Part 3: 4 ways retailers can boost store sales this holiday season

This is a 3-part blog series to prepare you for the upcoming holiday season.

Think Santa is the only one to make the holidays a success? Think again.

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As the final blog of a three-part series with IBM, this article will share with you realistic ways retailers can optimize their holiday season by leveraging data, managing fulfillment, being proactive in shopper care and offering consumers consistent experiences no matter where they prefer to shop. The best part? The holidays won’t be the only time of the year that retailers can appreciate these tips.

#1: Leverage data to help increase multiple units per transaction 

With big data, retailers can be more predictive, more proactive and more profitable in their efforts. This also means that merchants can bulk up each transaction making relevant recommendations to upsell and cross sell. Leaning on historic data generated from past holidays and current trends, identify what inventory has sold the most, what price points are your sweet spots to sell, and what items have historically been easy add-ons to help add more dollars to each transaction. This will vary depending on your overall average price points, but the goal is to increase sales and increase customer retention by gently marketing relevant products that customers either need (such as batteries), or want, (such as an affordable holiday candle), in addition to their main purchase. Aid them in making add-on choices by being fully informed about stock availability, location, and arrival time. Combined with strategic merchandising both online and in physical stores, this is a great way to boost overall holiday sales.

#2: Incorporate a variety of ways for customers to shop and connect with your brand

Consumers want what they want when they want it—with very few exceptions—and that includes how they shop. With COVID still making many consumers wary of shopping in physical stores, and other consumers simply preferring to shop online, having multiple channels for consumers to shop is vital this holiday season. This also means building trust with your customer by sending consistent and honest communication about inventory, fulfillment, shipping, and holiday messaging. Make it convenient for them to reach you if they want. For example, if one customer prefers to phone in holiday orders while another wants to buy online then pick up at a store, it’s important to have clear contact details, shopping options and customer service support across every step of the journey. This should include, but is not limited to, branded websites, social media, email marketing, online review sites such as Yelp and Google, and of course in-store signage and communication. Everything from store hours to return policies to shipping costs to delivery options should be shared consistently across each touchpoint, helping to ensure a seamless and excellent shopping experience for your customers this holiday season.

#3: Manage fulfillment challenges before they arise

With holiday sales predicted to grow 7% to 9%, better than the 5.8% increase it tracked in 2020, retailers need to proactively prepare in order to reward themselves later this holiday season. But let’s face it, fulfillment has been a challenge ever since COVID started and this holiday season will be no exception. Get ahead of the challenges by communicating with vendors what shortages they anticipate, budgeting for last minute orders due to unexpected delays and even consider introducing new vendors that can guarantee on-time deliveries. Additionally, implementing intelligent inventory promising into a store’s inventory management and fulfillment responsibilities confidently positions merchants to maximize their conversions, gain control over immediate and future inventory actions, and prepare stock based on consumer demands throughout the holiday season and beyond. The key takeaway here is simple: Be proactive to remain profitable.

#4: Deliver customer service that Santa would be proud of

Creating a balance between profitability and the best customer experience is not easy. But it needs to be among your top goals this holiday season as consumers have countless options to where they shop. Consumers want convenience, speed, and product availability. With costs increasing on global supplies and demands increasing among consumers, finding the balance between store operations and customer care can be a challenge. Data analytics enables retailers to make recommendations based on their customers purchase history and key touchpoints for communication, creating a more personalized experience. To make every interaction feel personal, take the time now to identify holiday expectations and how you will make sure the customer feels supported by your team. Next, proactively aim to prepare frontline associates working directly with consumers on how they can meet these standards. Schedule trainings, plan for employee reviews, incorporate incentives on customer service experiences that are recognized by consumers and be proactive in encouraging your company to outshine their competition with customer care this holiday season. As a result, your sales and customer retention will increase.

Finally, as the holidays near, there are two ways to approach them. You can take control of them, or they can take control of you. What do you want for your retail business? Give Santa a break this holiday season and gift yourself the gift that keeps on giving. IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising can empower to you create next-generation omnichannel experiences and preserve brand trust by providing shoppers with greater certainty, choice and transparency across their buying journey.

Part 1: 3 ways retailers can gift themselves with enhanced inventory management this holiday season

Part 2: ‘Tis the season for fulfillment: 3 retail holiday hurdles and how to overcome them

Source: ibm.com

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AI-based supply chains: Using intelligent automation to build resiliency

Businesses with optimal supply chains achieve 5-15% lower supply chain costs, 20-50% less inventory holdings, and up to 3X cash-to-cash cycle speeds. Yet, most companies underperform due to operational inefficiencies and unexpected external disruptions.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite, an AI-based supply chain optimization and automation solution that helps improve supply chain resiliency, increase agility, and optimize operations. This integrated suite is designed to promote collaboration by consolidating disparate data sets to enable you to drive actionable insights, smarter workflows and intelligent automation which lead to faster problem resolution and more efficient supply chain operations.

Tackle your most complex supply chain challenges

Supply Chain Intelligence Suite provides next-generation supply chain capabilities that go beyond visibility. Using a combination of business rules, advanced analytics, AI and automation, the offering enables supply chain professionals to better plan for and respond to their most complex supply chain challenges. For most organizations, these top challenge include visibility, multi-party collaboration and traceability. 

True end-to-end visibility with embedded AI

‘Drowning in data and starved for insights’ is still true in the world of supply chain management. Nearly 60% of businesses have poor visibility across their supply chain and 76% of business leaders agree that without “one version of the truth,” their organization will struggle to meet its business objectives.

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Supply Chain Intelligence Suite brings you one unified view across your global supply chain network with actionable insights, enabling you to better understand, prioritize, and resolve critical issues in real time. By providing common situational awareness across the supply chain, users can make more confident decisions faster.

Improved efficiency with intelligent automation and multi-party collaboration

By automating routine decisions, supply chain leaders can achieve a new level of operational agility and efficiency. In Supply Chain Intelligence Suite, exception workflows are triggered automatically to resolve any issues caused by unexpected disruption.

Most large enterprises have thousands of tier-1 partners and tens of thousands of extended partners globally. Supply Chain Intelligence Suite’s open platform enables customers to connect and communicate with their extended network in real time. This means replacing the manual, daily process of emailing spreadsheets back and forth with automatic information sharing. Problems can be identified sooner, and cross-company teams can collaborate more efficiently.

