IBM’s chapter 2 in digital transformation era

IBM’s chapter 2 in digital transformation era

As emerging technologies such as AI, automation, IoT and blockchain become pervasive, their combined impact has started reshaping standard business and technology architectures. There is a clear demand from any organisation to be fully digital and be able to accommodate high client expectations and deal with pervasive interconnectivity. In Chapter 1, many organisations experimented with AI and moved simple workloads to the cloud, they committed to “random acts of digital”. Now there is an industry shift towards a new chapter - Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 is about moving from experimentation to true transformation, gaining speed and scale in their digital transformation. There are three core areas, which are critical for businesses on the path to Chapter 2 namely Digital and AI, hybrid cloud and responsible stewardship.

Notably, the first factor is digital and AI. Business are pursuing two distinct approaches to digital transformation: outside-in and inside-out. While an outside-in approach is largely “driven by the market and demand for new digital services”, an inside-out approach is about modernising core systems and “architecting their business for change”. Furthermore, there can’t be AI without IA (information architecture). This is because companies need a business platform to connect of all their digital services and manage the lifecycle of their AI apps.

At hybrid cloud, to achieve real digital transformation, organisations need a hybrid agile cloud infrastructure, which is open, secure and managed, allowing to seamlessly use private, public and multi cloud environments, flexibly as needed, to host and run AI and other solutions including automation, analytics, blockchain. Chapter 2 is about scaling AI and creating hybrid clouds. It’s about bringing the cloud operating model to all those mission-critical apps and enabling customers to manage data, workloads, and apps and move them between multiple clouds. Businesses need open cloud technologies, which enable them to move applications and data across multiple clouds easily and securely.

Companies are currently around 10-20 per cent into their cloud journey. Their initial forays in Chapter 1 have focused on renting compute power at scale, to drive cost and productivity efficiency. The next 80 per cent of the cloud opportunity focuses on shifting business applications to the cloud and optimising everything from supply chains to sales.

Regarding responsible stewardship, chapter 2 offers vast new opportunities, but it will take more than technology and more than business to achieve growth and success. Businesses must “do more than digitally reinvent themselves.” They need to act as responsible stewards and work to build new levels of trust. This can be done by ensuring that clients’ data is secure, that clients retain control of their data and that they can trust AI technology and its recommendations. It is imperative to invest in equipping students and working professionals for a new generation of in-demand skills.

IBM in digital transformation era of Vietnam

Establishing for over 20 years in Vietnam market, IBM positions itself as a digital transformation partner in Vietnam by bringing its key technologies to analyse data and make useful insights for businesses in vertical sectors such as: healthcare, automotive, retail, government, aviation, finance, banking and business solutions. In June, OCB announced the successful deployment of the IBM Integrated Analytics System (IIAS).

It is the first bank in Vietnam to have deployed IIAS. IIAS is a unified hybrid data-management analytics solution providing massive parallel processing. It comprises a high-performance hardware platform and optimised database query engine software that work together to support various data analysis and business-reporting capabilities.

Earlier, IBM Services collaborated with ACB to develop a robust business continuity strategy that it could use to help reduce downtime while promoting around-the-clock availability of mission-critical information. The IBM team assessed the existing disaster recovery infrastructure for vulnerabilities and designed new recovery and failover plans. Disaster recovery and failover testing was conducted, including tabletop and end-to-end exercises.

In the result, the solution has helped ACB in reducing IT downtime and increasing availability of mission critical information, saving million-dollar due to faster disaster recovery capabilities and activating the always-on method to more than 2000 point-of-service transaction locations in over 60 provinces where ACB has its operations.

Techcombank is another great example. In the need to transform both its IT infrastructure and the way that its people worked with technology, the bank worked closely with local and regional IBM teams to successfully implement two IBM LinuxONE Emperor II servers, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The new servers feature proprietary IBM Secure Service Container technology to increase protection against cyber-security threats both internal and external, meeting Techcombank’s requirements. In addition, Techcombank refreshed its storage infrastructure, replacing legacy disk storage with powerful and efficient all-flash IBM DS8886 arrays. These systems provide the necessary speed and availability to deliver data at the speed the LinuxONE landscape can process it, closing the loop and optimising performance.

On the other hand, IBM is working on initiatives to develop the workforce of the future and close the skills gap in the countries we operate. Our focus on talents is about creating new collar roles. Recently in October, IBM launched our New Collar & Skill Accelerator programme & kicked off by the MoU signed with Hanoi University of Science & Technology. In the first year of implementing the program with HUST, IBM will support the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence department to develop and finalize AI curriculum, using IBM’s available resources, courseware, materials and other resources of the IBM Academic Initiative.

IBM will also provide support for the department to implement technical enablement workshops for lecturers and researchers, as well as to help the department on development of project’s results matrix, monitoring and evaluation. This arrangement is expected to benefit around 1,000 students who will be trained using the curriculum developed in this program. Vietnam is the first country in ASEAN to launch this programme with aim to train 200,000 students in the period of 2019 - 2025.