Arvind Krishna, in his first address after taking over as the IBM CEO in April, on Tuesday, said it is a critical turning point, an opportunity to develop new solutions and partnerships and a privilege to lead the company at a time like this.

He made several announcements in areas such as artificial intelligence, Cloud and 5G. He also talked about transformation among clients during the COVID-19 crisis.

“This pandemic is an unprecedented tragedy. It is also a critical turning point. It is an opportunity to develop new solutions and partnerships. It is a privilege to lead IBM at a time like this,” Krishna said in a video address on Tuesday.

Krishna took over from former CEO Ginni Rometty in April. "The crisis has accelerated importance of hybrid cloud and AI. Businesses are questioning and transforming operational models," he said.

Krishna announced that IBM was launching ‘AI for IT’ to help “every CIO to be able to automate their functions.”

“I am predicting that every company will become an AI company,” he said.

Krishna unveiled the IBM Watson AIOps, a new offering that the company said “uses AI to automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time.“

“Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation,” he said, adding that this could be as high as about $260,000/hour.

On 5G and Edge computing, Krishna announced that IBM along with Red Hat, a company it acquired last year, has launched ‘New Edge Computing Solutions’ to support telecom players and enterprises in the 5G era.

The company said enterprises will be able to tap into potential of 5G to support critical use access such as emergency response, robotic surgery or connected-vehicle safety features through new edge services.

The new solutions launched by IMB include IBM Edge Application Manager – an autonomous management solution designed to enable AI, analytics and IoT enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed -- and IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager – a new solution offered by IBM that runs on Red HatOpenShift -- to deliver intelligent automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual and container network functions in minutes.

In addition, IBM also announced IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, which the company said will “bring together a set of partners across the telecommunications industry that offer a breadth of network functionality that helps providers deploy their network cloud platforms.”

The open ecosystem includes the likes of Dell, Cisco, and Samsung.

On Cloud, Krishna said the company is unveiling a tech preview of IBM Cloud Satellite, which will help Clients deploy cloud native services across all computing requirements.

“IBM Cloud Satellite will help clients run workloads where it makes sense. It gives clients common access management and centralised visibility” Krishna said.

First Published:May 6, 2020 12:31 AM IST