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

The latest State of Salesforce report from IBM and Oxford Economics states that nearly 30% of innovation activities and ecosystem, workforce, and customer engagement will be virtualized by 2023. The transition to digital-first customer and employee experiences has created more data from more systems than ever before. The delivery of these connected digital experiences will require seamless integration of data, potentially across multiple siloed systems.

IBM and MuleSoft plan to make this process easier so that customers will be able to securely connect, compose, and automate business processes and modernize applications at scale:

• In collaboration with Red Hat, MuleSoft will extend Anypoint Runtime Fabric to Red Hat OpenShift as a certified OpenShift application, unlocking increased flexibility for companies to deploy APIs, integrations, and automation across public and private clouds.

• 85 of the world’s top 100 banks run on IBM Z. MuleSoft supports IBM Z Digital Integration Hub, making it easier for joint financial services customers to integrate core business applications and share real-time, industry-relevant information with MuleSoft.

• IBM Z Digital Integration Hub creates flexible, efficient real-time information flow between multiple systems of record on z/OS and cloud environments while also optimizing costs.

• MuleSoft complements IBM Z Digital Integration Hub by allowing customers to securely share current information stored in the Z Digital Integration Hub via reusable APIs and easily integrate it to external applications with clicks, not code. To provide even more options for clients, MuleSoft also provides a CICS connector via the IBM CICS Transaction Gateway.

• Together, IBM and MuleSoft plan to accelerate integration with core systems and faster development of hybrid cloud applications, as well as support for governance, risk, and compliance requirements.

• As a part of the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center, a digital front door to a vast array of tools, training, resources, and ecosystem partners, MuleSoft will help joint customers accelerate the modernization of their applications, data, and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture.
• As part of the commitment to its longstanding Salesforce practice, IBM Consulting is also significantly increasing the number of MuleSoft-certified professionals to support intelligent workflows, automation, and industry-focused use cases that accelerate digital transformation. IBM Consulting, a global Salesforce partner, harnesses the industry expertise of certified Salesforce and MuleSoft practitioners to help companies deliver key business outcomes and scale innovation faster.

The solution is built on Red Hat OpenShift and runs on the AWS Cloud, simplifying the ability for customers to run workloads in the AWS cloud. The companies also intend to collaborate on further co-development to provide greater flexibility and choice on where to run OSDU applications. An IBM and Reuters whitepaper, sponsored by IBM, found that the energy industry is facing pressure to reduce greenhouse gases as demand for affordable energy continues to rise.

Energy companies need solutions that help drive efficiencies to free up capital, time and resources to invest in discovering new, more sustainable energy sources. Data and digital technologies can help to navigate this transition, hence an IBM survey found that less than half of oil and gas executive respondents are using data to drive that innovation.

This is in part because most of the digitization efforts have been in proprietary closed systems, hindering the potential to combine and maximize the value of data. The collaboration between IBM and AWS aims to accelerate the reduction of data barriers in the industry.

IBM Open Data for Industries is an open-source solution using the OSDU data foundation for the oil, gas and energy industry. IBM Open Data for Industries is entirely integrated with IBM Cloud Pak for Data for easy data management, and built on Red Hat OpenShift.

With this collaboration, customers will gain the flexibility to run OSDU Data Platform applications in the AWS cloud or on-premises while addressing data residency requirements. Combined with the expansive cloud infrastructure of AWS cloud services, this data platform can help energy companies reduce the cost, time and resources needed to leverage their data.  Bill Vass, vice president, engineering, AWS, commented:

“Much of the data needed to solve the complex energy challenges, such as superior subsurface decisions, already exists, yet is untapped. This is because one of the greatest values of that data is derived when it can be effectively combined, but usually, this data is locked by data residency requirements, legacy applications or proprietary data formats. By collaborating with IBM and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, we will be able to offer customers a global, seamless offering with the flexibility to run on virtually any IT infrastructure and drive longer-term digital innovation.”

IBM and AWS collaboration will accelerate the value of this platform for global customers. The goal is to help serve the needs of energy companies today with the flexibility to adapt to change amid energy transition. According to Manish Chawla, global managing director, energy, resources and manufacturing, IBM:

“Data is a critical asset to help fuel energy transition, yet too often energy companies must choose between running applications on-premises or in the cloud, and often each deployment uses a proprietary data format. This means that rather than using all of that collective data to gather insights, augment operations and inform innovation, some of it was going unused. Our collaboration with Amazon Web Services is addressing the need to make it easier for energy customers to access their data and provides the industry with a flexible solution to meet the challenges of today, as well as more easily adapt as the industry evolves.”