Transparency 

Built on IBM Blockchain, Supply Chain Intelligence Suite enables traceability by product, company, location, product movement, and condition. This level of detailed transparency is essential to achieving regulatory compliance, cold-chain management, product recall processing, dispute resolution and sharing product history with consumers.

Accelerate your digital supply chain transformation

Leading companies are moving to infuse actionable AI, intelligence and automation into their supply chain. IBM is excited to introduce the Supply Chain Intelligence Suite to help you start this next generation of improvements with its industry-leading AI and advanced technologies. 

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IBM rolls out Spectrum Fusion HCI: all-in-one cloud native storage

Achieving a state of digital modernity with cloud-native applications requires a shift in IT investment strategies with a renewed focus on speed and flexibility, across the entire enterprise from the edge to the core to the cloud.

And for an increasing number1 of organizations around the world, that means a sophisticated converging of containers and infrastructure. Specifically, advanced hyperconverged systems optimized for helping companies create new applications as microservices, deploying them in containers and managing them with Kubernetes, is the path to the modernized enterprise.

The new IBM Spectrum® Fusion Hyper-Converged Infrastructure – announced in April and made generally available today – is just such a system. The enterprise-grade turn-key Spectrum Fusion HCI is designed from the ground up to streamline container development and enable and ease access to the hybrid cloud.

It combines Red Hat® OpenShift® with integrated compute, storage, networking, and services that is ready from the factory to build, manage, deploy, and concurrently run containerized applications with sustained high performance and pre-built security.

IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI can connect with other geographically dispersed systems based on Red Hat OpenShift technology creating a vast infrastructure network to run containers everywhere. As this network scales, working with Kubernetes can be complex as organizations often face multiple consoles, user interfaces, logins and more.

To address this challenge, IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI simplifies management by providing unified visibility and control to run all your Kubernetes environment from a single management point, across local resources, remote data centers and hybrid cloud environments. This allows organizations to scale applications from development to production without complexity, helping enable the fast deployment of applications and reduce management costs.

According to the “2020 Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook” report2, Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents one of the top emerging workloads across hybrid cloud deployments. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI supports GPU applications with NVIDIA A100 GPU servers to help organizations simplify and accelerate AI, compute-intensive Machine Learning (ML) workloads for data scientists, and inferencing tasks across datacenters, edge, and public clouds.

Backup of application data as well as systems metadata is a critical requirement. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI integrates with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for OpenShift to provide complete backup of the system. The backup feature allows administrators to take the entire system backup as well as granular application-level backup with customized backup intervals. The application-level backup can be stored locally leveraging the storage snapshot capability or externally using IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vSnap server’s wide range of target platforms ranging from block storage to S3 compliant object storage.

As customers move to hybrid cloud deployments, containers play a key role in portability and consistency across different environments. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI is the right all-in-one solution that makes containers easy to build, easy to manage, easy to integrate and easy to run; helping clients improve operational agility by enabling the rapid delivery of cloud-native applications with ubiquitous access to data from edge-to-core-to-the-cloud.

And we’re not stopping there. In early 2022, we’ll release a software defined-only version of Spectrum Fusion that organizations can run on any system with Kubernetes and on any cloud. In these times of unprecedented change, organizations need systems like Spectrum Fusion that have the agility to reach the market faster and adapt more quickly to disruptions.

Source: ibm.com

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What is supply chain resiliency?

For years, supply chain professionals have measured success by how well they have been able to drive down costs and drive up efficiency. Just-in-time (JIT) became an artform and masters of the practice achieved new levels of precision. Goods arrived exactly when needed, waste and holding costs were kept to a minimum, and single source strategies prevailed due to ease and cost savings.

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Then, 2020 sent shockwaves through many JIT strategies; the disruption was just too big to absorb and supply chain ecosystems had not been built to flex. As we come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is here to stay, there has been an awakening in the discipline of supply chain with respect to resiliency. The time has come to change the maniacal focus on efficiency for one that balances both efficiency and resilience. Supply chain pundits from industry and academia point out that it is possible for businesses to strike a balance between just in time and just in case. Wendy Tate, professor of supply chain management at the University of Tennessee, and coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Chain Management said it well, “Eliminating waste is good, but inventory isn’t necessarily the same as waste. Take out too much inventory, and you add risk. In short, we need to rethink what JIT means and the trade-offs.” It’s now clear that resiliency must encompass being able to quickly adjust to – and even gain advantage from – disruptions, while preserving efficiencies as much as possible.

According to Geraint John, Vice President Analyst with the Gartner Supply Chain practice, “Supply chain executives overwhelmingly recognize the necessity to make their networks more resilient and agile.” Gartner defines supply chain resiliency as the ability to adapt to structural changes by modifying supply chain strategies, products and technologies, and agility as the ability to sense and respond to unanticipated changes in demand or supply quickly and reliably, without sacrificing cost or quality.

Supply chain leaders that IBM speaks with embrace this new focus on supply chain resiliency and are looking for an approach that minimizes the tradeoff between JIT and planning for uncertainty. In this blog, let’s explore best practices that drive supply chain resiliency with this definition at the core. This includes building resiliency in supply chain frameworks by expanding and enhancing partner ecosystems and relationships, while maintaining a focus on efficiency and meeting customer expectations. By understanding your options, making data-driven decisions, and maintaining communication with customers and other stakeholders, it is possible to strike the right balance for your business.

Why is supply chain resiliency important?

Supply chains are the backbone for the global economy. They have also grown increasingly complex and now are comprised of hundreds of suppliers, service providers and production and distribution centers spread across the globe. Since life as we know it depends on global supply chains being able to effectively source and collaborate across trading partners, business-to-business networks need to be built with resilience in mind. And even in the face of uncertainty, companies can deliver the right products at the right place and time, and even out-maneuver competitors.

While disruptions to supply chains vary in magnitude and impact, anyone who has worked in supply chain management for a while knows that disruptions are inevitable. However, one study shows that 60% of supply chain leaders say their supply chains have been designed for cost efficiency, not resiliency.

Supply chains have become so finely tuned to drive down waste and costs, that when supply chain leaders needed to make decisions quickly to address dramatic shifts in supply, demand and logistics, their options were limited. They lacked the data and strong partner ecosystem and relationships to find workable alternatives to keep their supply chains moving. In fact, a study by the World Economic Forum found only 12% of leading global companies sufficiently protected against future disruptions in supply chain and operations, with the remaining 88% urgently require additional measures to build resilience.

