Power up your hybrid cloud experience! Host Steven Dickens is with Six Five Media In the Booth at IBM TechXchange, where he’s joined by IBM’s Bargav Balakrishnan, VP, Product Management, to discuss the evolution, impact, and future of IBM® Power® servers.
Their discussion covers:
- The IBM Power server capabilities, including support for AIX®, IBM i operating system, and Linux®
- The response of IBM Power servers to business demands, protection from core to cloud, streamlined insights, and automation
- Highlights from the past three years since the launch of Power10, including momentum and success stories
- New announcements regarding the IBM Power11 processor, Spyre Accelerator, RPG Assistant, enhancements to PowerVS
- The impact of AI on the Power business and its benefits for IBM clients
Learn more at IBM.
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Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. I’m Steven Dickens, your host, and we’re coming to you live from IBM TechXchange where we’re here with The Six Five Media. I’m joined by Bargav Balakrishnan. Why we’re laughing people is Bargav and I know each other, but we’ll try and keep it professional.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Professional today. Yeah, that’s right.
Steven Dickens: So tell the viewers and listeners a little bit about what you do for IBM.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Sure. So over the last couple of years, I joined the Power business and I have the great pleasure of leading our product management business for our core platforms, application modernization and AI for Power.
Steven Dickens: So I saw you on the agenda today, keynoting.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yes. Yes.
Steven Dickens: Look at you all fancy.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yes.
Steven Dickens: But no seriously, keynote for the entire Power track here at TechXchange. Tell us a little bit about what you covered and what some of the key takeaways would be.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, sure. So maybe before I jump into actually what we announced, maybe step back give you a little context on the Power business for those who might not be familiar or who haven’t quite been following the last couple of years. So if you go kind of look across our customer base, I would sum it up to say that most customers are asking for the same thing, different language. Every customer these days and AI has supercharged this, they’re looking to grow, save, and comply in some kind of order.
Steven Dickens: I like that. Grow, save, and comply.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Grow, save, and comply. Right. And as I said, AI is kind of supercharging, okay, how do I use AI to grow my business? How do I use AI to drive productivity? How do I use AI to stay in compliance? And so that kind of three-headed, three-legged stool is top of mind and all three of those have to be at the same time. And so as we think about the Power business, what we’ve done is really to kind of transform our portfolio and really drive focus in three very specific offering areas to help accelerate our client’s transformation needs. First, we are continuing to build and deliver differentiated platforms to go drive mission-critical workloads that our customers depend on Power for. In addition, as with any infrastructure, more and more you have to have an AI-ready component to infrastructure. That’s just part of the norm, right, these days.
So that’s the first one. The second key pillar is driving modernization. So what I mean by that is helping our clients modernize their applications to drive velocity, modernizing their processes and workflows to improve productivity, and infusing AI to unlock new insights. And then the third key pillar for us is all about frictionless consumption. Right. It’s about pay as you go, thoughtful workload placement, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s on premises, but with the same user experience, without all the differences that workload placement can usually provide. So that’s the business context. Now from a keynote perspective, what have we announced today or what did we talk about?
Steven Dickens: Yeah, you guys hit quite a big. I mean I was checking through, got sent through some details. Spyre, which really fascinating.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yep.
Steven Dickens: The new Power11 processor.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yep.
Steven Dickens: RPG assistant.
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.
Steven Dickens: Some stuff for Power VS. Tell me more.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Right.
Steven Dickens: Whether you want to go that order or what just,-
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, so if we go back to those building and delivering core differentiated AI ready infrastructure, that’s really where the heart of P11 processor and Spyre comes into. Right.
Steven Dickens: So the interesting thing for me with Spyre,-
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah.
Steven Dickens: Obviously we saw the Z guys with Telum II and they announced the Spyre. I think for me the key piece is the consistency across IBM infrastructure.
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.
Steven Dickens: Can you double click there maybe for me?
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah. 100%. And I think that’s also why we see a lot of value because when we think about infrastructure clients, they kind of value similar things around resiliency, availability, low latency, low latency infusing generative AI into our mission transactional workflow. So when you think about the why it starts to become obvious, why there’s a lot of synergy that Power and Z and future brands perhaps in the future can leverage from this purpose-built optimum accelerator.
