Innovation and synergy with IBM Storage for IBM Z and LinuxONE

In September 2019, IBM announced the IBM z15TM, designed to deliver strong enterprise capabilities with the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments and to scale from one to four frames. This week, IBM is once again pushing the envelope with the announcement of the new z15 Model T02 and LinuxONE III Model LT2.

And the innovation doesn’t stop there. IBM Storage prides itself on delivering value to our customers by creating strong synergies between IBM Z® and our number one storage systems for enterprise servers–IBM DS8900F all-flash arrays and the IBM TS7700 virtual tape solution.

These enterprise storage solutions offer a crucial advantage over other products in the marketplace–deep integration with IBM Z. The design teams within these market-leading IBM product lines share intellectual capital and synchronize new technology releases.

This advantage is certainly recognized by IBM Business Partners:

“As an IBM Business Partner with a strong commitment to IBM Storage, we’ve watched the recent surge in IBM Enterprise Server sales with great interest,” notes Rusell Schneider, Storage Director of Jeskell Systems, a long-time IBM Storage Business Partner. “Our customers understand that in mission-critical environments, IBM Storage solutions such as DS8900F and TS7700 offer many advantages. The integration among IBM Z and IBM Storage is deeper. Installations are easier. Performance and functionality are simply better. Innovation in integrating IBM Z with IBM Storage in multicloud environments offers our large data center users the flexibility, cost and scalability they want.”

The deep integration between IBM Enterprise Servers and IBM Storage means that the recent focus areas for IBM Z–cloud native, encryption, cyber resilience, and flexible compute–have been major directions of innovation for IBM DS8900F all-flash arrays and TS7700 virtual tape solutions as well. New storage capabilities in these domains demonstrate that IBM continues to invest in advancing IBM DS8900F and TS7700.

IBM Storage supports business transformation into a multicloud ecosystem through a series of innovations centered around Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT), Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform, IBM Cloud PaksTM and IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks, among others. IBM DS8900F and TS7700 TCT functionality enables hybrid multicloud as an extension of the primary storage for data archiving and disaster recovery. It also provides physical separations of systems to help customers prevent widespread corruption of data due to system failures, intentional or accidental human error, malware or ransomware attacks.

IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks is the software-defined storage infrastructure supporting IBM Cloud Paks. These solutions are designed to enable organizations to easily deploy modern enterprise software either on premises, in the cloud, or with pre-integrated systems. They also bring workloads to production by seamlessly leveraging Kubernetes as the management framework, supporting production-level qualities of service and end-to-end lifecycle management. This is designed to give clients an open, faster, more secure way to move core business applications for any cloud.

Then, to protect multicloud environments, IBM TS7700 virtual tape systems can now be used as both traditional backup and archive solutions or as object store repositories.

One of the most successful collaborations between IBM Storage and IBM Z has been the implementation of encrypting data everywhere. Both IBM DS8900F and TS7700 solutions offer security integration to extend IBM Z pervasive encryption to the storage by providing encryption of data at rest, in flight and in the cloud.  Additionally, when integrated with tape systems such as IBM TS4500, TS7770 solutions offer the ultimate physical air gap cyber security between data and online cyber threats.

Cyber resilience goes hand-in-hand with data protection. The modern enterprise demands that digital systems and assets be available 24/365. Part of the reason that IBM Z remains as popular as ever for business-critical workloads is due to its reputation for reliability. IBM DS8900F systems complement IBM Z resilience with multiple data replication, backup, and protection capabilities such as IBM HyperSwap and Safeguarded Copy technologies that result in 2 to 4 second recovery point objectives and better than seven nines overall system availability–that’s three seconds of downtime in a 365x7x24 year.

“Because information is now our most valuable business resource, data protection and cyber resilience have become our most important business tasks,” states Andreas Kirrstetter, Platform Manager Tape Infrastructure of IBM client Fiducia & GAD IT AG. “Part of the reason we use IBM Z is for their security and resilience. But this means that our storage and archiving systems must offer just as much security. This is why we’ve turned to IBM solutions such as TS7700 virtual tape libraries. They help us lower costs while allowing us to implement ‘air gaps’ for the ultimate data security. We see IBM TS7700 as the future of data archiving and protection.”

