The first week of May means flowers from April showers and that it’s time for IBM Think in Boston. The first day of the event has historically been the Partner Plus day, which is devoted to content for IBM partners, which include ISVs, technology partners and resellers. The 2025 keynote was kicked off by Kareem Yusuf, senior vice president of ecosystem, strategic partners and initiatives at IBM. Below are my key takeaways from Partner Plus:
- Scaling is key to partner success. If one adopts the typical hockey stick adoption curve, there are a few IBM-related technologies on the cusp of hitting the shaft and growing rapidly, including hybrid cloud, observability and, of course, AI. Yusuf talked about the key to scaling being driven by a “vibrant ecosystem defined as a community with a variety of rich participants working harmoniously towards a mutually beneficial outcome.” For IBM, this ecosystem is comprised of distributors, resellers, service partners and ISVs. IBM’s focus for this community is a combination of product innovation, go-to-market strategies, and new product innovations featuring technology acquisitions. It’s interesting to note that scaling AI will require partners to use AI to automate many of the mundane processes that typically slow businesses down.
- Advancing agentic AI requires showcasing capabilities. During his keynote, Yusuf discussed the importance of agentic AI and its integration into classic products such as DB2 and Planning Analytics. To elaborate on these capabilities, Parul Mishra, vice president of AI productivity for IBM, joined Yusuf on stage. She discussed what the next wave of work would look like. Mishra explained: “Agentic AI has opened a new wave of productivity for all of us. We will move away from rule-based automation engines to conversational agents.” She added, “We are now part of an AI agent fabric where they can think, plan and act.”
At Think, IBM announced several innovations in agentic AI including a build your own agent framework, pre-built domain agents, integrations with leading applications such as Adobe, AWS, Microsoft and ServiceNow, agent orchestration and observability. The company also introduced the new Agent Catalog in watsonx Orchestrate to simplify access to 150+ agents and prebuilt tools from IBM and its ecosystem partners. If advancing AI requires use cases, IBM has them in spades and that should benefit it and its customers.
- Integrated experiences for cross-sell and upsell. Yusuf pivoted the keynote back to joint success and discussed how it was critical to deliver integrated product experiences and common pricing. Jenny Fitzgerald, director of application observability and resilience, joined the stage to provide more details on this topic. She talked about unlocking customer value with a unified experience across multiple products and gave an example of Instanta and Concert. The former is IBM’s observability product, which customers use to ensure their apps are running smoothly and catch issues before they impact the business. She showed how, through a common user interface, customers could pivot to Concert to check out the resilience posture of the application. There are also hooks into third-party tools between Instana and Concert to create an integrated experience. This helps the IBM Partner community “land” a customer but then easily upsell other products. Common pricing is critical to ensure customers understand what they are paying for and there is some consistency from partner to partner.
- There is plenty of gold in the Java hills. The topic of Java does not have the same sizzle factor that AI or cloud does, but it’s a massive market that’s stood the test of time. Still, some businesses are facing an upcoming migration challenge. To explain, Mark Haberkorn, vice president of WebSphere and runtimes came on stage. “Customers are having a bit of a Y2K like issue with Java 8 ending community support. Many customers rely on the community to support their applications and open-source libraries and now will need to move from Java 8 to something else,” Haberkorn said.
One of the biggest challenges is that most of the Java 8 applications have not been touched for decades and could have been built by teams that are no longer around, creating a big problem. To help with this, IBM has turned to AI to create three possible solutions. The first is automating the upgrade of the app to run on Java 17 without changing any of the WebSphere operation. The second is to migrate the application to the cloud in a hosted IBM environment and run it there. The third is to use AI-based tooling to understand the state of the application and then migrate the application to a new end state. On stage, Haberkorn ran a demo of Java 8 being modernized with just a few mouse clicks.
The keynote wrapped up with the announcement of the Global Partner Plus Award winners, for which I was one of more than a dozen judges.
- AI for business: EY used IBM watsonx to automate their client’s foreign tax compliance processes. The solutions have saved EY’s client tens of thousands of hours annually while improving data quality and reducing the risk of tax non-compliance.
- Automation: ScaleUP Consultoria optimized application performance for a large investment institution with IBM Turbonomic. In four months, the solution executed over half a million automated tasks, resulting in $4 million of revenue savings with $10 million in savings projected by the end of the year.
- Hybrid by design: Glasshouse Systems evolved a retailer’s IT environment from an on-premise environment to IBM Power Virtual Server with multi-cloud support. This reduced store deployment time from weeks to minutes, lowered costs by 40%, and centralizing disaster recovery, enabling rapid expansion.
- Modernization: GAVS Technologies implemented an Identity and Access Management solution at a bank using IBM Security products. The bank’s efficiency improved by 90% with IBM Security products while employee onboarding time dropped from weeks to days.
- Sustainability: Prolifics used IBM Maximo and IBM watsonx.ai to modernize its client’s production processes, improve quality control and enhance sustainability. The solution increased production throughput by 30%, optimized energy consumption, and reduced scrap, resulting in savings of $100k annually and a 25-ton reduction in CO2 emissions.
- Workforce productivity: NEC Corporation streamlined management of their IT resources and enhanced employee productivity with the use of Turbonomic. Within six months of implementation, the company experienced a 10% reduction in cloud costs and within one year achieved a 200% ROI.
The AI era is here, and companies that embrace it will enjoy the benefits of a “rising tide,” likely bigger than the industry saw with the Internet. However, it does require new ways of thinking and delivering value. With that being said, legacy apps like ones written in Java are still widely deployed, enabling IBM and its partners to address both sides of bi-modal IT.
Source:: Network World