AI, Automation to Accelerate Shift towards Hybrid Cloud

Lata Singh, Director, Partner Ecosystem, IBM India and South Asia, highlights that AI and automation will be crucial in driving hybrid cloud as we move further into 2021. She also underlines IBM’s efforts including the recent IBM Cloud Satellite to enable partners drive their customers seamlessly onto cloud

Over the last 12 months, what are the changes you have observed in customer demand?

Over the last 12 months, we have observed three major shifts in customer demand: emergence of the network economy, expansion of new business models for cost efficiency and agility and finally, the acceleration of digital ecosystem. Centred on these three shifts, we are seeing an increased demand for cloud, security, remote work technologies and BCP engagement.

While the cloud adoption increased immensely with remote working environment, the demand for cyber security spiralled due to aggressive cyber attacks. As per the recent Threat Intelligence Index by IBM Security, India was the second most attacked country in Asia Pacific, as it accounted for 7 percent of all the attacks observed in Asia in 2020.

As we move further into 2021, the need is to leverage AI to monitor, detect and contextualise dynamic behaviour and movement across hybrid cloud environment to verify the legitimacy or lack of a threat in an automated response.

Finally, Business Continuity Planning was always a key hallmark for most of our clients, but based on the 2020 learning, organisations are embracing AI to get better insights to address market volatilities.

What is your approach towards embracing the new world in the post-covid era?

The year 2020 was about disruption, it was about overcoming challenges. It was about rapid adoption of technologies. However, 2021 is the thawing period; It’s time for organisations, for people to go back to work, it’s for organisations to scale. It’s also time for organisations to apply our collective learning by keeping resiliency at the core, and also developing a robust hybrid cloud and AI strategy. But in addition to that, we are successfully leveraging Red Hat as a unique platform to address these challenges. Our hybrid cloud approach allows clients to connect the back office to the front office to modernise mission critical workloads to build cloud native apps and to securely deploy and manage data and applications and when we really look at this entire hybrid cloud AI strategy, we are getting to the level of platform economy and all of us know that our ecosystem by adopting hybrid cloud is working towards building a platform based offering. So we’re looking at managed service providers, we’re looking at cloud service providers, data centre service providers, and that can be one organisation delivering everything or it can be multiple organisations, but we’re looking at how does the ecosystem that is very service driven ecosystem, embedded IBM technologies within their offering

Please talk about your recent achievements in terms of channel footprints.

We want to highlight few areas that saw the adoption. One is the entire hybrid cloud. The second was security. I would say these two were the big focus and then Big Data and AI. We also had our  leading GSI’s, like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, and HCL who joined our hybrid cloud ecosystem, and our technical experts worked closely with these partners to co-create and co-innovate solutions. We also had our ecosystem of value-added distributors who understood the pivot that’s happening in the marketplace and therefore have been focusing on building core capabilities not only as cloud aggregators and working on the IBM Cloud, but also looking at how are they investing their resources to advise and engage the larger ecosystem around the security and data and AI platform as well. We also worked with Vodafone Idea limited to announce a hybrid cloud offering right based on open technology from IBM and Red Hat to serve nearly 300 million subscribers.

In 2021, what will be the technology adoption trends and mode of adoption?

Our research does show that 25 percent of the workloads have moved to the cloud globally. So the opportunity is significant. The 5G is going to bring IoT to the forefront. The AI and automation are accelerating and simplifying the shift towards hybrid cloud.

What are your recent partner initiatives? Please talk about the revamped PartnerWorld2.0 and how is it benefiting smaller partners.

It’s actually an overhaul of our entire partner program to bring more partners into our ecosystem. So we’ve defined it under three tracks: Build, Service and Sell. The program focuses on building skills as it helps partners deliver projects and services to their customers. So under the build track, it’s about building and selling software from an ISV perspective, it is adopting or embedding IBM technology in the solutions that they are building. In addition, the entire focus is on ensuring that our partners are aware of the offerings from IBM across technologies, and they’re able to pivot to the needs of the clients and also look at their own growth path for their organisations as they move forward.

How are you enabling smaller partners catering to SME customers to build and implement advance technologies like AI and hybrid cloud solutions?

So one thing that we did announce last year and you’ve heard about it is the $1 billion investment that that we’ve talked about to help our partners provide the clients seamless and secure journey to the cloud. That means we put in motion significant investment through our program enhancements to drive our partner to leverage the investments we’re putting into use by looking at the solution that they want to embed with our technology, or move to the IBM cloud.

The Red Hat marketplace, gives partners a one stop shop to sell their open shift certified software as well. With the industry cloud ecosystem, and with the recent announcement of our IBM Cloud satellite, we are encouraging our partners to grow their business with the IBM Cloud, for regulated industries, to be able to provide a secure cloud environment for them to deliver to the clients. So the overall investment is across our channel partners, not just the smaller channel partners, but every partner needs a different level of hand holding. In India, the team has co-developed a solution with LTI to help insurance agencies leverage social media reviews of businesses to help identify potential risks associated with ensuring those companies.