In addition to multicloud capabilities, encryption, and extraordinary cyber resilience, the IBM Z focus on flexible compute solutions means that the power of IBM Z is available for medium to large organizations, thanks to innovations such as the newly announced entry-level IBM z15 Model T02.

IBM Storage has innovated in step with this move toward greater flexibility and accessibility. The IBM DS8900F and TS7700 families both now offer smaller-footprint, lower-entry cost options: The entry-level DS8910F model has been available since last autumn and includes a smaller footprint with a rackless configuration that can be mounted in an industry standard 19-inch rack. This week, TS7700 is also announcing flexible configurations for organizations with different business needs. The same virtual tape capabilities are delivered as prepackaged racked solutions or rack mounted configurations with flexible deployments across client-supplied 19-inch industry standard racks. Enterprises starting with modest investments can surround them with the same deeply integrated, highly functional multicloud storage used by the largest organizations.

And innovation continues at a brisk pace; IBM TS7700 is working on a number of new features that will enhance cyber security, increase object store functionality and accelerate disaster recovery from the cloud.

“One of the significant advantages of IBM Z has always been its tight integration across hardware, operating systems/application software and storage.” states analyst Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting. “The new IBM z15 model T02 now brings those capabilities to medium and entry level businesses. So, these businesses can now enjoy the comprehensive data security, cyber resilience and multicloud capabilities as well as the sophisticated functionality of DS8900F AFA and TS7700 virtual tape library storage previously only available to high-end enterprise customers.”

IBM Storage works closely with the IBM Z and LinuxONE teams to synchronize our development and release of new technologies in order to give organizations the greatest benefits and advantages possible. This is the definition of synergy–when the team is greater than the individuals involved. And it’s exactly what IBM Storage gives our clients every day around the world.

Source: ibm.com

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Quickly start monitoring space by using your existing wireless network

Whether your workforce has shifted from corporate cubes to home based, or you offer essential services that require fully operational buildings, you need to know who is using your space, at any time, all the time. You need easy-to-access data to answer key questions: who is occupying my facilities and when? Are there opportunities to consolidate space? Should we reconfigure or repurpose existing space?

If you’re making critical space decisions with manually intensive work and less-than-perfect data, now you can harness your information, make informed decisions based on real-time occupancy insights, and react quickly to changing business demands.

A new partnership for space utilization insights

IBM TRIRIGA and Cisco have teamed up to give you the tools you need to deploy location sensing using your existing WiFi network infrastructure. This solution helps you scale quickly and get faster, more accurate occupancy insights, to enable you to reimagine and streamline your connected spaces.

Save on hardware costs with WiFi-enabled space insights

With this partnership, IBM TRIRIGA’s IoT and AI-driven insights application, IBM TRIRIGA Building Insights, now natively integrates with Cisco’s DNA Spaces cloud service. If you’re a space planner or manage facilities, you can quickly take advantage of these insights. With a lower cost to entry, you can understand how facilities are being used based on data coming in from an existing network.

“Cisco DNA Spaces is an industry leading indoor location platform that leverages Cisco’s WiFi access points to understand behavior of people and things in buildings,” says Rajesh Reddy, Head of Product, Cisco DNA Spaces. “Our partnership with IBM TRIRIGA creates a gold standard for enterprise workspace analytics and building insights.”

More value from your IWMS

This agreement means that you’ll also gain additional value from your TRIRIGA integrated workplace management system (IWMS). You’ll have the ability to assign the right spaces to the right organizations, establish chargeback allocations, and more.

With this new partnership, you’ll also have critical information that lets you optimize your space with:

◉ Pre-packaged business intelligence for space utilization, aggregated to floors and buildings, within locations managed from IBM TRIRIGA IWMS portfolio

◉ Predictive AI capabilities and machine learning to improve usability of occupancy trends and data

◉ The ability to monitor occupancy and utilization required to implement business continuity protocols and deploy resources as needed

Gain the visibility you need into your space

With true occupancy insights now in hand, you have the ability to make informed decisions about your space. You’ll be able to:

◉ Gain visibility from the location level down to a single floor, enabling you to react quickly to consolidation or new move requests

◉ Identify building occupancy trends and patterns to fine-tune your space strategy

◉ Ensure the right mix of spaces for your occupants and your business, and protect your investment in key talent

◉ Consolidate underutilized space, allowing you to control and reduce costs

Discover how to take more control of your space by attending our webinar

If you need to quickly address new occupancy demands, please attend  an IBM/Cisco webinar. Designed for space planners and facilities managers, we will explain how true occupancy insights enables you to make strategic space management decisions.