Modern supply chains must be equipped to quickly and efficiently adjust operations to manage through disruptions and even get ahead of them to minimize the impact of events before they occur. With access to real-time, trusted data and a strong ecosystem of partners, companies at the forefront of innovation are leveraging disruptions to improve business outcomes – not just revenue, but leaning into cost-optimization while exceeding customer expectations.

How to get started with supply chain resiliency 

When business interruptions happen, supply chain professionals can face supply pressures, logistics limitations, dramatic demand mix changes, lack of visibility into inventory count, and location and capacity restraints. And this list is far from comprehensive.

That’s why businesses are prioritizing supply chain resiliency, with 87% of organizations surveyed telling Gartner they plan to invest in supply chain resiliency within the next two years. If your organization has similar plans, here are just five tips to help ensure you’re building your strategy on a solid foundation that allows you to minimize the tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency:

1. Keep customers front and center. One overarching lesson supply chain leaders have learned is that customers increasingly want full visibility of supply chains from inventory to last-mile logistics. Businesses need to provide that to meet customer expectations. According to a new survey of 2,200 adult consumers conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM, two thirds said they expect to have delivery (67%) and inventory (65%) options immediately available when shopping online, while 64% will go somewhere else to purchase an item if it is not available for delivery within one or two weeks. B2B companies are also under unexpected pressure to deliver digital experiences on par with those in the consumer space. In fact, more than 70% of B2B buyers say they are moving to remote or digital purchases.

2. Digitize so you can automate. The ability to generate granular, real-time secure data about your supply chain has gone from nice-to-have to a necessity. But it’s hard to be agile if you’re relying on manual forms, fax and email for business transactions. Prioritizing digitization of essential manual processes is a critical first step to ensure visibility into accurate, real-time date as well as frictionless connectivity with suppliers. You’ll be able to detect issues before they impact your customers and your business while driving efficiencies.

3. Break down silos. For many organizations, data is scattered across siloed systems within and outside of organizational boundaries, so teams don’t have the information they need when and where they need it. End-to-end, real-time visibility into inventory and workflow activities across your organization enables you to optimize supply chain performance, deliver on customer expectations and gain competitive advantage. This includes visibility across multiple departments and divisions and across your extended supplier and partner ecosystem. You also need to be able to deal with massive amounts of internal and external data scattered across siloed systems, from disparate sources and in different formats. With the ability to integrate all relevant data sources and connect the dots, you can make more informed supply chain decisions and drive action.

4. Evaluate your sourcing strategy. Increasingly, companies are diversifying their sourcing strategies to identify multiple suppliers for goods and services, and further reducing their exposure by onboarding suppliers in different geographic locations. But perhaps even more important is the strength of your supplier relationships. Supply chain ecosystems based on truly collaborative partnerships foster greater creativity and flexibility in how you approach and mitigate disruptions. When your relationships with trading partners are built for the long-term on a foundation of trust, you can more effectively meet customer expectations while balancing costs and risks.

5. Commit to the long game. Supply chain resiliency isn’t a one-time project, but an ongoing process. A strategy for resiliency today, may not be a strategy for resiliency tomorrow. The sources, types and lengths of disruptions change. Your business is dynamic. And customer expectations continue to rise. The only constant is your requirement for options that allow you to create a safety net right now and shift it as your business and operating environment evolve. Resiliency is not a separate function, but must be built into the existing functional teams in your supply chain.

Supply chain resiliency best practices

Supply chain resiliency requires a multi-faceted approach that varies based on your organization, industry, customers and role within your business network. Here are just a few of the best practices that organizations are embracing to build a more resilient supply chain.

◉ Know your options. The strength of your partner ecosystem directly contributes to supply chain resiliency. When you’re locked into one supplier your options are limited, so you need to look for new ways to build and maintain trust and transparency with more partners. Technologies like blockchain can help simplify and accelerate supplier identification, onboarding and management, setting the tone for mutually beneficial relationships. Secure and scalable information exchange fuels transparency and trust, so you can gain a deeper understanding of options you can act on to deliver better customer and business outcomes.

◉ Make data-driven decisions. When you create a foundation of end-to-end visibility across the supply chain – into each source of supply and demand, including details on customers, orders, and inventory – you can identify potential pain points and develop contingency plans. Overlaying key technologies like AI, machine learning and analytics allows you to gain insights into the impact of external events that might cause disruptions. With a deep understanding of how your business runs on a daily basis, you can take advantage of a range of approaches to address multi-layered challenges. In fact, nearly half of all consumers surveyed by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM stated they are more likely to purchase from a business using advanced technologies such as AI to help reduce shipping delays. So, use AI and analytics to unlock opportunities and make better decisions.

◉ Manage expectations. You can’t avoid every disruption no matter how much you try. Part of supply chain resiliency means planning for contingencies and always being able to set and manage expectations. Once you make a decision and communicate to customers, keep those lines of communication open. With always up-to-date inventory and order information only a click away, you can still deliver value to customers even when further complications arise. Demonstrating resolve that you are taking the best course of action in the moment to optimize outcomes goes a long way toward protecting your brand.

Solutions for supply chain resiliency

Supply chain strains remain an ongoing concern for everyone. So, it’s never been more important to build supply chain resiliency. IBM understands what’s required to build resiliency in supply chain frameworks, ecosystems and relationships, while maintaining a focus on efficiency and meeting customer expectations.

Consider the following solutions to help you on your way:

IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite – An AI-based supply chain optimization and automation solution that helps accelerate time to value, increase supply chain agility, and improve supply chain resilience through actionable insights, smarter workflows and intelligence automation. Solutions like IBM Blockchain Transparent Supply allow you to build your own blockchain ecosystem to drive supply chain visibility, share data securely with trusted partners and increase efficiencies. Empowered by the industry-leading AI, IBM Supply Chain Control Tower provides the actionable visibility you need to orchestrate your end-to-end supply chain network, identify and understand the impact of external events to predict disruptions, and take actions based on recommendations to mitigate the upstream and downstream effects.

IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network – A trusted, scalable business-to-business network that helps automate and orchestrate your supply chain processes and partner collaboration on a single cloud-based platform. Support peak volumes of any transaction type with high availability and AI-powered data insights to help you detect anomalies and take corrective action to avoid disruptions. Unify supply chain data, insights and actions across your customers, partners and suppliers on a single business network.