The collaboration underscores the value of IBM and Red Hat to provide flexibility and unlock greater business value for operational data across industries.

Most platforms as a service include templates or build packs. opinion How to build a particular type of application is usually centred around the popular ones. 12-element methodology. This is why PaaS options are often labelled as “opinion” and are ideal for new greenfield applications.

This simplification makes software development faster and easier and hides the underlying compute, storage, database, operating system, and network resources needed to run applications, thus increasing the scope of the developer’s work. It will be reduced. PaaS providers charge for the use of these resources, and in some cases for the use of the platform itself, by the number of applications per user (or “seat”) or hosted.

What makes PaaS

Like other cloud services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) And Software as a Service (SaaS), PaaS is typically accessed over the Internet, but can also be deployed in on-premises or hybrid mode. In any case, the underlying infrastructure on which the application runs is managed by the service provider. In many cases, customers can decide where to physically host their applications and choose the performance or safety of their environment. Often there are additional costs.

PaaS and IaaS

For many, the PaaS and IaaS debate is settled by the market, but the decision to use the underlying building block itself (IaaS) or the opinionable PaaS is to pursue speed. It is a decision that many people make today. Application to the market.

Benefits of PaaS

One of the biggest benefits of using PaaS is the ability to quickly create and deploy applications. You don’t have to take the hassle to set up and maintain the environment in which your application runs. This, in theory, allows developers to deploy faster and more regularly, allowing them to focus on differentiators rather than solving problems such as infrastructure provisioning.

PaaS is maintained by the service provider and comes with service level contracts and other guarantees, so developers don’t have to worry about cumbersome and repetitive tasks such as patching and upgrading, ensuring the availability and stability of their environment. I can be sure it is expensive. , Although the outage still occurs.

PaaS risk

Most of the risks associated with using PaaS result in a loss of control that professional developers must tolerate by handing over their applications to third-party providers. These risks include information security and data resident concerns, fear of vendor lock-in, and unplanned outages.

With PaaS, some team members may find it confusing because developers have a limited range of changes to their development environment. Failure to change the environment or deploy feature requirements by service providers can lead to enterprises.

PaaS example

Some of the major PaaS providers include Amazon web services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, and Salesforce Heroku. The big three cloud providers on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have all made significant investments over the last decade to facilitate the adoption of their services, integrating their own cloud components to facilitate adoption. The major PaaS options still on the market include:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

One of the first PaaS options, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, enables rapid deployment and management of cloud applications without having to learn about the underlying infrastructure. Elastic Beanstalk handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring details automatically.

Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open-source PaaS managed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF). Originally developed by VMware, it was transferred to Pivotal Software, a joint venture between EMC, VMware and General Electric, and then to CFF in 2015. Like OpenShift, Cloud Foundry Kubernetes For orchestration.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a PaaS offering for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centres. Applications are sandboxed, run, and automatically scaled across multiple servers.

Microsoft Azure App Service

Microsoft Azure App Service is a fully managed PaaS that combines various Azure services on a single platform.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift is a family of PaaS offerings that can host or deploy on-premises in the cloud to build and deploy containerized applications. The flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform. It is an on-premises PaaS built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and built around a Docker container orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes.

Salesforce Heroku

Early very beloved PaaS, Heroku may have gone astray Since being acquired by SaaS giant Salesforce in 2010, Heroku has been part of a wide range of Salesforce platforms for developer tools, supporting a wide range of languages ​​and thousands of developers running applications on them. I will. In fact, to use Heroku, you need to build a common runtime deployed in a virtualized Linux container. Dynos, As Heroku calls them, it’s spread across the dyno grid on AWS servers.

Evolution of PaaS

Platform as a Service has matured into its own important cloud services category, but containers, Serverless computing, and Function as a service (FaaS) option offer many of the same benefits as PaaS, but for portability, flexibility, and serverless computing, it promises an environment where you pay only for what you use.

So Benkepes wrote for Computerworld in 2017, PaaS is widely embedded in container management and automation ideas, and major providers such as Red Hat, VMware, and Big Three cloud providers are properly pivoting towards facilitating container adoption. Kubernetes in recent years.