Join us May 13 for IBM TRIRIGA Academy to hear more from IBM and Cisco

Soon, we’re launching IBM TRIRIGA  Academy. This is a new virtual learning platform designed for real estate and facilities professionals who want to create a smarter business. Participate in our sessions, schedule a demo, and interact with subject matter experts.

Our keynote, Intelligent Facilities Management Today, Tomorrow and Beyond, focuses on how to stay agile and navigate effectively through any disruption that comes your way. Hear from the United States Air Force, IBM Global Real Estate and Cisco on what they’re doing to create resilient operations in their facilities, better understand their spaces for optimal utilization, and ensure resources are deployed when and where they’re needed most.

Make the smartest decisions with an intelligent real estate and facilities management solution

Space matters. It’s at the heart of your real estate strategy, informs time-sensitive decisions, helps safeguard occupant wellbeing, and is crucial for controlling costs. That’s why you need IBM TRIRIGA, an intelligent real estate and facilities management solution. Through the smart application of data, IoT and AI, TRIRIGA helps you harness essential information and insights, and enables you to reimagine and repurpose space to meet ever-changing needs across your connected facilities. It’s also a single source of truth for your entire portfolio, giving you greater visibility into key areas: space and facility utilization, operations and maintenance, occupant experience, capital projects, and lease administration and accounting. With TRIRIGA – backed by the data security and expertise that only IBM can provide – you can create a more resilient real estate portfolio, regardless of size, scale and configuration.

Source: ibm.com

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Eliminate supply chain disruptions with AI-powered playbooks

In the next four years, your supply chain organization has a 1 in 5 chance of experiencing a disruption that could result in related damages exceeding $120 million.

Organizations deal with business and supply chain disruptions on a daily basis. We get so used to dealing with these hiccups that sometimes we lose perspective of the very real dangers and costs that can arise. If small headaches aren’t tended to quickly, there is a real threat they can lead to a much bigger one.

There is often a disconnect or a gap between data (visibility) and action that can be a root cause of these headaches. While progress has been made in managing data and establishing visibility in recent years, that hasn’t translated into managing how knowledge is captured, shared, leveraged and put into action. So, how should you protect your organization and adapt to meet the challenges posed by modern supply chain disruptions?

Supply chain playbooks – what could be considered an “old-school” solution – are being updated for the digital era and already demonstrating that they can make teams significantly more effective in managing disruptions. These playbooks are trained in supply chain to capture and archive a company’s supply chain knowledge, learning from past events and resolutions over time.

Many supply chain organizations have some type of playbook, but digital playbooks can comprehensively capture organizational knowledge, pair it with real-time relevant data, and allow users to instantly and automatically access it to apply to current tasks and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

7 ways AI-powered digital playbooks can elevate your supply chain

How do best-in-class digital playbooks improve the traditional playbook process and help your organization better mitigate supply chain disruptions? Let’s dive in to these 7 areas:

1. Centralizing and digitizing best practices – Too often, knowledge capture of events, decisions and best practices used to handle specific disruptions are captured via paper-based, siloed processes. This leads to resources becoming quickly outdated or difficult to track down. With digital playbooks, the process is centralized and digitized – ensuring knowledge capture occurs in real time, with rapid access to critical information.

2. Defining and capturing execution steps digitally – In a traditional or manual system, the steps to handle an exception – such as a shipment delay – are often ‘lost in translation’ via email and personal conversations. With digital playbooks, the steps for managing specific exceptions are clearly defined and available across the organization. This leads to better compliance and adherence to best practices.

