Three things you need to know about AIOps

For those that may have missed it, it’s been about 60 days since I rejoined the IBM Z organization as vice president, IBM Z Software. For me, there couldn’t be a more exciting time to join the IBM Z team – IBM Z software is not only a critical component of IBM’s overall hybrid cloud strategy – it is the key that opens the door to the wider hybrid cloud world to realize the full value of client applications and data. 

But for clients to fully realize that value, they need to focus on a few key areas: modernization, prediction, automation and security. With that in mind, moving forward, I’ll be sharing my thoughts here on key topics I’m talking to clients about every day within these themes. 

First up? AIOps. Let’s take a look at three things IT leaders need to know: 

1.    What is AIOps? 

IBM defines AIOps as the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance IT operations. Why is this important? According to recent studies, 90% of potentially value data is either inaccessible, untrusted or unanalyzed. With AIOps, clients can gain new visibility into data and applications across the hybrid cloud – freeing up important time that developers could be using to innovate. 

In the era of hybrid cloud, where our clients are gathering data from hundreds of sources – it’s critical for them to be able to ingest all of that data to improve decision making and developer productivity. 

2.    AI can and should be part of your on-premise strategy 

While you may not typically think of IBM Z and AI together, bringing AI capabilities to IBM Z is a big priority for us this year.  

To give you an example: for our clients, a millisecond can make the difference between running fraud detection on a transaction or bypassing the checkpoint and opening up your business to risk. By bringing AI to IBM Z, our clients can ensure they’re doing analysis as close to where mission critical data and applications reside as possible.  

By layering AI on top of this, we’re helping our clients to automate even more tasks with deeper visibility, less risk and more value.  

AIOps is a great place to get started – leveraging tools like IBM Z Operations Analytics on Z, together with Watson AIOps makes it possible to examine large volumes of structured and unstructured data with a singular view across the full IT continuum.

It’s critical to include IBM Z in any broader AIOps initiative. According to a recent report by Intellyx:

“The mainframe must be central to an AIOps adoption effort not because it is somehow more important than the rest of the stack, but simply because it is an essential element of most business-critical workflows.” 

3.    AIOps can help accelerate your journey to hybrid cloud 

For IBM Z clients on their journey to hybrid cloud, Red Hat OpenShift is the first step to establish a platform to “build once, run anywhere.” Layering on AI gives you an added edge, helping to modernize how data is collected, organized and analyzed to supercharge developer productivity. By leveraging a hybrid cloud and AI model, you’re also able to address key challenges around modernization including latency, and making cloud-native apps secure, scalable and resilient with co-optimized software and hardware infrastructure that deliver encryption everywhere and vertical scalability. 

AIOps is a key focus area not only for the IBM Z business – but across IBM – to help our clients on their journey to hybrid cloud. I encourage you to watch this space for more news over the coming months– we’re only just getting started. 

Learn more by visiting the AIOps on IBM Z community: ibm.biz/AIOpsCommunity 

What are some key topics you’re hoping to hear more about?