Software
IBM | December 18, 2023
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Software AG (FRA: SOW), a company majority owned by Silver Lake, to purchase StreamSets and webMethods, Software AG's Super iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) enterprise technology platforms, for €2.13 billion in cash.
As organizations continue to accelerate their digital transformations, application and data integration solutions are critical elements for application modernization and effectively deploying AI across the enterprise. StreamSets and webMethods are among the technology leaders in application integration, API management, and data integration. IDC predicts the worldwide integration software market will exceed $18.0 billion in 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.1%.1
The acquisition of StreamSets and webMethods is further evidence of IBM's deep focus and investment in AI and hybrid cloud. StreamSets will add data ingestion capabilities to watsonx, IBM's AI and data platform, while webMethods will give clients and partners additional integration and API management tools for their hybrid multi-cloud environments.
The core offerings include:
StreamSets - a cloud-native DataOps and data ingestion platform which allows enterprises to achieve consistent access and delivery of data across a wide spectrum of data sources and types. StreamSets also facilitates the design of smart data pipelines and the ingestion of real-time and batch data.
webMethods - an integration and API management platform. The integration platform, deployed both on-prem and in the cloud, offers B2B integration, managed file transfer, and provides a modern API gateway to manage, monitor, and monetize APIs.
Software AG's Super iPaaS platform is growing, profitable and has a significant recurring revenue profile. StreamSets and webMethods serve more than 1,500 clients across the globe.
"Together with IBM's watsonx AI and data platform, as well as its application modernization, data fabric and IT automation products, StreamSets and webMethods will help clients unlock the full potential of their applications and data. This powerful combination helps drive innovation while preparing businesses for AI, no matter where applications or data reside," said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. "Today's news will give IBM clients and partners one of the most modern and comprehensive application and data integration platforms in the industry."
The pending acquisition follows a more than 20-year relationship between IBM and Software AG, with both StreamSets and webMethods expected to drive synergy with IBM's current portfolio, including watsonx, Red Hat, the company's IT automation products, as well as IBM Consulting. Additionally, StreamSets and webMethods are expected to benefit from IBM's global scale, operating in more than 175 countries.
"IBM is the ideal home for webMethods and StreamSets, the products at the heart of our Super iPaaS vision," said Sanjay Brahmawar, Chief Executive Officer of Software AG. "Combined with IBM's global scale and focus on hybrid cloud and AI, our people will have a fantastic opportunity to develop while helping enterprises everywhere get the most out of their applications and data."
"We believe that there is no business more iconic or better suited than IBM to continue investing in and growing these great platforms," said Christian Lucas, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Software AG and Managing Partner of Silver Lake. "The opportunity to bring the StreamSets and webMethods teams together with IBM to innovate in building the future of hybrid cloud and next-generation AI solutions for the enterprise is uniquely compelling. We are pleased that our investment in Software AG helped spark that vision, reflecting Silver Lake's commitment to partner with the world's best management teams and technology leaders in driving exceptional value creation for customers, employees and other stakeholders."
StreamSets and webMethods will be acquired with available cash on hand. The consummation of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2024.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
Read More
AI Tech
PR Newswire | October 26, 2023
Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) launched watsonx Code Assistant, a generative AI-powered assistant that helps enterprise developers and IT operators code more quickly and more accurately using natural language prompts. The product currently delivers on two specific enterprise use cases. First, IT Automation with watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, for tasks such as network configuration and code deployment. Second, mainframe application modernization with watsonx Code Assistant for Z, for translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z.
Designed to accelerate development while maintaining the principles of trust, security, and compliance, the product leverages generative AI based on IBM's Granite foundation models for code running on IBM's watsonx platform. Granite uses the decoder architecture, which underpins large language model capabilities to predict what is next in a sequence to support natural language processing tasks. IBM is exploring opportunities to tune watsonx Code Assistant with additional domain-specific generative AI capabilities to assist in code generation, code explanation, and the full end-to-end software development lifecycle to continue to drive enterprise application modernization.
According to a recent IDC report, "Because it relies on a model trained on curated data, watsonx Code Assistant can help enterprises improve code quality by propagating best practices through code recommendations, instead of polluting enterprise code bases with code generated by models trained on unvetted repositories."2
With this launch, watsonx Code Assistant joins watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx Assistant in IBM's growing line of watsonx assistants that provide enterprises with tangible ways to implement generative AI, said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. Watsonx Code Assistant puts AI-assisted code development and application modernization tools directly into the hands of developers – in a naturally integrated way that is designed to be non-disruptive – to help address skills gaps and increase productivity.
Additionally, IBM Consulting brings deep domain expertise across these use cases working closely with clients across industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare and government, to build strategies to allow them to take advantage of the potential of generative AI and code generation to accelerate modernization.
IT Automation - IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed
The Ansible Automation Platform helps enterprise developers and IT operators implement automation, using Ansible Playbooks, for IT tasks including infrastructure management, hybrid cloud deployment, network configuration, application deployment and more. With IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, platform users can input plain English prompts to automatically generate task recommendations for Ansible Playbooks that adhere to best practices in task creation and maintenance. This way, a greater number of team members can create Ansible Playbooks more efficiently and implement automation engineered to be more resilient and easier to support without in-depth training.
Technical Preview Key Data:
Approximately 4,000 developers participated in the technical preview.
85% overall average acceptance rate of the AI-generated content recommendations. (from July 27 – Oct 23, 2023, based on over 41,000 recommendations)
Productivity improvements in the range of 20-45%.
"Red Hat has already shown what domain-specific AI can do for IT automation at the community level," said Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat. "The release of watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed has the potential to close skills gaps, create greater organizational efficiencies and free enterprise IT to deliver even more business value."
