researchers at the Centre, who will help the researchers commercialise any promising innovations developed there.

The organisations will also explore how to leverage OpenPower-based systems for high performance computing.

“We live in an information economy – from the smart devices we use every day to the super-computers that helped find the Higgs Boson, the power of advanced computing means we now have access to vast amounts of data,” said UK Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson.

“This partnership with IBM, which builds on our £113 million investment to expand the Hartree Centre, will help businesses make the best use of big data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

David Stokes, chief executive for IBM in the UK and Ireland said: “We’re at the dawn of a new era of cognitive computing, during which advanced data-centric computing models and open innovation approaches will allow technology to greatly augment decision-making capabilities for business and government.”

“The expansion of our collaboration with STFC builds upon Hartree’s successful engagement with industry and its record in commercialising technological developments, and provides a world-class environment using Watson and OpenPower technologies to extend the boundaries of Big Data and cognitive computing,” he added.

Blue Box, Cisco, Hilton Romansky, IBM, Jim Comfort, News & Analysis, Open Source, Piston

Cisco, IBM spend big in OpenStack-focused land grab

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both signed deals to acquire OpenStack vendors this week, with Cisco acquiring Piston Cloud Computing, a firm specialising in OpenStack-based private cloud software and IBM buying up managed private cloud provider Blue Box.

Piston offers what it calls Piston CloudOS, a supped up version of OpenStack for private clouds alongside custom cluster management and monitoring software and APIs. Underneath that sits a custom Linux micro-OS that contains all of the necessary code to run CloudOS; the company said it can be characterized as a “bare-metal operating system that is tailor-made for pools of hyper-converged, commodity resources.”

Cisco said Piston will help it deliver on its Intercloud vision, which sees a Cisco-based set of cloud services that can federate with one another; OpenStack seems increasingly to be at the heart of that effort.

“Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud,” said Hilton Romanski, corporate development lead at Cisco.

“Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners,” he added.

The move will also give Cisco some strong in-house OpenStack expertise. One of Piston’s co-founders, Chris MacGown, was among the originating members of OpenStack’s Nova-core (compute) development team.

This is the second big OpenStack-focused acquisition Cisco has made in recent months. In September last year Cisco acquired Metacloud, a provider of commercially supported OpenStack. Metacloud also had IP in the networking technology it has integrated into its OpenStack distribution, which gave Cisco’s OpenStack play an SDN boost.

IBM, meanwhile has acquired managed private cloud provider Blue Box, which the company said would help bolster its hybrid cloud and OpenStack strategy.

The company said the move would enable it to provide a public cloud-like experience within its customers’ datacentres by allowing it to offer a remotely managed OpenStack offering, which it hadn’t previously.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM said it will continue to support Blue Box customers and use the company as a channel to sell its own cloud services.

Both acquisitions are a sign the old-hat vendors are putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to OpenStack – particularly when some of them, like HP and Red Hat, are digging their heels in and aggressively pushing their OpenStack wares.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Shaun Gregory, Watson

Woodside to deploy IBM Watson to improve oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Australian oil and gas firm Woodside will deploy IBM’s Watson-as-a-Service in order to improve operations and employee training, the companies announced this week.

The energy firm plans to use the cloud-based cognitive compute service to help train engineers and operations specialists on fabricating and managing oil and gas infrastructure and facilities.

The company said the cognitive advisory service it plans to use, ‘Lessons Learned’, will help improve operational processes and outcomes and include over thirty years of collective knowledge and experience operating oil and gas assets.

Woodside Senior vice president strategy, science and technology Shaun Gregory said the move is a part of a broader strategy to use data more intelligently at the firm.

“We are bringing a new toolkit to the company in the form of evidence based predictive data science that will bring down costs and increase efficiencies across our organization,” Gregory said.

