Solutions that all IT experts should have in their toolbox

If you had to come up with one word to describe the state of the business world in the last decade, “speed” would show up near the top of the list. Companies must constantly and rapidly adjust to the fast-changing business environment, ramp up production and offer higher-quality products and services in record time. How can they achieve this?

To answer this question, we need to examine the issues at stake. These can be broken down into several parts: accelerating business processes, automating operations, eliminating friction between business and technological processes through modernization, increasing rapid decision-making capacity and guaranteeing comprehensive security. 

All of IBM’s hybrid cloud software solutions enable medium and large-sized companies to address these issues. “Whether you’re opening up your data to a partner, facilitating the integration of a supplier or extracting data, Cloud Paks allow you to automate business operations and model, streamline and accelerate your processes,” explains Carl Cabou, technical expert at IBM.

These solutions are offered as part of five Cloud Paks that harness the power of artificial intelligence. There is a Cloud Pak for:

1. Automation of business processes, partly performed by humans, to accelerate the execution of tasks and reduce the risk of errors through intelligent workflows (robotic process automation).
2. Integration, which lets business partners access internal data and enables communication between systems that do not interact thanks to application programming interfaces (APIs). It also allows cross-selling and even data monetization through automatic communication.
3. Security, which proactively detects threats and equips you with the tools and practices you need to maintain a secure and responsive environment.
4. Data, involving collection, organization and analysis for storage or business intelligence purposes. For example, you can identify functional trends from large volumes of data, extract data from handwritten documents and sort relevant data to be classified using artificial intelligence.
5. AIOps powered operations, to reduce service interruptions by monitoring all application components, analyzing structural system data in real time and detecting technical problems—or preventing them altogether through corrective measures.

IBM Cloud Paks come with powerful tools that have different functions and belong to different product families but all contribute to achieving the same goals: making business processes more reliable, speeding up deployment and accelerating the digital transformation of businesses and organizations.

Artificial intelligence is key to these solutions and their evolution. “AI will learn and eventually make decisions without you even having to manually create a rule engine,” Carl Cabou explains.

Set upon a container platform like OpenShift by Red Hat, these five solutions offer a lot of flexibility since they can be deployed at any supplier.

Despite all the solutions offered by technology and artificial intelligence, human intervention remains essential. “IT infrastructures will no longer consist of large blocks. Rather, they will be divided into smaller pieces through what are called microservices architectures,” says Carl Cabou. “New teams will need to be trained in order to realize the full potential of these technologies. Without these individuals, the digital transformation is bound to fail.”