That doesn’t mean PaaS is dead Inevitably, that PaaS has evolved as the industry has made widespread migration to Kubernetes-coordinated containerized applications. There is always a market that simplifies software development, but the underlying platforms for doing so are changing over time.

Nvidia is talking up AI at Computex 2021, which is returning to Taiwan as a hybrid in-person and virtual event, that will be held tomorrow. Nvidia and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) last week flipped the “on” switch for Perlmutter, billed as the world’s fastest supercomputer for AI workloads.

The new Base Command platform gives developers access to the cloud-hosted computing power of Nvidia DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputers and NetApp data management tools.

Nvidia touted Base Command as a way for enterprise developers to “quickly move their AI projects from prototypes to production” with software designed “for large-scale, multi-user and multi-team AI development workflows hosted either on-premises or in the cloud,” the company said. The software development platform enables numerous researchers and data scientists to “simultaneously work on accelerated computing resources, helping enterprises maximize the productivity of both their expert developers and their valuable AI infrastructure,” the company said.

Base Command offers a single pane of glass interface to view AI software development on integrated monitoring and reporting dashboards, with command-line APIs available.

Nvidia also announced the availability of new AI-optimized servers from major computer manufacturers as part of its Nvidia-certified systems program. The new systems are certified to run Nvidia AI Enterprise software and are either available now or coming later this year from OEMs. Participating companies include Advantech, Altos, ASRock Rack, Asus, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Nettrix, QCT, and Supermicro.

New x86 servers based on Nvidia Ampere architecture GPUs are available now, the company said. Nvidia-certified systems using Bluefield-2 DPUs will come out later this year and non-x86 machines powered by Arm CPUs will arrive in 2022. Manuvir Das, Nvidia head of enterprise computing, said:

“Enterprises across every industry need to support their innovative work in AI on traditional data centre infrastructure. The open, growing ecosystem of Nvidia-certified systems provides unprecedented customer choice in servers validated by Nvidia to power world-class AI.”

Das said the new servers will become “some of the highest-volume x86 servers used in mainstream data centres, bringing the power of AI to a wide range of industries, including health care, manufacturing, retail, and financial services.”

The certified systems are expected to run software such as the Nvidia AI Enterprise suite of AI and data analytics software on VMware vSphere, Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise for design collaboration and advanced simulation, and Red Hat OpenShift for AI development, with additional support for Cloudera data engineering and machine learning modelling tools.

OpenShift GitOps provides IT teams with GitOps workflows to use for cluster configuration and application delivery. It is based on the idea of GitOps, which enables developers and operations teams to use a Git repository as a single source of trust.

Red Hat noted that one of the key benefits of GitOps is the automation of infrastructure and deployment requirements, which leads to faster, more secure, and scalable development. The senior vice president of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat, Ashesh Badani commented:

“With OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, we are working to remove the false wall between developers and IT operations, enabling the teams to work together earlier in the application development process. This not only helps to find and prevent defects more quickly in the software delivery process but also streamlines the process as a whole by providing increased visibility and security across the lifecycle.”

OpenShift Pipelines runs in each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container. It allows each step to scale independently, which helps reduce the cost and overhead for running the pipeline.

Red Hat hopes that OpenShift Pipelines will provide teams with full control over their delivery pipeline, plugins, and access control without needing to manage a central CI/CD server.

This year’s competition invites the world’s software developers and innovators to combat climate change with open source-powered technology. 

Now in its fourth year, the Initiative has grown to more than 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 nations and has generated more than fifteen thousand applications.

Call for Code aims to drive immediate and lasting humanitarian progress around the world through the creation of practical applications built on open source-powered software, including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, atmospheric data from IBM’s Weather Company, developer resources and APIs from partners like Intuit and New Relic.

The diverse and like-minded global ecosystem supports Call for Code to continue expanding. It includes UN World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator experts, Arrow Electronics, Black Girls Code, Caribbean Girls Hack, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative University, Ingram Micro, Intuit, Kode With Klossy, NearForm, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, United Way, and World Institute on Disability.