IBM Sterling Order Management – Deliver optimal customer experiences with a complete omnichannel order fulfillment platform that empowers you to optimize for today and prepare for tomorrow. Accelerate transformation by simplifying technology and implementation complexity to deliver omnichannel order fulfillment capabilities such as curbside pickup, buy online pickup in store (BOPIS), and ship from store (SFS). Empower your business to maximize results by managing business rules that are right for your customers and your business.

Wherever you are on your journey to supply chain resiliency, we’re here to help you explore your options and take advantage of new ways to strike the balance between efficiency and resiliency.

Act with speed and confidence to mitigate disruptions and build resilient supply chains

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Power Ecosystem reacts to Power10 launch

As we continue our focus on the critical role IBM Power ISVs play in supporting the Power 10 launch, I would like to highlight innovations with ISVs that go beyond performance optimization to how we are extending capabilities around AIX solutions with OpenShift on Red Hat, enabling IBM Power as a platform for mission critical data management solutions, and driving continued competitive advantages with ISVs for our AIX and IBM i clients.

Application modernization

Any application modernization effort requires a strong ecosystem of software to provide developers the ability to leverage new innovations and position their business to realize efficiency and flexibility gains.

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Finacle customers have long relied on IBM Power to run their mission-critical core banking workloads. As banks face pressure from demanding customers and competition from fintechs, they are innovating to handle an increased demand for digital banking and more personalized services. Finacle Digital Engagement Hub provides customers who have long relied on Finacle Core Banking on AIX with a system of engagement with analytics-driven customer experiences across channels, applications, and devices. The Digital Engagement Hub is a cloud-native workload deployed with Red Hat OpenShift and can be delivered on the same infrastructure as the core banking workload, allowing for a highly flexible solution offering with very low latency.

Kelly Switt, senior director of Financial Services Industry Strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships at Red Hat explained that, “We predict the future of digital banking will be built on the ability of FSIs to innovate at scale while retaining stable and reliable operations. Red Hat OpenShift running on Power10 can provide a production-ready, cloud-native foundation that fosters innovative offerings like Finacle Digital Engagement Hub, supporting banks and financial institutions in driving the next-generation of personalized services without impacting operational stability.”

Power10 based systems provide a solid foundation for application modernization. The consolidation and dynamic scaling capabilities enable customers to run systems of record side by side with Red Hat OpenShift based applications, allowing for a highly agile and flexible experience. Power10 is designed to allow customers to incrementally modernize by extending the value of existing applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux while starting to surround them with new cloud-native apps at their own rate and pace. Customers are able to leverage existing investments while also reaping the innovation, technology and economic benefits of the Power platform as the technology stack is modernized.

Mission-critical data management

Customers have utilized IBM Power for over 25 years with mission critical databases. The introduction of Power10 builds on the industry leading reliability of IBM Power, ranked most reliable for 12 years by ITIC, with the delivery of innovations like Open Memory Interface and inter-node SMP fabric.

Reliability is incredibly important as customers begin evaluating the modernization of existing systems of record to open source databases (OSDBs) like PostgreSQL and MongoDB. On database modernization, Eric Cargol, VP NA Commercial Sales and Global IBM Alliance at EnterpriseDB expressed how “Customers are increasingly using PostgreSQL as their database of choice to accelerate innovation and meet business objectives. EDB’s enterprise-grade PostgreSQL, coupled with IBM Power’s top ranked reliability and investment in hybrid cloud, makes Power10 a great option for flexible and scalable growth of EDB environments. We are aligned with IBM and committed to supporting our joint customers across their modernization journey.”

Leveraging enterprise distributions of popular OSDBs like PostgreSQL and MongoDB provide the support and tools needed for deploying mission-critical databases, whether they are new applications, re-platforming, or legacy database migrations. Undertaking the shift to commercial OSDBs with IBM Power and our ISVs minimizes the risks customers face with an extremely reliable system that maximizes availability and performance while minimizes outages.

IBM i ISVs excited for Power10

The IBM i operating system team has an incredibly strong customer base and ISV ecosystem. Current innovations focus on numerous areas, including application modernization, along with ongoing enhancements in Db2, RPG, and open source integration. The latest IBM i is designed to benefit from Power10 performance and throughput gains for single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. Future work with Power10 and IBM i includes the exploration of on-chip compression and crypto accelerators. Ross Freeman, Product Manager and IBM Strategy Leader for IBM i partner, Infor, shared his excitement around Power10, “As a long-standing ISV of IBM Power, Infor is excited by the industry-leading innovation in the new Power10 systems. With thousands of clients running on IBM Power today we look forward to continuing our relationship with IBM and the benefits Power10 will bring to our mutual clients.”

AIX leveraging Power10 technology

The IBM Power team ensures that each operating system, AIX, IBM i, and Linux all take advantage of new Power10 functionalities. The AIX operating system team has a history of collaborating with ISVs for roadmap enhancements that help them optimize and build value around their solutions. This collaboration is demonstrated in the recently published IBM Power10 whitepaper. Other examples include enabling open source technology, performance and scale features, services for integrating with Power capabilities such as hardware acceleration of encryption and compression, and support for IBM’s next generation of advanced compilers with features for Power10 optimization and acceleration of machine learning and inferencing solutions.

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Innovating with ISV partners

ISVs have always played a critical role in the value IBM Power delivers to customers. Through joint development and optimization with ISVs, IBM Power has continuously led the market in performance, scalability, and flexibility. As we launch Power10 we’re excited to highlight just some of the continued innovation with ISVs, going beyond performance optimization to how we are integrating AI, extending capabilities around Linux containers and Red Hat OpenShift, and teaming to further enhance security of one of the most secure platforms in the industry.

Jointly Innovating

The launch of the IBM Power E1080 system is only the beginning. We have a number of new innovations coming to Power10 on which we are partnering with ISVs such as SAP. Changbin Song, Vice President, SAP HANA & Analytics at SAP shared “SAP and IBM are working continuously on projects and technologies to benefit their joint customers. Together, SAP and IBM plan to look at new and improved capabilities brought by Power10 for its SAP HANA workloads.” 

In Core AI Inferencing and Machine Learning

The Power10 processor is designed to democratize AI across applications and operating environments, be it on Linux, AIX, IBM i, and across the entire Power10 family of servers. IBM Power users can now infuse AI directly into the core business applications and enterprise databases and run AI close to where the data resides. Our ISV partners can leverage this via four new Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) units in each core. MMAs are alternatives to external accelerators for the execution of statistical machine learning and inferencing and are designed to reduce cost and provide a simplified solution stack for AI. IBM has optimized math libraries to enable AI tools to benefit from the acceleration provided by MMA units. The IBM Power E1080 has 5x faster AI inferencing per socket over the IBM Power E980 and, by supporting MMAs, ISVs can use the capabilities to help customers to speed up their applications and run high performance AI with security and efficiency.

