At the IBM Cloud Forum 2020, tech experts delivered a strong message: businesses need to use information technology in new and creative ways to enhance their customers' experiences and get ahead of market disruptors and other competitors.
This critical path forward must be based on a well thought out strategy with IT optimisation being an essential component of digital transformation.
The three keynote sessions (now available on-demand) reflect this message: "Power Agility, Drive Innovation and Forge New Business Models with Cloud", "Build, Modernise and Manage Apps Seamlessly with IBM Cloud" and "Be Future-Ready with Your Cloud Strategy."
These keynotes provide attendees with insights from IT professionals both from within IBM and from clients and partners and are well worth watching. You also have instant access to documents (in PDF format), ready to download for later consumption and can also access breakout tracks targeted at business leaders, practitioners and developers.
The first keynote, “Power Agility, Drive Innovation and Forge New Business Models with Cloud” covered the power of cloud and how it can be harnessed to enable sustainable innovation and help the business navigate current uncertainties. And in “Build, modernise and manage apps seamlessly, with IBM Cloud”, IBM explores how to increase resiliency, maximise ROI, and build new cloud-native apps that respond to ever-changing market needs and consumer demands.
Rob Thomas, Senior VP, IBM Cloud and Data Platform talked about critical success factors in the cloud journey and how to leverage this for competitive business advantage. Rob explored how to think about cloud, AI, data, security in strategic ways to support your business.
In the spotlight here was the IBM Cloud Satellite platform. This new offering is a pervasive cloud model that stretches from your premises, through the edge and the IBM Cloud service. IBM Cloud Satellite allows you to run workloads wherever it makes sense while providing simplified management from a single pane of glass controlled through the public cloud.
IBM Cloud Satellite is designed on top of an open-source Kubernetes foundation, providing portability and allowing IT quick access to a rich catalogue of cloud services that are quickly provisioned, deployed and operated through an API-driven cloud service.
Distributed Analytics is just one example of an application that could benefit from this approach, allowing data to be analysed in different locations, with consistent and compatible workloads wherever the data is available. This approach can be of benefit to businesses that would otherwise be impacted by high data egress costs as well as compliance with regional security and privacy requirements.
During their keynote session, Jim Freeman, CTO IBM Services Asia Pacific and Archana Vemulapalli, General Manager, IS Offering Management, discussed business continuity with the adoption of cloud and DevOps tooling and patterns resulting in a managed hybrid IT solution.
Juan Carlo Soto, VP IBM Garage and Solution Engineering, talked about IBM Garage and how this framework helps you place innovation at the heart of the enterprise, driving meaningful, measurable transformation, achieving start-up speed with enterprise scale.
IBM Garage allows organisations to work with IBM to co-create, co-execute and co-operate to bring innovative services to the market. It helps companies realise business value and promote internal cultural change – from idea to outcome and scaling the offering to achieve full transformation.
Finally, Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research AO explained how the IBM Research AI agenda includes advancing the field of AI from narrow (single task, single domain) to broad (multi task, multi domain), and addressing challenges in scaling AI through automation – including Data Automation, Data Science Automation and Lifecycle Automation. In this context, Watson is an essential part of the IBM AI Lifecycle Portfolio.
If you have the opportunity to watch these sessions (plus any or all of the breakout tracks), do it. You will find some inspiring material, thought-starting concepts and very useful case studies.
In addition to the keynotes and breakout sessions you will also have access to the Experiential Zone, a virtual show floor with partners split across three areas of interest: “Manage Disruption”, “Stabilise your Business” and “Accelerate your Business”. These partners have specific expertise that can help guiding your organisation through each of these processes, taking it to the whole digital transformation process.
