To meet growing demand, IBM advances on-prem private cloud with new Watson AI capabilities

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced that in less than 12 months since the release of IBM Cloud Private – an open source technology that brings cloud capabilities to organizations running on-premises IT systems – hundreds of leading enterprises worldwide have turned to the platform to help modernize their operations. They include New Zealand Police, China’s Fuyao Group, Japan’s Aflac Insurance, Turkey’s credit bureau Kredi Kayıt Bürosu and Brazil’s Fidelity National Information Services.

Building on this momentum, IBM is announcing a slate of new advanced features for the on-premises private cloud platform, including the integration of powerful AI capabilities such as IBM Watson Assistant and IBM Watson Speech-to-Text, as well as support for additional public clouds, including the IBM Cloud. The updates provide clients with even more choice and flexibility for their IT journeys, and, for the first time, bring the power of IBM’s Watson AI behind the company firewall.

IBM is releasing details of over a dozen organizations which are driving transformation with IBM Cloud Private, including:

• New Zealand Police (NZP) is using the latest technologies to transform its operations and increase its ability to address crime and keep the community safe. NZP is exploring how IBM Cloud Private and Kubernetes containers can help to modernize its existing systems as well as quickly launch new services such as a mobile based communications system for its officers.
• Fuyao Group is China’s largest and most advanced manufacturer of automotive glass supplying Audi, Bentley, General Motors, Toyota and other top car makers. To meet growing demand, Fuyao has embarked on a Smart Manufacturing initiative and is using IBM Cloud Private to help integrate the management of enterprise applications across its global manufacturing and business operations, ensuring the free flow of information across the organization.
• Aflac Insurance, Aflac Insurance, a leading provider of medical and cancer insurance providing protection to 1 in 4 households in Japan, has signed an agreement with IBM to help simplify and automate its IT infrastructure. With IBM Cloud Private, Aflac plans to enhance the efficiency of its operations and speed up the development of new products and services.
• Kredi Kayıt Bürosu (KKB) provides the national cloud infrastructure for Turkey’s finance industry. Last year KKB established a new data center in Ankara and is now using IBM cloud Private to help consolidate and localize the banking systems of over 150 members including banks and other financial services companies. With IBM Cloud Private, KKB is able to drive innovation across its financial services ecosystem while meeting the high standards for data security and privacy.
• Brazil’s Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), a global leader in payment processing solutions for the financial industry, has adopted IBM Cloud Private to help streamline credit card chargebacks for its Brazilian operations. IBM Cloud Private is helping FIS to orchestrate the various IT systems involved in reconciling and checking of transaction chargebacks while meeting the stringent regulatory requirements of the industry and helping to prevent fraud.

“The cloud has evolved in a very short time from being a way to cut costs to a platform for business transformation and innovation,” said Robin Hernandez, Director, IBM Private Cloud Offering Management. “Our IBM Cloud Private affords clients a transition to cloud that’s designed to enable them to maintain their on-premises systems on which they still depend for many mission-critical applications and sensitive data sets.”

Putting AI Inside the Enterprise
Today IBM is advancing IBM Cloud Private even further, announcing major enhancements to the platform, ranging from AI capabilities to additional public cloud support. Starting today, IBM Watson Speech-to-Text is now available with the new IBM Cloud Private version 3.1, making it the first time the tool is available in an on-premises environment. With Watson Speech-to-Text, users can automatically transcribe and analyze audio from seven different languages.

In addition, IBM Watson Assistant is now available on IBM Cloud Private. The Watson Assistant platform helps developers and non-technical users to create conversational AI solutions, from simple chatbots to complex enterprise grade solutions for customer service and more.

IBM also announced today that IBM Cloud Private is now available on the IBM Public Cloud, to help clients to easily move their enterprise workloads from on-premises systems to the public cloud in order to create hybrid cloud environments.

Client quote
“IBM Cloud Private is helping us to establish an end-to-end digital platform that will underpin a smarter, more agile, and more flexible corporate operating structure,” said Mr. Lebing Xia, Vice President and CIO of the Fuyao Group. “And by enabling us to connect to other cloud-based services like AI, Blockchain and IoT, we will be able to get even more business value from the cloud.”

Analyst quote
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly 2Q18 Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, September 2018, total worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure is expected to total $62.2 billion in 2018 with year-over-year growth of 31.1%. While public cloud datacenters will account for the majority of this spending, on-premises private clouds will account for nearly 20% of the total cloud IT infrastructure market, growing at 19.3% year over year in 2018. “Enterprises have a range of business and IT needs some of which are well served by public cloud offerings and some which are not,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director, IDC. “On-premises private cloud is a powerful option for established companies that are looking for a gradual approach for transforming their organization while keeping control of their IT infrastructure.”

About IBM Cloud
With $18.5B in annual cloud revenue, IBM is the global leader in enterprise cloud with a platform designed to meet the evolving needs of business and society. Moving past productivity and cost improvements, the IBM Cloud is tuned for the AI and data demands that are driving true differentiation in today’s enterprise. IBM’s private, public and hybrid offerings provide the global scale businesses need to support innovation across industries.