“Data science, underpinned by an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and the rapidly decreasing cost of computing, is likely to be a major disruptive technology in our industry over the next decade. Our plan is to turn all of this data into a predictive tool where every part of our organisation will be able to make decisions based on informed and accurate insights.”

Kerry Purcell, managing director, IBM Australia and New Zealand said: “Here in Australia IBM Watson is transforming how banks, universities, government and now oil and gas companies capitalise on data, helping them discover completely new insights and deliver new value.”

Big Data, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

IBM opens IoT, cloud, big data studio in Shanghai

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio aimed at attracting design and digital experts to work with clients on digital solutions using the company’s mobile, big data and cloud technologies, this time in Shanghai.

Based at IBM’s Yangpu and Zhangjiang offices, the hub will host local IBM Design and Interactive Experience teams as well as digital service designers and developers.

“People’s expectations of enterprise technology has changed because of great design they see in devices and apps they use at work and at play,” said Phil Gilbert, general manager, IBM Design. “Our studios around the world bring design into everything we do and change the way we work to transform how enterprise technology is created, with client experience at the centre.”

The company said the studio will be a space for clients in industries such as healthcare, financial services and retail that are keen to develop new digital services in collaboration with IBM; it has about 20 of these studios located around the world.

Earlier this year the company opened a studio at its Southbank location in London which hosts employees specialising in big data, cloud and mobile products and services – including Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service.

Funding, IBM, News & Analysis, Sellpoints, Stephen Gold, Watson, WayBlazer

IBM backs WayBlazer, Sellpoints to show its commitment to Watson

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM announced this week it has invested in two companies, WayBlazer and Sellpoints, which are using cognitive computing to enhance their travel planning and shopping applications. The move seems intended to show IBM’s commitment to Watson-as-a-service, the company’s cloud-based cognitive computing service which launched last year.

WayBlazer, a travel planning and shopping service, uses IBM’s Watson cloud service to help personalise holidays and create personalised travel recommendations for each customer from a slew of social and financial data.

Sellpoint uses Watson to do much the same thing, but for large retail and manufacturing firms looking to bolster their ecommerce sites without having to invest loads by way of internal development resource.

IBM said the investments in WayBlazer and Sellpoint were part of a $5m series A and $7.5m series C funding round, respectively, but the company declined to disclose the financial terms of its involvement.

“IBM is committed to helping our partners accelerate the development and delivery of Watson enabled apps into market where we see endless opportunities for cognitive computing to transform entire industries,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson.  “WayBlazer and Sellpoints are terrific examples of how cognitive computing technology can be used to help organizations redefine customer engagement and drive much deeper, meaningful and relevant consumer experiences.”

Brian O’Keefe, chief executive officer of Sellpoints said: “With the natural language and cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, we’re able to deliver a more personalized, relevant and enjoyable experience, and drive a much deeper level of engagement with customers.”

IBM said the investments were part of the $100m it committed to Watson last year. But it hasn’t always made it clear that it was pursuing direct investments into companies willing to use its technology, which could be an expensive proposition in the long run. The company continues to be relatively quiet on the financial performance of the Watson unit.

Alistair Rennie, Deloitte, IBM, News & Analysis, Tom Scampion

IBM, Deloitte to jointly develop risk management, compliance solutions

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to use big data for compliance in financial services

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to use big data for compliance in financial services

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to develop risk management and compliance solutions for the financial services sector, the companies said this week.

The partnership will see Deloitte offer up its financial services and risk management consulting expertise to help IBM develop a range of cloud-based risk management services that combine the technology firm’s big data analytics and Watson-as-a-Service cognitive computing platform.

Deloitte will also work with joint customers to help integrate the solutions into their organisation’s technology landscape.

“The global enterprise risk management domain is undergoing significant transformation, and emerging technologies like big data and predictive analytics can be used to address complex regulatory requirements,” said Tom Scampion, global risk analytics leader at Deloitte UK. “We are excited to be working with IBM to apply their market leading technologies and platforms to enable faster, more insightful business decisions. This alliance aims to completely re-frame and re-shape the risk space.”

