How Intel and IBM are helping enterprises accelerate innovation

By Rohit Badlaney | GM IBM Cloud Product

May 30, 2024

Historically, we have seen that enterprises across highly regulated industries have been more hesitant than others to adopt emerging technologies, with concerns around data security and compliance being top of mind. But, as customer demands for flexibility and real-time information mount, the speed of technology adoption and innovation have accelerated. To keep pace, it is essential that enterprises adopt technologies that maximize the value of their data and harness the power of AI. This is where a hybrid cloud by design strategy comes into play.

Built for performance

To modernize and run today’s data and compute intensive workloads, it is critical that enterprises identify technology partners that are committed to helping solve their unique business challenges. And, for regulated industries, assembling individually optimized processors, systems and software uniquely tailored for their requirements only works until workload varieties increase – then you hit a wall. To address this, Intel is announcing that IBM has been named an Intel Foundry Accelerator Cloud Alliance partner, marking a step forward in the collaboration between our two companies to drive innovation and accelerate the deployment of advanced technologies. 

This alliance is set to offer clients a secured and scalable pathway to integrate their preferred processors and cloud environments, helping to reduce the time to market for new deployments. Suk Lee, Vice President of the Ecosystem Technology Office, Foundry Services, Intel Corporation, emphasized the importance of this collaboration, stating, “By joining forces with IBM Cloud, we are unlocking new possibilities for our mutual customers to rapidly innovate and scale their AI and hybrid cloud workloads, leveraging IBM Cloud’s robust cloud infrastructure.”

This newly announced partnership expansion is built on the foundation of solid work between our two companies in service to our mutual clients. In early 2023, IBM and Intel expanded their relationship via the launch of the 4^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors being built on IBM Cloud Bare Metal and Virtual Servers. When processors are designed for the cloud versus on-prem, they are designed to deliver true, optimized performance across some of the fastest-growing workload types in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud to support enterprises’ transitions to a secured, common cloud foundation. The 4^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors are no exception – they include built-in AI acceleration and security enhancements to help better protect modern VM and container-based applications and regulate where workloads can. They also include Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX), a feature that helps accelerate CPU-based AI inferencing performance.

Secured and resilient infrastructure for mission critical workloads

One of the main challenges of maintaining a view across hybrid, multicloud infrastructure is figuring out where data resides. For enterprises, the urgent need for action in response to the pandemic and other global pressures led to them bringing their products and services online right away which led to data becoming scattered across multiple hybrid IT environments. With the risk of data breach and compromise on the line, enterprises that are hybrid by design can provide that context to help make the right decisions when it comes to that data and authenticated users who can access that data.

However, to get this critical context across diverse hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, the data should be encrypted while not only at rest and in-transit, but also in use. Confidential computing can isolate sensitive data in a protected environment during processing and is only accessible to authorized programming code – making it invisible to any other party, including the cloud provider. Recently, IBM and Intel announced new confidential computing capabilities with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC and Intel® Xeon® technology. Leveraging Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), mutual clients can help ensure distributed institutional security for their clients’ workloads.

IBM also has decades of experience with regulated workloads and industry requirements and to help scale hybrid cloud adoption, IBM’s Cloud Multizone Regions (MZRs) are designed to enable global clients to deploy mission-critical workloads with high levels of security and help them address their data sovereignty and regulatory compliance requirements. IBM most recently expanded its footprint in Madrid and Montreal; signaling its continued commitment to help clients address their evolving regulatory requirements and leverage technology such as Generative AI with a secured, enterprise cloud platform.

IBM and Intel’s software ecosystem partnership and contributions to opensource projects can help  organizations adopt a variety of high-performance workloads by optimizing popular applications and frameworks to run on their technologies. IBM Cloud VPC instances powered by Intel technology aim to help organizations get the most out of their IT modernization initiatives. 

To help clients navigate the hybrid cloud opportunity, we invite you to join Fast Company, IBM and Intel at Accelerate 2024 – an exclusive global event series designed to speed up your digital transformation harnessing the power of hybrid cloud and AI. You can hear directly from IBM and Intel’s mutual clients about how they are creating newer and richer experiences to drive innovation and revenue in their markets.

Follow this link to learn more and register for the next Accelerate event in São Paulo on Tuesday, June 4, 2024.