IBM Announces Investment in Partner Ecosystem and AI Development

IBM announces investment in partner ecosystem, advances in artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud and quantum computing at the company’s Think Conference today. The innovations highlight IBM’s role in helping its clients and partners accelerate their digital transformations, return to work smarter and build strategic ecosystems that can drive better business outcomes.

“We will look back on this year and last as the moment the world entered the digital century in full force,” said IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. “In the same way that we have electrified factories and machines in the past century, we will use hybrid cloud to infuse AI into software and systems in the 21^st century. And one thing is certain; this is a future that must be built on a foundation of deep industry collaboration.  We are boosting investment in our partner ecosystem. Also at Think 2021, we are unveiling our latest hybrid cloud and AI innovations -- the very technologies that serve as the building blocks of a new IT architecture for business.”

Continued Investments in IBM’s Partner Ecosystem 

New Benefits to Drive Partners Success - As part of a $1 billion investment to support its partner ecosystem, IBM unveiled new competencies, skills training, and benefits to ensure its partners succeed in an increasingly competitive market. For example, IBM has created a new competency framework to enable partners to demonstrate expertise, technical validation and sales success in specialised areas such as hybrid cloud infrastructure, automation and security. IBM ecosystem partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one partner which has already achieved competencies for building an industrial and manufacturing AI solution for data scientists and AI developers. To further its investment in ecosystem partners, IBM is also expanding availability of its Cloud Engagement Fund (CEF), to all partner types, whether they build on, service, or re/sell IBM technology. CEF provides investment through significant technical resources and cloud credits for partners to help migrate customer workloads to hybrid cloud environments. IBM’s collaboration with Siemens Digital Industries Software is just one example of how the CEF is helping our partners scale. Through this joint initiative, Siemens will apply IBM’s open hybrid cloud approach, built on Red Hat OpenShift, to extend the deployment flexibility of MindSphere, the industrial IoT as a service solution from Siemens.

New Innovations Bring Data and AI Together 

Supported by the ecosystem, Watson Orchestrate Helps Professionals Automate Work to Increase Productivity -  Watson Orchestrate is a new interactive AI capability designed to increase the personal productivity of all business professionals across sales, human resources, operations and more, helping them reclaim up to 50% of their time to focus on more strategic work. Requiring no IT skills to use, professionals initiate work using Watson Orchestrate 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. This can help workers more quickly perform routine tasks, such as scheduling meetings or procuring approvals, or more mission-critical tasks, like preparing proposals or business plans. It was developed in IBM Research, is now available in preview as part of the IBM Automation Cloud Paks and is expected to be generally available later this year.