IBM's new AI offerings have a big India footprint

IBM's latest offering IBM Watson AIOps, which deploys artificial intelligence to automate the way enterprises detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time has a strong India footprint.  There's also significant Indian contribution to the company's new suite of AI based application modernisation tools for cloud infrastructure.

IBM research India played a lead role envisioning, researching and developing many of these AI-driven innovations in collaboration with other IBM Research labs in the US and Switzerland. Gargi Dasgupta, Director, IBM Research India and CTO, IBM India said these research-led products which are a core part of the company's strategy has been incubating for the past one year. 

IBM Watson AIOps aims to discover new patterns in IT operations, remove noise, correlate problems across multiple data sources and make recommendations to fix them. This will help IT companies cut costs incurred due to unpredictable outages and incidences.

"The products looks at cloud native applications, how they are deployed, managed and bring intelligence when the application performance is deteriorating in a matter of seconds to respond," says Gargi.  

IBM's India research lab has multidisciplinary team of researchers specialising in AI, Software Engineering and Cloud Computing.

LogicMonitor's 2019 IT Outage Impact Study, which surveyed over 300 IT decision makers said that despite best efforts of companies nearly 50% of outages and 47% of brownouts were unavoidable and 75% of the respondents said that performing preventative maintenance was the most important tactic.

Gargi explains that without AI, it would take a lot of time  to process humongous logs, incidence, and metric tools needed to detect and fix incidence. But with the new set of AI tools, the outages could be brought down from days to minutes or even seconds.  

At the company's virtual digital conference 'Think Digital', IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna said that current crisis has brought enterprises' vulnerabilities to forefront and companies are responding by adopting artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud-based IT architectures.

"I'm predicting today that every company will become an AI company -- not because they can, but because they must," Krishna said.

With businesses accelerating cloud adoption, IBM's new set of AI tools for cloud application modernisation also was led by the India labs. Amith Singhee, STSM and Senior Manager, Hybrid Cloud says that biggest challenge around modernising of cloud services largely is related to medium to large clients across industry sectors.

"We have looked at application patterns across travel & transportation, finance, insurance, retail, consumer and have generalised solutions to work across industry sectors," Gargi says, adding that current conditions makes a stronger case for automation and autonomic management more than ever.

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