Accelerating business decisions with Red Hat

IBM and Red Hat have extended their synergy around Red Hat OpenShift and Power10 to accelerate business insights with the infusion of AI into applications and data stores with the new Power10 MMA engines. This is designed to eliminate specialized systems or attached accelerators, to lower the total cost of ownership. In addition, IBM has enabled greater efficiency in cloud-native workloads with the ability to have 4X more containerized throughput per core running Red Hat OpenShift applications than compared x86.

End-to-end cloud-native security

Securing your data is more important today than ever before with the high threat of cyber-attacks. Power10 is architected for security, leveraging accelerated encryption across the stack so that data is available only to people authorized via encryption keys. To help support our customers’ modernization effort, IBM has teamed with Aqua Security, a pure-play cloud-native security provider that builds on our strong, secured Power10 base. Amir Jerbi, Co-founder and CTO at Aqua Security, shared that “IBM customers are shifting to hybrid cloud environments to help address operating costs and increase automation, but in doing so they also demand security and compliance. Aqua plays a key role and provides a further layer of cloud native security to support this transformation. We are proud to be one of the first security providers to help IBM and their customers achieve the potential of cloud native applications.” For more details on our relationship, check out Aqua’s press release and video. Partnering with Aqua gives our customers the ability to securely deploy cloud-native Red Hat OpenShift solutions on IBM Power.

Getting Started with Power10

We understand that many of our customers may not upgrade their software and hardware concurrently. These customers can take advantage of the ability to run in Power9 compatibility mode, designed to enable them to modernize software environment at their own pace.

IBM Power has a long history of partnership and co-creation with ISVs, providing support such as complementary access for development and testing on the latest equipment and collaboration with technical professionals. Whenever we have a new server release, as with Power10, we encourage ISVs to work with their IBM contact to be nominated for early access to hardware through our Early Support Program. ISVs can learn more about the support and programs available through the ISV Resource Center.

Source: ibm.com

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Announcing IBM Power E1080: engineered for agility

Organizations around the world are navigating constant and rapid changes to their operations and customer demand. They want IT infrastructure to help them be agile and flexible, efficient, and cyber resilient. It should help them to predict marketplace changes and respond at near real-time. While this requires their data to transform into value quickly, the security of sensitive data remains a key concern with increased ransomware and malware attacks. As organizations modernize their infrastructure, IBM is addressing these requirements with the new IBM Power E1080, the first in a generation of servers based on the Power10 processor.

IBM Power E1080 is engineered for agility. It supports IT modernization with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience. Here is how it is designed to deliver on the key enterprise needs:

Respond faster to business demands

Power E1080 delivers scalability and efficiency.

◉ World record SAP SD-two tier benchmark with 8 sockets that beats the best 16 socket results of x86 environment

◉ 2.5X performance per core than x86 Xeon Platinum

What if you can get this performance with a lower energy footprint? With the revolutionary 7nm Power10 processor, workloads that run on a Power E980 will consume 33% lower energy when run on the Power E1080.

IBM Power10 generation of servers is designed to make technology consumption a frictionless experience. With Hybrid Cloud Credits, enterprises can procure pay-per-use capacity that can be deployed across Power Private Cloud and Power Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud. The architectural consistency across these environments gives the flexibility to deploy where you want and when you want without requiring additional middleware or application re-factoring.

Protect data from core to cloud

With data residing in an increasingly distributed environment, you cannot set a perimeter to it anymore. This reinforces the need for layered security across IT stack. Power10 family of servers introduces a new layer of defense with transparent memory encryption. All data in memory remains encrypted when in transit between memory and processor. Since this capability is enabled at the silicon level, there is no additional management setup and performance impact. Power10 also includes 4X more crypto engines in every core compared to Power9 to accelerate encryption performance across the stack. For example, the widely used AES encryption performance is improved by 2.5X over Power E980.

With these innovations along with new in-core defense for Return-Oriented Programming attacks and support for Post Quantum Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption, IBM Power E1080 makes the server platform family that is among the most secure even better.

Streamline insights and automation

As more AI models are deployed in production, the challenges around the AI infrastructure are coming to the fore. The typical AI deployment involves sending data from an operational platform to a GPU system. This usually induces latency and may even increase security risks with more data in network. Power10 addresses this challenge with in-core AI inferencing and machine learning. The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) in Power10 core provides the computational strength (at multiple levels of precision) and data bandwidth to tackle demanding AI inferencing and machine learning. Power E1080 delivers 5X faster AI inferencing per socket over Power E980.

Maximize reliability and availability

Power has been leading the industry in infrastructure reliability with 25% lower downtime vs. comparable high-end server. With Power E1080 we are making the most reliable server platform in its class even better with advanced recovery, diagnostic capabilities, and Open Memory Interface (OMI) attached advance memory DIMMs. The continuous operations of today’s in-memory systems depend on memory reliability because of their large memory footprint. Power10 DIMMs deliver 2X better memory reliability and availability than industry standard DIMMs.

As enterprises continue to modernize their business, the solutions of our ISV ecosystem partners will take advantage of these innovative and essential capabilities in IBM Power E1080. They will continue to help customers get more from their mission-critical workloads running on Power.

This is a critical time for IT infrastructure. Companies need agility, security, insights and reliability to ensure continuous operations. IBM Power is engineered for times like these.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM ships new LTO 9 Tape Drives with greater density, performance, and resiliency

As data generation continues to explode around the world with some researchers suggesting a doubling of the ‘digital universe’ to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025, increasing pressure is being placed upon the administrators responsible for storing, managing, and securing that data.

To help enterprises contend with the challenge, IBM, which has been innovating in data storage for seven decades, announced today the general availability of the industry’s first magnetic tapes and drives that can store an unprecedented 45TB of compressed data on a single cartridge (18TB uncompressed). The new drive and tape are based on the new Ultrium LTO-9 specification and designed to provide organizations greater access, performance and resiliency for data stored on-prem, in the cloud, or at the edge.