3. Updating and refining process with AI – Because execution steps are defined and captured in most organizations manually, these steps are often not kept up to date. As a result, steps may become obsolete. With digital playbooks, processes are updated and refined with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They can observe conversations about resolutions to capture actions and best practices in order to recommend updates to processes for the future. Designated supply chain professionals can then accept or edit those recommendations as required.

4. Continuously capturing tribal knowledge – In traditional supply chain playbook processes, ‘tribal,’ local or specialized group knowledge is often lost. Whereas with digital playbooks, there is no limit on knowledge capture. It is continually secured, readily accessible and can be leveraged for ongoing improvements.

5. Preserving every disruption resolution with AI – Rare scenarios and events are often not captured and documented in the manual supply chain playbook. However, digital playbooks with AI capture these effectively so that lessons learned are available for reference by supply chain teams in case similar events occur in the future.

6. Easily managing role changes – Different steps in a process are taken by certain subject matter experts (SMEs) and certain job roles. And the personnel, as well as their job roles or functions, often change. It is difficult and time-consuming to update playbooks as these shifts occur. Digital playbooks allow you to easily manage role changes and give personnel access to the right information to perform their jobs.

7. Easy updates with each system upgrade – As supply chain and operational systems change or are updated, it can impact execution steps. Organizations using manual playbooks have a difficult time keeping up with such system changes. Digital playbooks make it is easy to update the playbook as systems are upgraded.

Based on the real-world applications that we’ve seen, AI-powered digital playbooks that curate organizational knowledge and leverage smarter and quicker responses can drive up to 95% greater efficiency when tackling recurring supply chain disruptions. Arming your team with these modern tools enabled by, and made for, the digital era can help you create and empower a team of supply chain heroes.

Source: ibm.com

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Stay true to customer promises during times of uncertainty

Disruptions are nothing new, but today, supply chains are being stressed in multiple ways at the same time. Supply pressures, logistics limitations, dramatic demand mix changes, and overnight shifts from physical to online retail are just some of the challenges companies are facing. As a supply chain professional, how do you manage concurrent supply- and demand-side pressures, handle seismic shifts in fulfillment, adjust for the broader organization’s ability to execute, and still deliver on customer promises?

Managing through disruption will remain an important topic among supply chain leaders for years to come. Already we are seeing valuable lessons emerge as supply chains are tested to their limits and businesses innovate to push beyond. Here are some early observations and takeaways to help manage disruption today and get ahead of events in the future:

Intelligent, end-to-end visibility is the foundation. Companies are acting quickly. For example, pivoting supply out of affected areas into other lines of supply. However, if raw materials are still being produced in the impacted area, the ability to make enough finished goods is hampered. Intelligent, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain – into each source of supply and demand, including details on customers, orders and inventory – helps you identify potential pain points and develop effective contingency plans. 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.

Manufacturing giant Parker Hannifin Corporation rolled out a global order orchestration framework, enabling it to receive, ship and accept returned orders from anywhere. Tight integration with the company’s warehouse management environment ensures a seamless, end-to-end ordering process—from purchase to picking and fulfillment.

Overlay transparency and authenticity in communication with partners. As organizations navigate this digital disruption journey, they are looking for new ways to drive efficiencies and increase resilience, while maintaining trust and transparency with suppliers. Technologies like AI and blockchain can help deliver deeper levels of insight to further understand and mitigate points of impact and contention. For example, these insights can be applied to multiple process optimization and transparency across ecosystems, to discover and quickly connect with alternative sources they trust. In turn, companies are able to continue to meet customer expectations despite unprecedented obstacles, and more effectively balance costs and risks. Introducing flexibility in their trading approach with partners – adjusting payment dates, shipping terms, sales and returns policies, and more – fuels collaboration and keeps supply chains moving forward. Those that have reached far into their supply chain and have a partner-minded business can respond faster to an ever-changing world.

Plan for contingencies so you can still deliver value. Disruptions are inevitable. But getting your customers what they need – when and where they need it – has never been more critical. It is possible to manage through complexity and preserve business continuity, while leaning in to cost optimization. When physical storefronts are no longer a channel to fulfill customer demand, your online presence becomes an integral part of your business – not just for revenue, but meeting customer expectations. Companies that are bold in their business continuity planning are the ones thinking creatively in the face of multi-layered challenges. They adapt to the unimaginable and are prepared to make tradeoffs between costs and risks to maximize responsiveness and keep more customer promises.

