IBM has introduced a suite of new technologies aimed at scaling enterprise AI across hybrid environments, as announced today at its annual THINK conference. This move reinforces IBM’s commitment to breaking down barriers to AI deployment with integrated solutions that unify data, orchestrate AI agents, and simplify enterprise operations.

With over one billion applications projected to emerge by 2028, businesses are under increasing pressure to streamline operations across fragmented systems. IBM is responding with hybrid technologies, enhanced agent capabilities, and the consulting expertise of IBM Consulting, aiming to help clients accelerate AI adoption and realize measurable business value.

Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM

“The era of AI experimentation is over,”

said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM.

“Today’s competitive advantage comes from purpose-built AI integration that drives measurable business outcomes.”

Enterprise AI Agents Powered by watsonx Orchestrate

Central to IBM’s announcement is the expanded functionality of watsonx Orchestrate, designed to help businesses create, deploy, and manage AI agents across a wide array of enterprise tools.

Key features include:

• Agent Builder: Enables users to create custom AI agents in under five minutes using no-code to pro-code tools.
• Pre-built Domain Agents: Ready-to-use agents tailored for HR, sales, procurement, and more.
• Wide Integration: Supports over 80 leading enterprise applications, including solutions from Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce Agentforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday.
• Agent Orchestration: Coordinates multi-agent workflows and tools across vendors.
• Agent Observability: Provides monitoring, guardrails, and lifecycle governance.

IBM also unveiled the Agent Catalog, offering access to over 150 agents and tools co-developed with partners like Box, Mastercard, Symplistic.ai, 11x, and others. Sample integrations include a Salesforce-native prospecting agent and a conversational HR agent for Slack.

Tackling Integration Challenges with webMethods Hybrid Integration

A common obstacle to enterprise AI adoption is integration complexity. IBM is addressing this with the launch of webMethods Hybrid Integration, a solution for automating workflows across applications, APIs, partners, and clouds.

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, organizations using webMethods realized:

• 176% ROI over three years
• 40% reduction in downtime
• Up to 67% time savings on project execution
• Improved ease of use, security, and visibility

This integration technology complements IBM’s existing automation offerings and is enhanced by collaborations with HashiCorp, including integrations with Terraform and Vault, to support secure, scalable hybrid cloud operations.

Unlocking the Value of Unstructured Data

Unstructured data—such as contracts, spreadsheets, and presentations—represents a largely untapped asset in enterprise AI. IBM is advancing watsonx.data to help organizations activate this data with greater accuracy.

Highlights include:

• Open Data Lakehouse: Now with data fabric features like lineage tracking and governance.
• watsonx.data integration: A unified tool for orchestrating data pipelines across formats.
• watsonx.data intelligence: AI-driven tools for deep insights from unstructured data.

Early testing indicates watsonx.data enables up to 40% more accurate AI compared to traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods.

In support of this strategy, IBM recently announced plans to acquire DataStax, a leader in unstructured data handling for generative AI. Additionally, watsonx is now integrated with Meta’s Llama Stack, further enhancing its generative AI capabilities.

IBM’s Content-Aware Storage (CAS) is also now available on IBM Fusion, with support for IBM Storage Scale arriving in Q3. CAS enables contextual processing of unstructured data to speed up AI inferencing.

Infrastructure for AI at Scale: Introducing IBM LinuxONE 5

To support high-performance AI workloads, IBM introduced IBM LinuxONE 5, its most secure and powerful Linux platform to date. It can process up to 450 billion AI inference operations per day.

Innovations include:

• Telum II AI Processor & IBM Spyre Accelerator: High-speed processing for generative AI, with Spyre available in late 2025.
• Confidential Containers & Quantum-Safe Encryption: Advanced security for sensitive workloads.
• Cost and Energy Efficiency: Compared to x86 systems, LinuxONE 5 can lower total cost of ownership by up to 44% over five years.

IBM also expanded partnerships with AMD, Intel, CoreWeave, and NVIDIA to deliver new compute and storage solutions for AI-driven applications.

The Road Ahead

IBM’s latest announcements represent a strategic push toward operationalizing AI at enterprise scale through modular, secure, and hybrid-ready technologies. As businesses move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption, IBM aims to be the infrastructure backbone enabling that transformation.

Image: IBM video

Omniverse now supports batch workloads that AI and HPC researchers, scientists and engineers can run on their existing A100 or H100 systems — including rendering videos and images or generating synthetic 3D data.

“Today’s scientific computing workflows are extremely complex, involving enormous datasets that are impractical to move and large, global teams that use their own specialized tools,”

said Dion Harris, lead product manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA.

“With new support for Omniverse on A100 and H100 systems, HPC customers can finally start to unlock legacy data silos, achieve interoperability in their complex simulation and visualization pipelines, and generate compelling visuals for their batch-rendering workflows.”

he continued. 

Using Omniverse and hybrid-cloud workloads, scientific computing customers can connect legacy simulation and visualization pipelines to achieve distributed, fully interactive, true real-time interaction with their models and datasets.

The global semiconductor shortage has highlighted the critical role of investment in chip research and development and the importance of chips in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.

This approach makes the Albany Nanotech Complex a world-leading ecosystem for semiconductor research and creates a strong innovation pipeline, helping to address manufacturing demands and accelerate the growth of the global chip industry.

The new vertical transistor breakthrough might potentially help the semiconductor industry continue its relentless journey to deliver significant improvements, including:

• Potential device architecture that enables semiconductor device scaling to continue beyond nanosheet.
• Cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days.
• Energy intensive processes, such as crypto mining operations and data encryption, could require significantly less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint.
• Continued expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices with lower energy needs, allowing them to operate in more diverse environments like ocean buoys, autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft.

Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research, said:

“Today’s technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact. Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call ‘hard tech.'”

Back in history, transistors have been built to lie flat upon the surface of a semiconductor, with the electric current flowing laterally, or side-to-side, through them. With new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors, or VTFET, IBM and Samsung have managed to implement transistors that are built perpendicular to the surface of the chip with a vertical, or up-and-down, current flow.

The new chips are anticipated to be used in IBM’s own server platforms. This follows the announcement in 2018 that Samsung would manufacture IBM’s 7 nm chips, which became available in the IBM Power10 family of servers earlier this year. The IBM Telum processor, also revealed earlier this year, is similarly manufactured by Samsung using IBM’s designs.

According to the report, continuous testing and continuous integration are both markers of success for elite performers. Another key to their success is trunk-based development.

Trunk-based development is a source-control branching model where developers collaborate on code in a single branch, known as the trunk, and restrict their work to within that trunk. The purpose is to streamline merging and integration phases. This development process increases the optimization of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services, which in turn increases software delivery efficiency.

The study also found that elite performers were 3.4 times more likely to execute database change management. That adds database maintenance to the list of critical success factors. Observability was another metric that defined an elite performer. Organizations that leverage observability tools such as AIops are 4.1 times more likely to have solutions that incorporate observability concepts and technology.

What does this all mean?

Here’s the first and most obvious observation: Organizations that use hybrid or multi-cloud are more likely to deploy DevOps best practices and toolchains. In this scenario, the appetite for risk is higher, as are the budgets to experiment with emerging technology such as cloud-based DevOps tools, databases, and observability. The ability to leverage new technology relates directly to the amount of risk and cost an organization is willing to invest in its future.

Putting that aside, for now, this report makes clear that most IT leaders with heterogeneous cloud deployments, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, have more choices of platforms for deployment and more choices of available tools. These leaders have access to better DevOps weaponry, which draws a straight line between the ability to pick best-of-breed technology and elite performer status.

Another bonus?

Because they can choose options from a larger pool of technology, the end-state solutions are more likely to be optimized as to capabilities and cost. When comparing the abilities of elite performers to the rest of the pack, here’s the best analogy we can think of: The elite performers shop in a large department store that has all the best brands of coffee makers at all the best price points. Everyone else shops at a small-town hardware store that only offers a few brands with a limited price selection.

This does not mean that those who leverage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud will be elite performers by default. It does mean that those who open their cloud platforms beyond a walled garden are more likely to have optimized solutions for development, deployment, and operations.

A recent study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value revealed that 71% of executives claim mainframe-based applications are still central to business strategy. Further, the study predicted that within three years the percentage of businesses using mainframe assets in a hybrid cloud setup will increase by two times.

IBM z/OS V2.5 features tightly integrated high performance AI functionality. The new AI improvements are designed to enable more informed decision making.

New security capabilities include expanding pervasive encryption to basic and large format SMS-managed data sets and anomaly mitigation capabilities that utilize Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA), Runtime Diagnostics, Workload Manager (WLM), and JES2.

The OS update also introduces new improvements for running on hybrid clouds. IBM z/OS V2.5 adds new Java and COBOL interoperability to extend existing programming models, enhanced performance and ease of use for z/OS Container Extensions, and transparent cloud tiering and Object Access Method cloud tier support to reduce capital and operating expenses. Ross Mauri, general manager for IBM Z. commented:

“IBM is all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, and we are deeply focused on delivering new innovations like AI and new security capabilities on IBM Z to help our clients move forward more quickly with their modernization journeys.”

Mauri also noted that IBM z/OS V2.5 brings new security and resiliency capabilities to the platform, and enables clients to infuse AI in real-time into every business transaction.

“Today’s release not only builds on our commitment to drive innovation to the Chef community but also on our vision of delivering a unified and scalable platform that accelerates the rate in which enterprise DevSecOps can deliver changes in hybrid-cloud, regulated and edge computing environments,”

The latest release of the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) is designed to bring together familiar elements of the Chef ecosystem into a more integrated automation solution. Chef EAS gives DevSecOps teams scalable patterns they can use to minimize the effort needed to implement complex solutions, enables full-stack visibility across heterogeneous infrastructure and applications, and unifies the experience for developers, operators, and administrators.

The new features in EAS include:

• Chef Infra Compliance Phase: Enables Chef® InSpec® users to automatically execute compliance audits as part of any Chef Infra Client run.
• Chef Infra State Management Dashboards: Allows users to view and manage Chef Infra Server details in Chef® Automate™.
• Unified Developer Experience: Chef® Workstation™ now includes the Chef® Habitat® CLI, giving Chef developers all the tools needed to get started with Chef EAS in one easy-to-install package.

The new release builds upon Progress’ efforts to make Chef easier to use for a wider range of audiences and use cases. Chef Infra Client 17 comes equipped with a number of new pre-built resources, helpers and cookbooks created by both the Chef and the Chef Community. Chef Infra Client 17 will be generally available on April 28.

New features in Chef Infra Client 17 deliver:

• Streamlined Developer Experiences: Improvements to Chef Workstation, cloud integrations, hypervisor support, and system architectures to ensure fewer challenges for developers in the coding process.
• Increased Platform Coverage and Support: Expanded coverage and support for ARM in the cloud, macOS Big Sur, the Apple M1 architecture, Windows 8 and PowerShell Core.
• Improved Cloud Detection, Security and Data Aggregation: New, more secure AWS metadata for better data gathering for cloud instances. Improved and more intelligent Azure data gathering allows users to manage systems based on more environmental variables.

A new program designed to acknowledge Chef Community contributors, the program includes personal recognition from the Progress Management Team, in addition to participation in an annual Chef Community event.