The Hybrid Cloud Platforms team within the IBM CIO Office uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to support a wide range of tasks within their IT environment whether it's patching, resolving vulnerabilities, or running regular health checks of their systems. Bob Epstein, Leader of IBM CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms, expects that the number of developers able to produce Ansible Playbooks with the full release version could increase as much as 10x as watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed empowers other team members such as Site Reliability Engineers who can use natural language to generate Ansible-specific automation tasks.
"I like to look at our modernization journey in these stages: In the past we were crawling, doing a lot of things manually. Then, when we started automating, we were walking. Once we implemented Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we were running. And as we look ahead, with watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, I think we will be able to fly," said Robert Barron, Architect, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, IBM CIO Office.
Mainframe Application Modernization – IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z
IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z helps enable faster translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z and enhances developer productivity on the platform. It is being designed to assist businesses in leveraging generative AI and automated tooling to accelerate their mainframe application modernization – while allowing clients to take advantage of the performance, security and resiliency capabilities of IBM Z.
Today, the product follows the application modernization lifecycle, starting with an application discovery capability, which maps out a technical understanding of the application and its dependencies. Then, an automated refactoring capability leverages the information captured in application discovery to identify selected elements to decompose the monolithic application into modular COBOL business services. Finally, watsonx Code Assistant for Z leverages generative AI to transform individual COBOL business services into object-oriented Java code. The next step in the lifecycle is validation testing. Anticipated in a future release, the product will support automated test case generation to validate the new COBOL or Java services.
TCS and IBM hold a long-term partnership that fosters a collaborative ecosystem to develop joint successes for their customers and stakeholders. Leveraging this partnership and the deep contextual knowledge, TCS has grown a purpose-led, dedicated, full-service practice for in-place application modernization.
"There is a significant need for the developer productivity gains that generative AI can bring to transform applications on the mainframe," said Keshav Varma, ISU Head, Technology, Software and Services Business Unit, TCS. "While watsonx Code Assistant for Z has only just become available, we have several clients that have already requested that we create proofs of concept for them. With decades of enterprise experience from both our companies, we look forward to building on our deep partnership with IBM using watsonx."
IBM Consulting Brings Expertise to Help Clients with IT Automation and Modernization
Early IBM Consulting engagements for both watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed and watsonx Code Assistant for Z aim to provide clients with the ability to deliver continuous automation, Ansible Playbook productivity, quality improvements, and transformation of IT operations – in addition to helping them identify the right application areas to modernize with Z.
For those looking for more personalized use cases with watsonx Code Assistant, IBM Consulting and IBM Client Engineering can work side-by-side with clients to identify specific pain points and solve critical business and technical challenges from the users' perspective. IBM Consulting brings deep industry expertise in application modernization, IT automation and generative AI via dedicated Red Hat and watsonx practices that work closely with IBM Research, IBM Technology and Red Hat.
Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
Read More
Software
Business Wire | October 25, 2023
DataStax, the company that powers generative AI applications with real-time, scalable data, today announced a new integration with LangChain, the most popular orchestration framework for developing applications with large language models (LLMs). The integration makes it easy to add Astra DB – the real-time database for developers building production Gen AI applications – or Apache Cassandra, as a new vector source in the LangChain framework.
As many companies implement retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – the process of providing context from outside data sources to deliver more accurate LLM query responses – into their generative AI applications, they require a vector store that gives them real-time updates with zero latency on critical, real-life production workloads.
Generative AI applications built with RAG stacks require a vector-enabled database and an orchestration framework like LangChain, to provide memory or context to LLMs for accurate and relevant answers. Developers use LangChain as the leading AI-first toolkit to connect their application to different data sources.
The new integration lets developers leverage the power of the Astra DB vector database for their LLM, AI assistant, and real-time generative AI projects through the LangChain plugin architecture for vector stores. Together, Astra DB and LangChain help developers to take advantage of framework features like vector similarity search, semantic caching, term-based search, LLM-response caching, and data injection from Astra DB (or Cassandra) into prompt templates.
In a RAG application, the model receives supplementary data or context from various sources — most often a database that can store vectors, said Harrison Chase, CEO, LangChain. Building a generative AI app requires a robust, powerful database, and we ensure our users have access to the best options on the market via our simple plugin architecture. With integrations like DataStax's LangChain connector, incorporating Astra DB or Apache Cassandra as a vector store becomes a seamless and intuitive process.
“Developers at startups and enterprises alike are using LangChain to build generative AI apps, so a deep native integration is a must-have,” said Ed Anuff, CPO, DataStax. “The ability for developers to easily use Astra DB as their vector database of choice, directly from LangChain, streamlines the process of building the personalized AI applications that companies need. In fact, we’re already seeing customers benefit from our joint technologies as healthcare AI company, Skypoint, is using Astra DB and LangChain to power its generative AI healthcare model.”
To learn more, join the live webinar on October 26 at 9am PT, where LangChain founder and CEO, Harrison Chase, and SkyPoint founder and CEO, Tisson Mathew, discuss their experience building production RAG applications.
About DataStax
DataStax is the company that powers generative AI applications with real-time, scalable data with production-ready vector data tools that generative AI applications need, and seamless integration with developers’ stacks of choice. The Astra DB vector database provides developers with elegant APIs, powerful real-time data pipelines, and complete ecosystem integrations to quickly build and deploy production-level AI applications. With DataStax, any enterprise can mobilize real-time data to quickly build smart, high-growth AI applications at unlimited scale, on any cloud. Hundreds of the world’s leading enterprises, including Audi, Bud Financial, Capital One, SkyPoint Cloud, Verizon, VerSe Innovation, and many more rely on DataStax to deliver real-time AI. Learn more at DataStax.com.
Apache, Apache Cassandra, and Cassandra, are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation or its subsidiaries in Canada, the United States, and/or other countries.
Read More