Eileen Fisher built a central inventory, order-promising and fulfillment hub — enabling true omnichannel retail capabilities and differentiated customer experiences — allowing them to build a solid foundation to drive growth.

Massive disruption to the supply chain requires a range of approaches. As times of complexity continue, supply chain leaders will keep learning and refining what works to satisfy customer demand. Strong leadership – recognizing the severity and impact of disruption on people’s lives, making bold moves and standing up for your values as a brand – is what customers expect in whatever market you serve. And this, perhaps, is the most important commitment you can make right now.

Source: ibm.com

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Sustainable supply chains? No longer an oxymoron

The time when sourcing strategies had minimal impact on their bottom line has come to an end. Businesses are facing pressure to create more sustainable, transparent, and socially conscious supply chains. The drive for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), sustainability and more transparency is driven by both internal and external sources, and even non-profit and federal organizations. A recent study shares 6 in 10 consumers (57 percent) are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative impact to the environment. All of this points to an inescapable fact impacting modern retail: building a sustainable and transparent supply chain is no longer just a strategy – it’s a necessity.

What is supply chain sustainability?

In a recent interview with Dr. Alexis Bateman, Research Scientist and Director of MIT Sustainable Supply Chains at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL), she explains, “The reality of supply chain sustainability is to understand that you are quantifying your impact and critically tracking progress over time, leading to a goal that’s relative to your impact as an organization and also relative to the entire supply chain. In sum, the key to becoming a more sustainable supply chain is to recognize your impact and make persistent, measurable change.”

Fortunately, taking steps toward supply chain sustainability and transparency can have a measurable impact on retailers’ ROI and sales.

Supply chain transparency is the new gold standard

Consumers are willing to pay between 2 to 10 percent more for products from companies that are transparent about their supply chain process. This number is growing as Generation Z consumers make more purchasing decisions. In response to this shift, retailers’ investments in responsible supply chains will grow to $889 million by 2023 as government organizations, employees, and consumers band together to urge retailers to be more transparent about their supply chain practices.

Most companies are starting to rank their supply chain practices on a public sustainability scorecard that addresses categories such as where they are in terms of CSR, where they want to be, and the steps they will take to improve their ecological footprint. Target is a great example of a company that excels at holding themselves accountable. The company releases a sustainability report each year in accordance with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. Target also publicly shares its progress towards evolving CSR metrics, showing a level of corporate accountability and transparency rarely seen from retailers – and helping to make Target one of Motley Fool’s favored retail stocks for 2020.

Next-gen consumers demand sustainable supply chains

For Gen Z, a brand’s ethos is the most important characteristic and 58 percent of the demographic says that “a brand’s purpose, values and mission” are the number one factor they consider before making a purchase. Millennials rank brand ethos as the third most important factor in their purchasing decisions. In response to next-gen consumers’ desire for a more sustainable production process, retailers in fashion are using more sustainable raw materials, and even fast-fashion retailers such as ASOS and H&M are making a shift towards recycled materials.

But this isn’t the only strategy modern retailers are using to cater to consumer demand. When challenged to think of ways to create a more sustainable production process, retailers should first take a look at their suppliers. New developments in supply chain technology are enabling retailers to create a more intelligent and sustainable production process from product inception through sourcing and production to delivery. As consumer tastes and demands change, retailers often must identify ethical suppliers in real-time, as well as make adjustments as they occur. This is an important feature to have in a time when overseas trade relationships with countries which are major manufacturing hubs – such as China, Europe, and South Korea – can be nebulous.

Reduce waste by swiftly remarketing returned products

As more customers opt to make online and mobile purchases, the processing of returns continues to be challenging. At this point, returns cost retailers $309 billion annually. But this is also an environmental issue; there is transportation impact and 5 billion pounds of returned goods go to landfills each year in the U.S. alone. The reverse logistics industry is expanding in tandem with e-commerce sales as retailers look for solutions to reduce waste and mitigate the expense of online returns. Deloitte reports, “With e-commerce revenues growing 15 percent annually and a product return rate near 30 percent of sales, we can expect 4 billion incremental units to be added to the annual reverse logistics pipeline by 2022.”

