IBM Delivers Cognitive Services Platform to Transform Business Operations

IBM has announced the first IBM Watson-based services platform built on the IBM Cloud that augments human intelligence to help improve service provider operations via cognitive technologies and freeing up professionals to focus on driving higher value results.

The IBM Services Platform with Watson already is being leveraged by early adopter Danske Bank as part of a new 10-year information technology infrastructure service contract.

The platform provides companies with artificial intelligence capabilities that bring together human intelligence and insight with technology by creating infrastructures, which is designed to predict and identify potential problems and self-heal, helping reduce business disruption and strengthening a highly secure IT environment.

"In a world where always on is the new norm for businesses of all kind, clients expect from their services partners the ability to deliver operational excellence at any time, at any place for any system," said Martin Jetter, IBM Senior Vice President of Global Technology Services. "The IBM Services Platform with Watson will redefine service delivery and quality and provide significant competitive advantages to our clients.

The IBM Services Platform with Watson’s cognitive capability can both predict problems and proactively direct automation to improve quality, as well as provide IT staffs with critical information to help them make faster, data-driven decisions. Over the next three years every industry will face an explosion of data as more and more digitization happens with adoption of mobile and IoT. A recent IBM survey found that approximately 50% of CEOs plan to adopt cognitive computing by 2019, and they expect a 15% return on their investment.

With the platform, automation tools can do more than execute simple instructions, they can now run diagnostics and execute actions to address the root causes of issues and unstructured e-mails and chats can be read in natural language and resulting insights used to resolve problems without manual intervention. Technical requirements can be understood quickly, gaps in current operations identified and tailored solutions designed and implemented. With vast knowledge bases able to be mined, the best answers are available for technical experts to use to enable them to find faster issue resolution.

The platform supports the entire managed services life-cycle, from designing to building, integrating and running services, with autonomic operations and augmented subject matter expertise.

"I am delighted that engineers from the IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) Labs in India have played a leading role in developing this game-changing platform hand in hand with their GTS and IBM Research colleagues across the world. As Indian business go digital and transform themselves around data, this first of its kind services platform gives them the visibility, prediction, prevention, and autonomous operations capabilities that will enable them to scale out and innovate with speed while being available 24/7. IBM Services Platform with Watson built on the IBM Cloud will help India CIO's transform from a better way to run IT to a new way of doing businesses in India," said Dr. Gopal Pingali, VP and Distinguished Engineer, IBM GTS Labs.

Clients around the world have already benefited from this integrated, cognitive services solution. Over 10-million IT disruptions have already been processed on the platform. In addition, the platform is mitigating a million incidents every month. Clients are seeing quality improvement through automatic incident remediation, reducing resolution time by up to 90%. And by applying auto determination technology, IBM has further reduced problem resolution time by 37%.

By adding a cognitive insight, the platform takes automation from simple repetitive tasks to more complex tasks, which previously required human intervention, including:

· continuous compliance

· autonomous governance

· self-service and automated provisioning

Elements of IBM Services Platform with Watson:

1. The platform utilizes IBM’s Data Lake, bigger than any of today's online retailers data sources, built on systems operational data gathered from IBM’s over 30 years of services experience in data intensive industries like banking, airlines and retail. It serves as the data foundry for the platform.

2. Client Insights Dashboard allows a client to have real-time access and visibility to their IT environment, which is continuously learning and improving.

3. A set of automated service delivery capabilities, which support the design, management and optimization of IT environments.

4. And finally at the core of the continuous feedback loop is Watson, which in this instance, serves as the insights engine of the platform that ingests structured and unstructured data, aggregates and analyzes the data, generates insights, directs automation andhas learned to manage all aspects of a hybrid cloud infrastructure, end-to-end and increasingly can make informed decisions.

The IBM Services Platform with Watson is an open, standards-based platform that enables integration of advanced technologies, pervasive security and data privacy, and delivers the next generation of easily consumed cognitive IT services.

With elements of the platform already being used by 800 clients around the world today, the IBM Services Platform with Watson is helping clients improve their business, providing them with higher quality, better productivity, and innovation through data-driven insights.