In addition to the 50% capacity boost from its predecessor, LTO-8, which supports 12TB of data (30TB compressed), the new IBM LTO-9 Tape Drive, which comes in three models, the F9C (Fibre Channel), F9S (Fibre Channel), and S9C (SAS), features several key performance improvements over LTO-8. For example, the new drives support data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s for full high and 300 MB/s for half high cartridges – an 11% boost from the previous generation.

The new drives also feature IBM’s new Open Recommended Access Order (oRAO), a new data retrieval accelerator that enables applications to retrieve data from tapes with dramatically reduced seek time between files. Specifically, oRAO, which can be used with compressed or uncompressed data, can reduce those access times by a whopping 73%. Developed from IBM file access acceleration technology, oRAO can also speed cyber resilience response times by shortening the time needed to recover data.

Building Up Cyber Resiliency with IBM LTO-9

The full-height IBM LTO-9 Tape Drive is designed to natively support data encryption, with core hardware encryption and decryption capabilities resident in the tape drive itself to ensure data privacy and reduce the risk of data corruption due to virus or sabotage.

According to a recent security report, from 2020 to 2021 the average total cost of a data breach increased by nearly 10% year over year, the largest single year cost increase in the last seven years. Today, ransomware is one of the costlier types of breaches, with an average cost of $4.62M per breach and one of the most common, with cybersecurity firm, SonicWall, reporting ransomware attacks rose to 304.6 million in 2020, up 62% over 2019.

In other words, ransomware is here to stay for the foreseeable future. It is no longer a matter of if your organization will be attacked, but when and how often. Looking to limit the impact of cyberattacks, the new IBM LTO-9 tapes and drives enable organizations to create cost-effective, cyber resilience strategies.

◉ The cost-effective data backup

Tape backups allow you to safely recover from a ransomware attack, helping you avoid expensive ransom and other fees. IBM tape solutions are also extremely cost-beneficial, costing less than 1 cent per GB per month, exactly 0.59¢/GB, in other words, $5.89 / TB. Also, by implementing an IBM LTO-9 tapes and drives, companies can store up to 1.04EB of compressed data per 18-frame tape library and up to 39PB of compressed data in a 10-sq-ft tape library with LTO Ultrium 9 tape cartridges.

Additionally, customers can reduce their Total Cost of Ownership of their tape library up to 39% by swapping in LTO-9 technology over LTO-8. And remember, tape technology does not add extra charges to retrieve your data.

◉ The best physical air-gap between your data and cyber criminals

Most organizations have a cyber recovery plan that relies on data backups. The best practice in this situation is create a physical “air-gap” to ensure the backup is going to a system that is secure and offline. Utilizing tape storage is the ideal way to provide customers with that physical gap. Tapes are portable, and can be easily stationed in remote, offline locations for superior protection from natural or manmade threats. When the new IBM LTO Ultrium 9 Data Cartridge is removed from the tape drive or library they are physically “air-gapped” greatly reducing the risk of cyber sabotage.

◉ Anti-corruption: tape provides data immutability with WORM capabilities

The IBM LTO-9 Ultrium WORM data cartridge model stores data in a non-erasable, non-rewritable format to prevent overwriting and reduce the risk of data loss due to human error.

Evaluating 10-year cyber security plans should consider IBM Tape Storage to keep critical data backed up, immutable with WORM data cartridges, and encrypted behind air gap protection to prevent blackmail. In case an attack occurs and restoring your entire storage is required, a clean copy of the data on IBM LTO-9 tape technology is likely to be the cheapest and most reliable recovery option without extra retrieval fees to a cloud provider.

As well as helping you protect against a malware or ransomware event, the WORM capabilities are often essential to meet regulatory and legal compliance across many industries and for publicly traded companies. With the immutability of LTO-9 WORM data cartridges, customers can be assured their data will always be available for audits, legal issues, and financial compliance.

Limit your exposure to malware and ransomware attacks with IBM LTO-9 tape storage.

Source: ibm.com

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Part 2: ‘Tis the season for fulfillment: 3 retail holiday hurdles and how to overcome them

Looking to have a big holiday season? Let fulfillment lead the way.

As retailers prepare for the upcoming holidays, it’s critical they consider all the influences that can make or break their holiday success. At the core of their preparation should be a single inventory tracking system that gives a 360-degree perspective on inventory management, customer engagement and fulfillment risk and opportunities. With each of these factors ultimately positioning businesses for competitive advantage, fulfillment will take a starring role in the success or failure of sales.

Read More: C1000-026: IBM Security QRadar SIEM V7.3.2 Fundamental Administration

Let’s explore three ways in which fulfillment can be challenged during the holidays and how to overcome these hurdles with preparation ahead of known events.

1. Holiday peaks present challenges to supply chains and order management

Demand peaks are an unavoidable reality that occurs most holiday seasons. And COVID has certainly heightened the uncertainty of supply and demand all year round. In fact, 32% of consumers are concerned that global supply chain issues causing lack of inventory could impact their ability to purchase holiday gifts this season. Due to this, gaining a stronger, more proactive approach to fulfillment is an essential part of optimizing your supply chain. The best way to manage this is to proactively prepare for important moments and enable the ability to track and perform fulfillment based on order volumes and workloads – particularly during peak seasons such as the holidays. This requires real-time inventory visibility and optimized order orchestration, helping to deliver stronger customer care through more polished fulfillment experiences. When retailers implement technology to overcome these hurdles, they are empowered to improve digital conversions and in-store sales while increasing omnichannel profitability. As a result, this also helps retailers protect their margins, meet delivery expectations and increase profits during peak periods.

2. Unexpected inventory disruptions are bound to happen. It’s how they are handled that can make or break a retatiler’s success

Let’s face it – the holidays will test your supply chain more than any other time of year. As retail business decision makers, welcoming a technology infrastructure that helps manage inventory fulfillment ahead of events is a key factor in your overall success. Being proactive, as it turns out, leads to profit. And the only way to do this is to have a strong order management system in place. As you look ahead to the holidays, consider how the IBM Sterling™ Event Readiness program can help you meet your fulfillment goals. In particular, you want to be prepared for escalated consumer traffic and expectations alike during the holidays with the ability to deliver orders seamlessly no matter where a customer’s journey leads thanks to intelligent fulfillment platforms.