Steven Dickens: And pulling that development effort and that sort of product management effort.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Totally. And it’s not a this or that, but Spyre we think helps with certain use cases, certain segments, and there’ll be other, I’m sure opportunities to partner as well beyond that.
Steven Dickens: So I missed the RPG assistant, they’ve got me briefed a bit later on this afternoon.
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.
Steven Dickens: And the Power VS stuff. What were the announcements there?
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, so for Code Assistant, I mean given you’ve been following, you know IBM has a point of view and differentiation when it comes to Code Assistants. Obviously there’s been Code Assistant for Z, Code Assistant for JCL. Probably the number one or maybe number two thing that our IBM i clients ask for is similar. Right. They have decades-long worth of applications, mission-critical that are written RPG. And so what our clients are asking for is a similar type of AI-powered assistant that can help with code explanation, code transformation, code generation. And so that’s what we previewed today, which is a Code Assistant for IBM i that we’re looking to quickly bring to market next year.
Steven Dickens: So basically customers can unpick and discover that RPG code.
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.
Steven Dickens: Maybe unpack that monolith, transform it. We’re not talking about potentially transforming away from the platform.
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.
Steven Dickens: But moving to a more agile model,
Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s 100% right. So kind of the use cases we’re going after, code explanation. What is this code? Whether it’s a new developer coming in, experience once leaving. So simple things like code explanation, to code generation, to help me generate test scripts. It’s so complex to test all these stuff. Right. And the last one being help me modernize my RPG from old to new. So there’s a lot of value we see and more use cases coming.
Steven Dickens: So it’s 2024, I’ve got to ask. It’s compulsory. I think they’ve put it into my contract.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah.
Steven Dickens: I’ve got to ask the AI question.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Of course.
Steven Dickens: You touched on it briefly earlier with that sort of, kind of how Power is playing in that ecosystem.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Absolutely, yeah.
Steven Dickens: What’s the Power AI story, especially as you’re going into Power11? We talked about Spyre.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah.
Steven Dickens: Kind of how should we contextualize that?
Bargav Balakrishnan: So the way I think about it is, look, AI is everywhere and therefore it’s a pervasive thought, is how we’re thinking about it too right now. The obvious one, everybody starts and it’s an important one is look, at the end of the day when you think about AI and scaling AI across the enterprise, right, number of use cases, number of users per use case, quickly you start to think about performance costs, bringing your enterprise data to bear for specific use cases. Right. And so a hybrid infrastructure is going to make a lot of sense to support enterprise value at scale and deploying AI at scale. Right. And so we are focusing a lot of our attention on developing and delivering AI-ready infrastructure for specific use cases where deploying models on Power for a use case of one low latency, transactional workflows, a lot of those things makes a lot of sense. And that’s where you’re going to see us continue to drive AI acceleration, whether it’s off-chip, on-chip, the software stacks needed, et cetera. So that’s one. This goes back to our business and kind of the three areas of a focused acceleration that we’re driving. So you’re going to continue to see us build and deliver the next system and the next innovations across the AI-ready infrastructure,-
Steven Dickens: Can we expect that in 25?
Bargav Balakrishnan: Stay close is what I would say, but,-
Steven Dickens: Watch this space for more.
Bargav Balakrishnan: Watch this space as we continue to develop there. That’s what I would say.
Steven Dickens: I’ve got to ask. It’s my job to put you on this spot.
Bargav Balakrishnan: I understand. So that’s one piece. The second piece on the modernization side, look, Code Assistant for IBM i is a big one, but that’s just one of so many other workflows that we can help drive AI into. Right. And so we’re thinking about a much broader AI set of use cases beyond developers. How can we help the IT admins with AI ops use cases and so on. And then last but not least, it’s as a service. Right. How do we continue to drive usability improvements, better price performance, as well as continue to expand the solution ecosystem around our as a service portfolio for things like DR as a service, OpenShift as a service, streamlining storage replication so we can truly drive that consistency our clients are asking for?
Steven Dickens: Well, I think there’s no better way to wrap. Fantastic summary there of what we can expect to see from Power. You’ve been here with us at IBM TechXchange. I’ve been talking to Bargav about what you can expect as we look forward with IBM Power. Lots more episodes. Please click and subscribe and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.
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