Access to clean water is one focus of this year’s Call for Code competition, a global initiative to combat climate change. Photo Credits: The Weather Channel

To help take on climate change, IBM is announcing new partnerships this year with Heifer International and charity: water. Heifer International joins the Call for Code movement, contributing their world-renowned expertise in mitigating hunger and poverty by investing in local farmers and their communities.  David Gill, Senior Director of Technology Innovation for Heifer International said:

“Smallholder farmers produce the majority of the world’s food and are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. With access to information and technology, they can make informed decisions on what to grow and when, enabling them to increase their incomes, while feeding the world. We’re excited to join IBM and the developer and open source communities in supporting these solutions that have the potential to increase access to water, food, and markets for millions of people around the world.”

IBM’s multi-pronged advocacy for environmental sustainability dates back decades. Earlier this year, IBM announced it will achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 by prioritizing reductions in its emissions, energy efficiency efforts, and increased clean energy use across the more than 175 countries where it operates. Ruth Davis, director of Call for Code, IBM noted:

“Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and we must apply our collective ingenuity and cutting-edge technologies to make a lasting difference. Together with our ecosystem of partners, IBM will work with the winning team to incubate and deploy their solution in communities where it’s most needed, just as we’ve done with past winners. I encourage every developer and innovator around the world to seize this opportunity through Call for Code to change our climate trajectory.”

David Clark, Photo Credits: IBM Newsroom

The winning solution from last year, Agrolly, is an app designed to support small farmers by providing climate and crop predictions and recommendations. Since October, its team has expanded their solution to new markets and provided hands-on training to more than 500 rural farmers who are testing and using the app to fight the effects of climate change. Agrolly is also working with the IBM Service Corps on a deployment plan to improve and test their technology in the coming months.

David Clark, CEO of David Clark Cause, and Creator of Call for Code said:

“The winning team from each Call for Code Global Challenge receives $200,000, and support from the IBM Service Corps, technical experts, and ecosystem partners to incubate their technology, open source their code to make it available for anyone to use, and deploy their solution on the ground in communities around the world. This year the competition focuses on three sub-themes that are key to combating climate change: clean water and sanitation; zero hunger; and responsible production and green consumption.”

There are now more than 30 generating solutions that are being incubated and field-tested in a series of deployments. Because of the UN World Water Day, the Linux Foundation announced that another Call for Code solution, Liquid Prep, will be hosted at the Foundation so developers worldwide can contribute their mobile and weather skills to help farmers optimize water usage during droughts.

This further refines the application development capabilities of Kubernetes platform with GitHub Actions, adding more freedom to how developers can build and deploy applications on Red Hat OpenShift across the open hybrid cloud.

“Combining Red Hat OpenShift with GitHub Actions will help our customers more securely automate nearly all their cloud-native development and DevOps workflows, providing a unified experience across the hybrid cloud that is exceptionally friendly to developers, security and operations teams,” says Jeremy Epling – Vice President of Product Management at GitHub.

Using GitHub’s built-in flexible CI/CD solution, GitHub Actions puts automation directly in the developer path, making it possible for nearly any event in a GitHub repository, like a pull-request or issue comment, to trigger workflows that can build and deploy applications across an IT environment and automate nearly any process in the software lifecycle.

Red Hat OpenShift now supports GitHub Actions, enabling organizations to standardize and scale their use of open, standardized developer toolchain components like Quay, Buildah, or Source-to-Image (s2i). This helps to meet developers where they are and provides choice and flexibility to OpenShift customers in how they build and deploy applications. The new GitHub Actions for Red Hat OpenShift, along with existing actions on GitHub Marketplace and action workflows, make it possible to achieve simple as well as complex application workflows on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform using an extensive array of standards-based tools.

As part of the collaboration, GitHub has also joined OpenShift Commons, a community that helps drive connections and collaboration across the OpenShift ecosystem. Beyond Actions and GitHub Marketplace, Red Hat and GitHub are also exploring self-hosted GitHub runners for OpenShift. A runner is the combined application and server that hosts a job and carries out the steps for an Action workflow. Self-hosting runners gives IT teams more control and flexibility over the hardware and software included as part of their environment. This means that end users can increase memory size, enable GPUs, or install software that may only be available locally as part of a tailored application development experience.

The addition of GitHub Actions builds on Red Hat OpenShift’s robust developer experience, which includes OpenShift GitOps (based on ArgoCD) and OpenShift Pipelines (based on Tekton). OpenShift is now able to provide a complete solution for DevOps and GitOps practitioners as they seek to build, deploy, and maintain cloud-native applications.