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- What is the Outlook for India’s Enterprise Server Market in 2022?
Due to the Covid-19 effect, servers were in high demand as companies sought to upgrade their infrastructure to minimize downtime and ensure their critical workloads are not disrupted. Enterprises sought new ways to ensure remote work for their employees and zero touch interaction between them and their customers. All of these factors contributed to an increase in demand and performance for robust infrastructure.
IBM has been the market leader in Unix servers for many years. We will continue consolidating our position and gaining market share through 2022.
With the rise in open-source and cloud platforms adoption, we see the Linux market expanding significantly over the next few decades. IBM will continue to be optimistic in this space, especially with our hybrid cloud offerings with RedHat. Our hybrid cloud offerings with RedHat will continue to be a leader in IT discussions. We are well placed and ready to work with our customers on their digital journey.
MSPs will also play a significant role in India’s growth in the server market. In the next years, the partnership between OEMs with such service providers and MSPs will be crucial. At IBM, we are continuously bolstering our ecosystems to ensure new consumption models for our customers while providing the best-in-class products/infrastructure.
- How are AI and hybrid cloud technologies changing the way that enterprises work?
Today’s CIOs are attempting to transform an inflexible, chaotic infrastructure into a hybrid computing approach. The infrastructure plays an important role in providing an innovative, flexible and scalable IT environment that is safe, manageable, secure, and easy to use. Enterprises have started to invest in scaling up their infrastructure to encourage cloud adoption.
Businesses want to be more flexible and quick-track innovation for customers in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex environment. This is possible by modernising their Information Technology Infrastructure (IT). Hybrid multi-cloud is the best option for businesses looking to balance security and reliability while still allowing for agility and scalability. Hybrid cloud can also be combined with automation and AI, which can provide a range of benefits, including increased flexibility, speed and agility, as well as a shift in cost model from capital expenditures towards operating expenses.
Morning Consult’s Global AI Adoption Index 2021 was conducted for IBM by Morning Consult. It showed that, while AI adoption was almost flat in the last year, it is changing as the business needs have changed due to the pandemic. 53% of IT professionals said that their company has increased its rollout of AI because of the pandemic. 95% of respondents agreed that it is crucial or very important for their business to have confidence that the output of AI is fair, reliable, and safe.
New-generation workloads use AI. First, the system is trained. Then it self-learns and becomes more efficient. Every AI application must have a clear infrastructure agenda. Enterprises are looking at their infrastructure in order to make better business decisions. As AI moves beyond experimentation to adoption, it will require significant computing resources and storage space. For businesses to be able to set up AI applications, they need robust and scalable IT infrastructure that can feed in the AI data. This allows for better accuracy and faster throughput. Companies are now focusing their attention on AI training to make faster inferences using AI applications.
- What are some industries where infrastructure played a key role in the adoption of digitisation?
IBM has noticed an increase in demand for services in manufacturing and BFSI. IBM expects to work with companies that modernise their applications and deal with large amounts of data. They also need an infrastructure that is secure, scalable and ready to handle the hybrid cloud and AI era. Servers are improving with speed and agility to adapt to new technologies in order to optimize IT infrastructure. It is vital that all layers of a company’s IT hardware and software stack are secured from end-to-end. The new generation of IBM processors simplifies encryption across the hybrid cloud without affecting performance. This allows clients to protect data at rest and provide a seamless hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure.
The BFSI industry has taken the initiative to recognize the importance infrastructure. Cloud-based infrastructure is essential in today’s platform economy. It allows banks to quickly adapt to market changes and can scale up and down as needed. Banks now have the ability to build multiple business platforms within and outside of ecosystems. These platforms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, they can form a technology platform that could provide resilient infrastructure in an “as-a-service” model for other banks and financial services companies. The platform economy for banks will be facilitated by IT infrastructure. This will make it possible for them to succeed in the post-pandemic world.
As the manufacturing sector moves towards digital technologies, and Industry 4.0, an IT infrastructure is vital to ensure that the sector has the most up-to-date information about equipment status, improve production performance, and maintain quality. For manufacturers looking to embrace Industry 4.0, a multi-cloud hybrid IT infrastructure is a crucial component of digital transformation. As successful manufacturers move from a standard setup to an automated factory setup, some organizations even go up to intelligent factories, RISC processor storage and servers continue to be the foundation of a next-generation IT architecture.