“Financial services firms are under tremendous pressure, which has forced them to spend the majority of their IT budgets addressing regulatory requirements.  There is an opportunity to transform the approach organizations are taking and leverage the same investments to go beyond compliance and deliver real business value,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager of analytics solutions, IBM. “Combining [Deloitte’s] knowledge with our technology will provide our clients with breakthrough capabilities and deliver risk and regulatory intelligence in ways previously not possible.”

Deloitte’s no stranger to partnering with large incumbents to bolster its appeal to financial services clients. Last year the company partnered with SAP to help develop custom ERP platforms based on HANA for the financial services sector, and partnered with NetSuite to help it target industry verticals more effectively.

Brendan Hannigan, IBM, managed security service, News & Analysis, Software as a service

IBM claims strong traction with cybersecurity cloud network

IBM says its recently announced cybersecurity cloud service is gaining traction

IBM says its recently announced cybersecurity cloud service is gaining traction

IBM said over 1,000 organisations have now joined its recently announced cloud-based cybersecurity service, dubbed X-Force Exchange.

The service includes hundreds of terabytes of raw aggregated threat intelligence data and those that sign up to the service can upload their own data, so the more people join the more robust the service gets.

The initial data dump is based on over 25 billion web pages and images collected from a network of over 270 million endpoints, and includes data from over 15 billion monitored security events daily. But the company said participants have created more than 300 new collections of threat data since its launch.

“Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic — no company or country can battle it alone,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager, IBM Security.

“We have to take a collective and collaborative approach across the public and private sectors to defend against cybercrime. Sharing and innovating around threat data is central to battling highly organized cybercriminals; the industry can no longer afford to keep this critical resource locked up in proprietary databases. With X-Force Exchange, IBM has opened access to our extensive threat data to advance collaboration and help public and private enterprises safeguard themselves,” Hannigan said.

Security isn’t a new area for IBM but offering real-time cyberthreat detection is, a move that has also put it in direct competition with a wide range of managed security service providers that have been playing in this space for years. Nevertheless, the company has a lot of clients so there’s a huge opportunity for the firm to harvest all of that data – particularly as it creates new partnerships with networking incumbents (like Cisco with VersaStack).

Andrew Buchanan, Enterprise IT, Graeme Osborne, IBM, IBM Cloud, New Zealand, News & Analysis

NZ Ministry of Health taps IBM gov cloud

NZ's Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

NZ’s Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has enlisted IBM to help the department set up a cloud-based system to support the country’s national healthcare IT infrastructure.

The Ministry manages a set of technical services that support both internal IT systems and national health systems including the National Health Payment System, which processes transactions for pharmacies and healthcare providers, and a National Health Index, which supports planning and coordination in health service delivery.

The deal will see the Ministry deploy all of its internal systems on IBM’s managed cloud infrastructure (hosted in-country) for a minimum of five years.

“The agreement is a key element in improving the Ministry of Health’s ability to deliver shared services for the sector, which enables secure access to personal health records for patients and their health care providers,” said Graeme Osborne, Director of the National Health IT Board. “Our aim is to improve productivity and patient safety, and enable new models of care through strategic technology investments.”

The move follows an pledge made by Health Benefits Limited, the crown company set up in 2010 to support health service provision, to consolidate the infrastructure of all twenty District Health Boards onto IBM’s cloud platform.

“We continue to invest in advanced technology infrastructure vital for New Zealand’s long-term economic growth. IBM’s cloud services offer customers like the Ministry of Health the most comprehensive enterprise-grade cloud environment in New Zealand and will support new, enhanced services for the public, suppliers and staff,” says Andrew Buchanan, cloud business leader, IBM New Zealand.

“This agreement further demonstrates our leadership and commitment to health care innovation,” Buchanan added.