It’s never been more important for retailers to take initiative to create a transparent and sustainable supply chain. Retailers can reduce waste by reintroducing returned goods back into their supply chain faster before they have to reduce margins on products or send them to landfill. By adopting a supply chain optimization platform that’s capable of performing reverse logistics, retailers can accelerate the process of return sorting and product re-merchandising. In turn, this will reduce waste by getting returned inventory ready for the selling floor in less time.

Source: ibm.com

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How to be a file transfer hero

“Visibility” is a term that gets tossed around a lot today, but what does it mean in terms of file transfers?

If your organization is like most, your B2B integration and managed file transfer environment is a mix of legacy and modern applications that you have masterfully architected to support your business needs. However, what happens when you get a call asking about the status of a file especially when it didn’t arrive when scheduled? Chances are, you don’t have the visibility you need to provide quick and accurate answers. So, you drop whatever high priority task you’re working on, to piece together information to respond.

Enough with the invisible heroics! What if you were able to monitor all file transfer activity and processes in one place, regardless of the solution you’re using – Axway, Globalscape, IBM, or something else?

IBM Sterling Control Center lets you gain visibility, monitoring, analytics, and governance across your entire environment. Here are just a few of the ways the solution brings peace of mind and confidence, providing the information you need quickly:

1. Enable self-service monitoring for every type of user.

“Service Level Configuration” allows power users to set up rules and alerts to better meet SLAs and monitor system health. With detailed visibility, you know right away if a file has been delivered or not – and why – so you can take action to meet commitments. The “Monitor this” feature allows business users and less technical users to select the file transfer they’re curious about and the specific activity to monitor, for example, “missed start time” or “missed end time.” They can point and click to set up notifications and rules in the same window and customize how they would like to be alerted – email, text, or both. This self-service capability saves everyone significant time – business users get the information they need when they need it, and power users spend less time responding to queries and more time on higher-level tasks.

2. Integrate with other applications using RESTful APIs and automate processes.

Our IBM Sterling Control Center RESTful APIs have read and read/write capabilities making it easy to import/export data easily and automate and direct action with other complementary applications. For example, some of our clients have internal reporting systems that aggregate data across their environment. To complete a specific weekly report, they need a subset of data from Sterling Control Center. Instead of manually finding and adding that data into their reporting system, they use an API to extract that data automatically as part of their workflow. Alternatively, think about a use case where you have a system that alerts if a node goes down or a critical SLA doesn’t get met. You can use APIs to receive those alerts directly into Sterling Control Center, saving you time and many headaches.

3. Monitor any event, from anywhere—IBM, third-party, or homegrown applications.

You can track, monitor, and analyze anything you want within Sterling Control Center—homegrown applications, third-party applications, an FTP server, as well as other non-IBM managed file transfer and B2B integration solutions. A consolidated view gives you the ability to monitor all your activity from a single screen and import/export data for specific analysis or reporting.

4. Generate and share scheduled reports weekly.

Save valuable time and automate your reports to management by scheduling and running built-in, weekly reports. You can keep everyone up to date with current activity without any manual effort!

Source: ibm.com

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3 ways AI can help solve inventory management challenges

Growing businesses have various sources of inventory that require receiving and sharing their ‘available-to-promise’ picture in real-time. As such, inventory management has become increasingly complex due to accessing information on a global scale. According to Forrester, omnichannel fulfillment is a high or top priority for 94% of retailers. To effectively manage costs and buyer needs, companies must address the basic issue of tracking quantities of supply and demand at both physical locations and ecommerce sites to ensure that the inventory pictures are in sync. Ultimately, this a much larger network than what traditional inventory management systems were designed to track and manage.

Identify the inventory pain points

It’s no longer just a B2C world where one seller is engaged with multiple customers. Instead, we’re seeing a B2B world amongst the broader supply chain where multiple inventory organizations need to share or connect inventory pictures with an intuitive, seamless user experience for configuration and modification. Sharing and receiving available-to-promise inventory with, and from, specific suppliers requires access control to reduce lead times and gain multi-enterprise visibility into each source of demand and supply.