3. Inventory visibility is not clear for customers and retailers alike

Lack of data – plain and simple – can quickly turn what could have been a successful holiday season into a very average or even bad season overall. Without data, retailers are literally blind to the opportunities that can better support their customers, strengthen their inventory management and optimize fulfillment. Gaining real-time, accurate data, however, leads to order opportunities across all selling avenues. Leveraging embedded AI technology into your inventory management further enhances this, positioning your brand to make smarter sourcing and fulfillment decisions at the lowest cost-to-serve. AI technology can benefit sales as well; nearly half of consumers respond that they would be more likely to purchase from retailers using AI tools in their supply chain management. The best part? This is the kind of holiday gift that keeps on giving!

The benefits of leveraging sophisticated inventory management solutions helps retailers to create next-generation omnichannel experiences – all year long. The benefits include optimized omnichannel fulfillment at the lowest cost-to-serve and real-time sourcing flexibility that makes better use of “at risk” and returned inventory. With clarity into the never-ending, always changing, big picture of commerce, retailers can optimize omnichannel decisions across commerce, merchandising, logistics, store operations and supply chain, as well as scale existing fulfillment capacity to accommodate more customer demands.

Source: ibm.com

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Reimagining ocean research with the world’s first autonomous ship

Humans have been exploring the ocean for thousands of years, but now the power of AI can help unlock its mysteries more than ever. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s trans-Atlantic voyage, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) will repeat the same journey—this time without any people onboard. The world’s first full-size autonomous ship will study uncharted regions of the ocean, and an AI Captain will be at the helm.

From Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, the crewless vessel will use explainable AI models to make accurate navigation decisions. The ship will collect live ocean data, delivering valuable research that can inform policies for climate change and marine conservation. Through IBM technologies, MAS makes all of this possible by advancing three areas vital to a successful mission: talent, trust, and data.

The future of the ocean is at stake

More than 3.5 billion people depend on the ocean as a primary source of food, and ocean-related travel makes up 90% of global trade. Since the 1980s, however, the ocean has absorbed 90% of the excess heat from global warming, endangering life both below and above the seas.

Protecting the ocean starts with understanding more data about its ecosystem, but this undertaking requires massive investment. MAS reduces the need for enormous resources in ocean research by using data and AI to augment human work (talent), navigate safely while meeting maritime regulations (trust), and fostering collaboration to develop actionable insights (data).

Talent: Saving time and costs for scientists

A typical ocean research expedition can take six weeks with as many as 100 scientists onboard. Only one week is often spent on actual research. The rest of the time entails traveling to and back from destinations and sometimes managing bad weather and rough seas.

“Traditional research missions can be very expensive, limited in where they can explore and take a long time to collect data,” says IBM researcher Rosie Lickorish, who spent time on RSS James Cook as part of her Master’s in oceanography.

MAS significantly cuts down time and costs for scientists. A solar-powered vessel, it travels independently to collect data in remote and dangerous regions of the ocean. Researchers back on land can download live data and images synced to the cloud, such as whale songs or ocean chemistry detected by an “electronic tongue” called HyperTaste.

“With AI-powered sensors onboard that can analyze data as it’s collected, scientists can access more meaningful insights at greater speed,” says Lickorish. “The cost of data for our experts is low, in time as well as money.”

Trust: Navigating accurately with explainable AI

A combination of technologies helps MAS travel with precision: a vision and radar system scans the ocean and delivers data at the edge; an operational decision manager (ODM) enforces collision regulations; a decision optimization engine recommends next best actions; and a “watch dog” system detects and fixes problems.

This entire system makes the AI Captain intelligent, allowing it to make trusted navigational decisions driven by explainable AI. Rules-based decision logics in ODM validate and correct the AI Captain’s actions. A log tracks exactly which initial conditions were fed into ODM, which path it took through the decision forest, and which outcome was reached. This makes debugging and analyzing the AI Captain’s behaviors vastly easier than the “black box” AI systems that are common today.

Safety and compliance are key. For example, decision optimization through CPLEX on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a unified data and AI platform, helps the ship decide what to do next. CPLEX considers constraints such as obstacles; their size, speed, and direction; weather; and how much power is left in batteries. It then suggests routes to ODM, which validates them or advises another course.

“ODM keeps the AI Captain honest and obeying the ‘rules of the road,’” says Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Distinguished Engineer and IBM Technical Lead for MAS.

Data: Fostering collaboration for better insights

Once the mission is complete, researchers will use IBM Cloud Pak for Data to store data, apply governance rules to enhance data quality, manage user access and analyze data for actionable insights.

Having all data managed by a unified platform can enable greater collaboration for various project teams across ten countries. In addition, organizations and universities around the world can partner with the research teams, forming a grassroots coalition to advance measures that curb pollution and climate change.

Source: ibm.com

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A new chapter in the IBM and Cloudera partnership

The amount of data collected by large enterprises is estimated to grow 10 times each year, and 90% of this data remains unused or underutilized. Managing these data sources across various siloes is time-consuming and costly. A lack of a cohesive governance strategy can lead to challenges in visibility, governance, portability and management that prevent enterprises from unlocking the business value of their data.

To help enterprises effectively manage their data needs, IBM entered a partnership with Cloudera almost a decade ago to expand our big data capabilities. In 2019, Cloudera merged with Hortonworks to pursue a hybrid cloud vision that further brought our companies together.

Today IBM is excited to announce a new chapter of our partnership with Cloudera that puts us in an even stronger position to help enterprises with their data and AI needs. We are strengthening our joint development and go-to-market programs to bring the advanced analytical capabilities of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a unified platform for data and AI, to Cloudera Data Platform. This new offering will enable use cases in data science, machine learning, business intelligence, and real-time analytics directly on data within Cloudera Data Platform. The integration brings Cloudera under the IBM data fabric, a hybrid, multicloud data architecture that helps businesses access the right data just in time at the optimum cost, with end-to-end governance, regardless of where the data is stored.

Introducing Cloudera Data Platform for IBM Cloud Pak for Data

As the name suggests, this offering combines Cloudera’s best-in-class data lake with the advanced analytical capabilities of IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides one of the most complete multi-function platforms in the market. Now, businesses can run edge, streaming, data engineering, ETL, data warehousing, data visualization, and machine learning use cases with a single offering.

CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides a fast path to modernize data platforms in place  without performing a costly architectural reimplementation and migration.

CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is hybrid and secure. It can run end-to-end anywhere with a full span of security and fine-grained enterprise-level governance that many other platforms can’t match. IBM’s state-of-the-art data fabric uses AI to automate complex data management tasks and universally discover, integrate, catalog, secure, and govern data across multiple environments.