Built on open source frameworks Docker containers and Cloud Foundry, and managed with the Kubernetes container architecture, IBM Cloud Private enables organizations to develop cloud-native applications and also modernize on-premises applications in order to deploy them in either private cloud settings or the public cloud of their choice.

Media contacts:
Jonathan Batty
IBM Media Relations (Europe)
jjbatty@ibm.com

Michael Zimmerman
IBM Media Relations (US)
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com

Notes for journalists and editors
Examples of other leading Global Enterprises transforming with IBM Cloud Private:

CNH Industrial, Italy
CNH Industrial, a leader in the capital goods sector operating in the agricultural and construction equipment, commercial vehicles, specialty vehicles and powertrain segments, has signed a multi-year cloud agreement with IBM. Through the deal it will use IBM Cloud Private and Watson Artificial Intelligence to transform its business processes – from manufacturing to supply chain, sales & marketing and financial services. IBM Cloud Private will help CNH Industrial to optimize its management of enterprise applications while still benefitting from the security of control of its own on-premises infrastructure. The agility and flexibility of ICP has the long-term potential of generating greater efficiencies in application development and could enable faster time to market for new innovative customer services.

Klirinski Interbankarski Sistemi AD Skopje (KIBS), Macedonia
Klirinski Interbankarski Sistemi AD Skopje (KIBS), a Macedonia-based payment system operator owned by 12 banks is working with IBM to transform payment clearing processes and support faster the integration of Macedonia’s banking system with the EU. With IBM Cloud Private KIBS will be able to consolidate and transform their existing resources into a “digital factory” capable of creating and running modern cloud-native applications on the fly. It is hoped that this transformation will reduce time to market for new digital products from one-and-a-half years to just a few months, while optimising operating costs and supporting KIBS’ compliance activities related to stringent banking regulations.

Sentient.io, Singapore
Sentient.io, one of Singapore’s leading Artificial Intelligence companies, is working with IBM to deliver on its mission to improve everyday life by making human and machine interactions more natural and pervasive.Sentient.io has chosen the IBM Cloud Private as a platform to host Singapore’s first AI-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform to enable its customers to transform and automate their organizations with AI capabilities such as perception, understanding, self-learning and problem-solving. Using IBM Cloud Private, Sentient.io will help government and enterprise clients to meet strict data security and privacy requirements, modernize existing applications by moving them to the cloud, and effectively manage the lifecycle of their digital assets.

Ilmarinen, Finland
Ilmarinen, the largest private insurer in Finland responsible for the pensions of over 1.1 million Finish citizens and more than EUR 45 billion in investment assets, has shifted applications to IBM Cloud Private to enable it to develop new digital services while maximizing its existing IT infrastructure. By putting its application development pipeline onto IBM Cloud Private, Ilmarinen is able to significantly speed up development cycles and reduce infrastructure costs, cutting the total application release time from days to minutes. This is especially important with increased pressure on the world’s pension systems due to an aging population.

Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), Germany
Germany’s largest statutory health insurance fund Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) is using IBM Cloud Private for a new service called TK-Safe which provides customers with their health insurance data via their smartphone – regardless of time and location. IBM is already providing information as-a-service to TK-Safe’s secure data vault which contains the encrypted health data of TK’s insurees across Germany. Via an open service platform, TK-Safe users can benefit from new value-added
services for their personal health care and are able to share information with their physicians, hospitals and service providers.

Mangalore University, India
Mangalore University, one of India’s top public education institutions, will provide new-age courses in emerging technologies through its affiliated colleges and is leveraging the power of IBM Cloud Private to provide a common platform that can be accessed remotely by any student. IBM Cloud Private will run on the university’s IBM Power servers as part of a comprehensive solution which also includes QRadar, MaaS360 and Cognos software. The solution will be integrated by Nihon Communication Solutions, an education delivery partner of IBM, which is responsible for the delivery of advanced courses on cybersecurity and Big Data Analytics and provides high-performance platforms for network and security applications.

SK Holdings C&C, Ltd., South Korea
SK Holdings C&C, a leading IT services firm and IBM business partner in South Korea turned to IBM Cloud Private to quickly and easily package applications as containers and re-factor them with IBM microservices. In addition, the company is leveraging the software to help clients modernize their legacy applications and provide a secure platform from which to run business critical software across both public and private clouds, in a true multi-cloud architecture.

Five9 Vietnam Corp., Vietnam
Five9 Vietnam is a fast-growing IT and cloud service provider that provides its clients with everything from mobile and analytics application development, to private and public cloud services. The company has been using IBM Cloud Private since April to design, develop, and package applications as containers for easy deployment on the public cloud. From there, their clients can tap into IBM microservices, such as analytics, AI and blockchain, to extend their functionality even further.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hundreds-of-leading-global-enterprises-deploy-ibm-cloud-private-300729130.html

SOURCE IBM