InterConnect 2017: IBM's Digital Approach Will Change Businesses & Society

Over 20,000 folks got to hear the latest from IBM through main tent presentations, breakouts and the vendor exposition named "Concourse"

The main message was "It's not about just changing the way we deliver IT,  it's about the next era of business. It will allow all of us to things we have never been able to do." IBM has always been enterprise strong, but the new demands from cognitive AI baked in the cloud, IoT, Blockchain and always active Security is going to push IBM to new capabilities already emerging. It seems obvious that IBM and their clients are pushing things to a new level and IBM is trying to stay ahead of the demand that digital will put on cloud infrastructure. IBM is building a very capable Digital Business Platform (DBP) that is cloud centric. To hear more of the Ginni Rometty Keynote, please click the highlighted words. To read more about Digital Business Platforms (DBP) click here and search for DBP.

Much of the time in general sessions revolved around announcements and IBM efforts rather than customer stories. This says to me that IBM is changing itself to adapt better to digital based on projections and real needs from early projects.

IBM Announced Several Partnerships:

Red Hat for deeper collaboration on open source
Salesforce for AI & IoT collaboration
AT&T for infrastructure support for media
PlayFab for pushing real time high demand ecosystems
Galvanize for filling the training gaps
Dalian Wanda for Cloud in China
Many States for Schools to produce New Collar Job focused graduates

IBM Announced New Capabilities:

IBM Digital Business Assistant
IBM Cloud Object Flex
HIPAA Understanding in the Cloud
Financial Services Patterns and Developer Tools
Watson Discovery to accelerate "Speed to Insight"
Hyperledger Blockchain Fabric for Enterprise Business

Interesting Customer Stories from the Main Stage:

Everledger talked about how they are leveraging blockchain to assure diamond provenance using IBMs cloud.

H&R Block talked about leveraging Watson to absorb tax regulations, content and experiences to create tax wisdom. This wisdom was used to get larger refunds for many US tax payers and giving H&R block a set of happier customers. I love the idea of using Watson to deal with government red tape :)

Interesting Breakout Sessions:

IBM is using Watson to assist the help desk folks and customers deal with questions, error messages and support. Watson is helping to serve 40,000 request a week through several channels.

SparkCognition talked about applying leveraging AI and analytics for security and the new industrial world.

A private bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, talked about using chatbots in an omnichannel environment for customer service

Bottom Line:

IBM gets digital and is leading their prospects and customers to the digital world in an incremental fashion for some and new business models for others.