As external partners read data from an inventory database, they need to understand how much of their inventory is still at the retailer so they can better plan their production. With accurate insights, they can use data to predict propensity to buy. This critical information supplements forecasts for future inventory needs based on historical sales, contextual information, and promotional plans. It allows key leads to plan inventory purchases from suppliers based on forecasts from demand planners and changing supply and demand. The top goal of planning inventory replenishment is having enough inventory to fulfill all customer orders, while minimizing excess stock on hand. Retailers can harness this information to understand how much inventory is needed to increase incremental sales opportunities.

Accuracy is equally important. When an organization runs a national marketing campaign, not having enough inventory safety stock can directly impact revenue, customer experience and even brand reputation. At the highest level, a control tower can help ensure the accuracy of, and provide visibility into, the performance of inventory across various channels, marketplaces, and sellers. This helps identify any anomalies (low performance) or issues (delayed supply, low inventory) that course correction can proactively adjust rather than react too late.

Although architecture to connect various solutions is an initial pressing issue for most companies, there’s a clear need to interact with inventory from a business standpoint in three ways. First, addressing the problem of having inaccurate or hidden information (clear visibility) since users need to constantly monitor supply, demand and inventory levels to identify potential inventory shortages and stale inventory. Second is being able to take action in real-time – saying ‘yes’ to the sale. Finally, applying AI insights to create inventory optimization and remove manual processes.

How AI helps optimize inventory management

1. Planning inventory replenishment – Fulfillment forecasting is particularly challenging in predicting demand — even more than supply. In order to predict allocation, data science is acritical application towards historical supply and demand because there are uncertainties and anomalies associated with each data set. Anomalies come from both supply and demand data since there will be unexpected fluctuations in each. This customer-behavior-centric model needs to consider not just where, but how and when, people want to receive their products.

By applying AI, inventory management solutions can improve store inventory levels by analyzing consumer fulfillment choices and shopping behaviors.

2. Estimated time to arrival – Knowing the quantity and location of available-to-promise inventory and where it resides is critical for businesses to meet and exceed customer expectations. Being able to communicate to customers the estimated time a product will arrive is increasingly valuable and necessary in this highly competitive age, with businesses like Amazon that can offer guaranteed delivery windows. There are countless inputs to improve the accuracy of these models and retailers must be able to simulate and drill into how each calculation was reached. This will help to ensure each fulfillment decision is aligned with the business’ priorities, whether it is cost or time.

3. Safety stock management – Businesses historically set a static quantity or percentage for their inventory levels. This means defining a minimum par that is reserved for walk-in sales and is not factored into e-commerce or other channels of fulfillment. With today’s ever-evolving consumer expectations, on top of omni-channel engagements, it is no longer enough to use generalized information. Stock levels need to dynamically shift to leverage and react to incoming demand. With automated re-balancing, tarnished brand loyalty from promising inventory to customers that cannot be delivered, or fear of overselling then over-purchasing inventory and leaving money on the table are two huge problems that can be tackled. Companies like REI use predictive rules to access in-store and warehouse inventory, going beyond linear, rules-based sourcing to meet seasonal customer and margin needs.

To achieve profitable omni-channel results, retailers need capabilities that can intelligently balance fulfillment costs against service to enhance return on investment, improve customer experience and increase repeat purchase behavior.

Source: ibm.com

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Don’t let cloud exuberance stop other IT infrastructure investments

Cloud computing is a growing component of modern IT infrastructure and it will continue to grow into the foreseeable future… but on-premises computing is not going away. Nor should it!

There are many reasons to continue to embrace and even expand your existing on-premises workloads. Compliance, latency requirements, security and data protection, cost issues, and productivity (among others) are all valid reasons to run computing workloads on premises instead of shifting to the cloud.

IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate how organizations develop and implement their IT infrastructure strategies. The results were published recently in a study titled The Key to Enterprise Hybrid Multicloud Strategy. And this study clearly backs up the premise of this blog post, that the future is hybrid and not everything will migrate to the cloud.

Indeed, one of the key findings of the study is that the push to public cloud doesn’t mean organizations have stopped investing in on premises. Organizations are increasing their funding for on-premises infrastructure at about the same rate as they are increasing cloud funding. While 82 percent of organizations are planning to increase spending on public cloud, 85 percent are planning to increase spending on existing infrastructure, outside of public cloud.