- What role has infrastructure played in the banking sector in light of the increasing cyber threats over the past few years?
Banks will have more sensitive consumer data to protect because they have more digital users. According to IBM Data Breach, data breaches cost companies INR165 million on average. Banks have started to implement strong data security controls to prevent unauthorised entry. These controls include monitoring data to detect suspicious activity, and encryption of sensitive data wherever it travels.A seamless authentication process is crucial for companies looking to continue leveraging digital channels to engage consumers.
The banking industry has started to work together to create more interoperable technologies and to support a common, open-source tooling in order to create a better security ecosystem. Banks are also introducing a new breed in unified security platforms that can connect and analyse data across multiple cloud environments. The security industry can take advantage of this new phase in cloud maturity and redesign its security to be cloud-based.
The Telum processor was created to address fraud in real-time to address the massive volume of transactions in the financial services industry. The IBM Telum Z Series chip from IBM is designed to handle this volume and allow applications to run more efficiently where their data is located. Businesses will be able to use the chip to gain insights and fight fraud in real time.
IBM’s new Power E1080 server was created to be the backbone for a next-generation hybrid cloud. The E1080 server can dynamically scale capacity according to demand using IBM Power Private Cloud With Dynamic Capacity. This makes it 50 percent faster for containerized workloads than the IBM E980. This allows containerised and cloud-native applications to be deployed faster and run at a higher performance level. IBM Power E1080 was designed to help businesses get the most out of mission-critical workloads.
- How does IBM help its clients with their infrastructure journeys? Can you cite a few examples?
IBM has been working with large enterprises and mid-sized companies since the beginning of their digital journey. Our clients are helped to prioritize and evaluate the possible business impact of digital transformation. We offer customized solutions tailored to clients’ needs, including bundled cloud, AI and IoT solutions.
Shree cement partnered with IBM to run their core business applications and database using AIX and Red Hat on IBM POWER9 based IBM Power Systems. Shree Cement can now seamlessly increase its productivity and improve its supply chain efficiency across its manufacturing plants through the implementation. Similarly, IBM partnered with CK Birla Groups National Engineering Industries to upgrade hardware to help the company migrate its ERP (enterprise resource plan) workloads to SAP HANA. This was essential to support the companys digital efforts. NBC’s digital-first projects approach and the company’s requirements for cybersecurity amid the pandemic led to NBC expanding its partnership with IBM to upgrade its IT infrastructure with the latest POWER9 servers, FlashSystem 5000 storage. PN International was also a client of IBM. KARAM and IBM collaborated to upgrade their IT Hardware for better database management, ERP and infrastructure management.
- Can you speak about the skills and know-how required by client organizations to empower their employees, address client security concerns, and deal with the practical challenges of migrating to cloud from on-premise systems? How can IBM help organisations with this?
At IBM, we believe that companies today are accelerating the digital transformation and moving towards a hybrid cloud environment leveraging multiple clouds and an on premise environment that enables them to be agile and also provide the level of security, compliance required for today’s enterprise. The key to a successful transformation journey is the skills and expertise of the organisation. This will also depend on how they can learn new skills. IBM is investing heavily in a variety of technologies to help customers adopt new skills and acquire new ones. This includes a focus on solution patterns and verticals.
Hyper-automation, for example, is the process of automating everything within an organization that can be automated. Organizations that adopt hyperautomation seek to streamline their business processes using artificial intelligence (AI), robot process automation (RPA) and other technologies to operate with minimal human intervention. AIOps uses artificial Intelligence to simplify IT operations management, and accelerate and automate the resolution of problems in complex IT environments. These domains are required for organisations to be able address such requirements.
Microservices architecture, which is a loosely coupled approach that allows for smaller, independently deployable services to be used in a single application, is similar. OpenShift Container Platform provides a great example.
IBM’s consulting arm has industry experts and a robust infrastructure like IBM Power and z Systems and Storage. This combination makes it possible to help customers gain value by adopting and developing skills in all of these areas.
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