Articles about IBM

The IBM mainframe has been a stalwart platform for enterprise computing for the last 50 years. There are not many technologies you can point to that have survived that long and remain a key component of many companies’ IT infrastructure. Its survival should be lauded, but the question remains: "Is it the only game in town for enterprise computing?"

That answer is a resounding "No." The mainframe is a combination of hardware and software that is arguably unique to all other computing offerings available in the marketplace today. That doesn’t make it a bad platform, but it does limit its opportunities for growth. It is a proprietary platform, only available from a single vendor -- IBM.

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IBM is warning customers of its Storwize hybrid enterprise storage solutions that it has accidentally sent out some malware infected USB sticks.

Companies ordering the Storwize V3500, V3700 and V5000 Gen 1 flash storage solutions may have been sent the infected sticks. The malware is contained in the directory for the initialization tool and when the tool is run it gets copied to a temporary directory on the computer’s hard drive.

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IBM is jumping on the cold storage bandwagon, offering a service and trying to take Amazon, Microsoft, and Google a piece of their pie. The company recently announced the launch of IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault, which basically stores data that only needs to be accessed every once in a while.

There will also be a cold storage service with "pay as you use" model, called IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex, coming later this year.

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It was a big day for IBM today, as it unveiled its first Blockchain-as-a-service. Unveiled at the Interconnect conference, this commercial blockchain service is based on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, built by The Linux Foundation.

In a nutshell, IBM Blockchain allows customers to build their own secure blockchain networks. It took the company a year to bring it from the initial announcement to a finished product.

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Your business will finally get the chance to use a quantum computer to do... well, whatever a business could use a quantum computer for. IBM has just announced IBM Q -- "an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems."

Its systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and IBM believes it could be used to "deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers."

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Although artificial intelligence has been around for some time, it's generally been beyond the reach of most businesses.

A new collaboration between industry giants IBM and Salesforce aims to put AI-enabled technologies into the hands of millions of users to help them make better informed decisions.

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There's increasing demand from companies to build apps that integrate with their existing enterprise systems.

Specialist in consumer-like micro apps Sapho is announcing new integration with the IBM Domino social business platform, that will simplify developer access to information and workflows used by employees.

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IBM and Visa want every Internet-connected device you own to be its own point of sale. The two companies announced the industry’s first collaboration to achieve this, through IBM’s Watson for IoT platform and Visa’s token technology.

Visa is currently powering 60 percent of the entire world’s payments and IBM’s Watson really needs no particular introduction.

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Communicating news of severe weather events or natural disasters is something mobile phones are well suited to, but if there's limited or disrupted network coverage the message may fail to get through.

IBM and The Weather Company have developed a new app that will use peer-to-peer connections within the mesh network to send alerts to individuals via their smartphone devices.

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The technology industry is having to contend with ever more sophisticated cyber security threats. With a growing shortage of security analysts and masses of data to process this throws more emphasis on the use of AI techniques.

This week at RSA Conference, IBM Security will be demonstrating what the "cognitive security operations center" of the future will look like, including new Watson-powered tools for investigating security events, new services for building these SOCs and breakthrough research that allows customers and analysts to interact with Watson through voice and chat.

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2016 was a blur of airports and hotels for me as I flew almost 200,000 miles in order to visit with hundreds of IBM i professionals all over the world.

One of the hottest trends for IBM i shops is exposing existing IBM i application functions as web services. Many companies I have spoken with want to leverage the rich capabilities they have already built into their core IBM i applications by making them available through web browsers, to mobile devices or to applications belonging to business partners or customers. Rather than rewriting those functions, they are simply building a service wrapper around them. Those services can then be consumed in a way that makes sense for the mobile or web user experience. They also can be used as connectors that allow disparate applications to talk to each other.

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We keep hearing how artificial intelligence won't leave people jobless, but instead will leave them with more time to tackle more demanding issues. However, if a Japanese insurance company is any indicator, that story doesn't hold water.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Company just announced that it will "replace 34 claim workers with IBM's Watson Explorer". So yeah, 34 white-collar employees got replaced by an AI.

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Software asset management and IT managers around the world, mostly fear being audited by Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This is according to a new report, just released by SAM solutions developer Snow Software.

Polling managers worldwide, three quarters (75 percent) say they fear being audited by Microsoft. Just over half (53 percent) say the same for Oracle, and a third (33 percent) about SAP.

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We've already seen this week that ransomware is an increasingly popular attack method. The fact that it's a profitable activity for cyber criminals is underlined today by a new report from IBM Security which reveals that 70 percent of businesses pay up to regain access to their data.

This puts criminals on target to make nearly $1 billion in 2016 from their use of the malware. Indeed, the report shows that ransomware made up nearly 40 percent of all spam e-mails sent in 2016, up from less than 0.6 percent in the previous year.

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Cern is currently searching for a potential supplier for its €5.3 million Helix Nebula hybrid cloud platform and T-Systems, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have made it to the last round.

Initially, 28 different firms from 12 countries submitted bids for the lucrative contract to develop a hybrid cloud platform that will be built upon commercial cloud services, publicly funded infrastructures and each firm's own IT resources.
Cern has narrowed down its list of bids down to the four firms based on the design ideas they have submitted for the project. The scientific organisation will eliminate one more firm and the remaining three will be required to build a prototype platform.

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