Key features

◉ Separation of storage and compute — CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides a data fabric with secure access to data anywhere it resides, from ingest to governance and data engineering, serving advanced analytics and high-performance BI all on one platform.

◉ SQL analytics for all your data — By leveraging Big SQL as well as Hive and Impala, CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides warehouse-grade performance that exceeds the performance of alternatives in the market.

◉ Run data science at scale — Use Watson Studio and CDP to build, run, and manage AI models to a petabyte scale.

◉ Automated AI lifecycle management — CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data leverages the automation capabilities of IBM Watson Studio to speed up lifecycle of your critical data science projects.

◉ Streamline data engineering — Take advantage of Cloudera Streaming Analytics, such as Flink, Apache Kafka, and SQL Stream Builder, and integrate it with IBM technologies like DataStage to achieve full breadth data engineering

◉ Real-time reporting and BI — Data can be ingested in real-time with Flink and then displayed in IBM Cloud Pak for Data analytics dashboards.

◉ Automated governance and cataloging — Data and associated metadata discovered are automatically catalogued, and assets are generated, removing the need for manual metadata/DDL generation

◉ Open platform — Built on open systems and using non-proprietary data formats, the solution allows businesses to leverage data on any cloud.

In short, CDP for IBM Cloud Pak for Data:

1. Enables data science at scale

2. Provides a seamless single view of data with complete security and governance, without the need for data movement or replication

3. Merges stream and batch data sets for analytics and real-time dashboards.

Together these benefits protect your existing technology investments in Hadoop while unlocking the business value of your data.

Source: ibm.com

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Moving ML from “best guess” to best data-based decisions

IBM Causal Inference 360 Toolkit offers access to multiple tools that can move the decision-making processes from “best guess” to concrete answers based on data.

The application of machine learning (ML) models by data scientists has paved the way for our current era of big data. Such traditional ML models have become highly successful in predicting outcomes based on the data. For example, they're good at answering: “What is my likelihood of developing a specific health condition?”

ML models, however, are not designed to answer the question of what can be done to change that likelihood. This is the concept of causal inference. And until recently, there have been few tools available to help data scientists train and apply causal inference models, choose between the models, and determine which parameters to use.

At IBM Research, we wanted to change this. Enter the open source IBM Causal Inference 360 Toolkit. Released in 2019, the toolkit is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive suite of methods, all under one unified API, that aids data scientists in the application and understanding of causal inference in their models.

Today, we’re excited to unveil the latest in these efforts—a new, customized website for the Causal Inference Toolkit, complete with tutorials, background information, and multiple demos showcasing the package’s abilities in multiple domains, including healthcare, agriculture, and marketing in the financial and banking sectors. Concurrent with this new website, we’re also releasing a new version of the open-source Python library with additional functionalities.

What is causal inference?

All decision-making involves asking questions and trying to get the best answer possible. Take the question: “What happens if I eat eggs every day for breakfast?”

Depending on what is being measured and what additional factors are involved, the answer could vary widely. What if the people who tend to eat eggs for breakfast every morning are also people who work out every morning? Perhaps the difference that we see in the outcome is driven by the exercise and not by eating eggs.

This is called a confounding variable—affecting both the decision and the outcome. And that’s what causal inference tries to resolve. What is the answer to the question after controlling (as much as possible from the data) for the confounding variable?

Next, we try and account for how the outcome is influenced based on different parameters (e.g., how many eggs are eaten; what is eaten with the eggs; is the person overweight, and so on). We can also try and account for what we are looking for (e.g., are we interested in whether the person will gain weight, sleep better, eat less during the day, or lower their cholesterol).

In short, it might be easy to start off with one question that can be answered using data. But to get a reliable answer, we need to fine-tune the parameters involved, and the type of model being used.

Figure 1:

A schematic of the pipeline to guide model selection and cohort definition in causal inference. The pipeline involves an iterative process, in which a) the causal inference is defined and a data matrix is extracted; b) the causal method is chosen; c) the underlying machine learning models are chosen; and d) the model performance is evaluated. If the models perform well, the causal inference prediction can be drawn to estimate outcome and effect. Otherwise, the process needs to be reiterated following some modifications in steps a-c.

Help from the IBM Causal Inference 360 Toolkit

Causal inference consists of a set of methods that attempt to estimate the effect of some intervention on some outcome from observational data. With the IBM Causal Inference 360 Toolkit, individuals have access to multiple tools that can move their decision-making processes from a “best guess” scenario to concrete answers based on data.

The IBM Causality 360 library is an open-source Python library that utilizes ML models internally and, unlike most packages, allows users to seamlessly plug in almost any ML model they want. It also has methodologies for selecting the best ML models and their parameters based on ML paradigms like cross-validation, and using well-established and novel causal-specific metrics.

Figure 2:

Examples of graphical evaluations of causal inference models available in the Toolkit package. These can help data-scientists select better-performing models among several options or detect problems in the data.

IBM Causal Inference 360 in the real world

At IBM’s research lab in Haifa, Israel, we have been using the causal inference toolkit as part of our work on drug repurposing. Drug repurposing or repositioning is a method for finding new therapeutic uses for accepted drugs. Here, the question we searched for was: “What would happen if patient X took drug Y?”

The result? Discovery of two new potential treatments for dementia that typically accompanies Parkinson’s disease. More specifics on how the causal modeling in this research worked can be found in a blog from April of this year, by our colleague Michal Rosen-Zvi.

The team also used the toolkit in a collaboration with Assuta health services, the largest private network of hospitals in Israel, to analyze the impact of COVID on access to care. Specifically, the team analyzed more than 300,000 invitations sent to women for breast screening exams, with the focus on instances in which the women did not show up for their appointments.

The causal inference technology revealed that while at first glance it seemed the nonpharmaceutical interventions of the government resulted in the no-shows. In reality, it was the number of newly infected people that influenced whether or not the women showed up to their appointments.

In another example, we wanted to understand whether novel irrigation practices contribute to a desired reduction in pollution and nutrient runoff. To do this, we used a dataset where multiple aspects of the agricultural use of the land were captured, including its irrigation method, and the amount of runoff was measured.

What we saw was that the naïve data showed little effect. But, after using the causal inference toolkit to correct for the fact that the irrigation methods depend heavily on the type of land use and the type of crop, we showed that introducing these novel irrigation techniques does reduce runoff. It can save fertilization and water, and reduce pollution of the watershed. This reduction can be further quantified to estimate the tradeoff between savings and initial investment.

Source: ibm.com

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