To me, this is not surprising. Given that many of the applications running on your on-premises IT infrastructure are running your business (that is, they are mission critical), it stands to reason that organizations should want to keep them maintained, operational, and efficient. And that requires investment.

We must never forget that the benefit of the applications that run on premises is substantial. These on-premises applications were built over time, perhaps over many decades, and they embody your core business processes. A pragmatic approach means that your existing enterprise applications must not only be maintained, but perhaps bolstered and improved. This is especially so because many of these applications are being used more heavily than ever before as organizations embrace digital transformation, analytical processing and mobile computing.

If you cease to invest in your existing software and hardware that runs your critical applications, it should be no surprise when they stop working efficiently or stop working altogether. Investing in the updates and refreshes required to keep your IT infrastructure operational is important, but unfortunately updates and refreshes tend to be the first thing that fall off the agenda when time/budget is a restriction. It is the silent risk that nobody is talking about.

Isn’t everything going to the cloud?

But what about the industry predictions that everything will be moving to the cloud? This is another example of tech industry over-exuberance. Whenever I hear an absolute term like “everything” I immediately doubt its veracity. Let me put it bluntly: everything will not be moving to the cloud. The cost and effort to do so would not deliver a reasonable return on the investment. There are two primary reasons why this is so:

◉ The majority of existing applications were not built with an understanding of the public cloud and it would take a lot of investment to re-engineer them to properly take advantage of a public cloud architecture.

◉ Even if demand is high, cloud service providers (CSPs) can’t build out their infrastructure fast enough to support all the existing data center capacity “out there” to immediately support everything.

Finally, there are scenarios that do not fit well in public cloud, perhaps in terms of pricing structure or compliance requirements.

The bottom line

The future is hybrid… namely, hybrid multicloud. I’ve written about hybrid multicloud here on the IBM IT Infrastructure blog before, so if that term confuses you be sure to click over and read my definition.

On-premises computing has its place in today’s IT infrastructure and it undoubtedly will in the future. As will, of course, public and private cloud. The bottom line is, and should always be, that you utilize the appropriate platform and technology for the task at hand. And many times, that will mean running applications on your IT infrastructure on premises.

Don’t let cloud obsession curtail your other IT infrastructure investments!

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Address customer data privacy and protection concerns with encryption everywhere

Data privacy and protection remain top boardroom and C-suite issues. The data breach threat still looms large: 59 percent of businesses experienced a data breach caused by a vendor or third party in 2018. As organizations migrate workloads to hybrid multicloud environments, they must ensure that the data within these environments is effectively protected.

Consumers have grown more concerned with the privacy of their data — as have regulators. In 2019, many fines were levied related to GDPR and U.S. Federal Trade Commission regulations. High-profile corporate data breaches and misuses have increased consumer scrutiny of how corporations use and share their data. A new IBM and The Harris Poll study found that almost all consumer respondents (94 percent) agree that businesses should do more to protect their privacy.

These trends, along with recent regulations such as the EU GDPR, the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act, and Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act, indicate that the pendulum is swinging toward more privacy and protection of personal data.

In addition to protection, your customers now expect privacy and control of their data. How can you deliver this?

Expand data privacy and protection

Until now, in my experience, both organizations and solutions have typically focused on protecting data at the aggregate level — within entire databases or applications. Existing data-protection solutions tend to be siloed and focus on protecting only data within the IT infrastructure. But data does not stay in one place: it needs to move. The need to manage privacy across multiple disjointed solutions makes enforcing the appropriate use of data (data privacy) across an organization complex.

Pervasive encryption helps prevent data misuse from data breaches across your enterprise and keeps data within your direct control. Even if hackers breach the data, they would likely not be able to access it because it is encrypted.

Maintain privacy with IBM Data Privacy Passports

Pervasive encryption lets you encrypt all enterprise data, keeping it secured within your on-premises environment. But what about when the data leaves this environment? What about data on other platforms?

Much of your customers’ data lives in the public cloud and is shared with your business partners. Your customers want this data private and easy to control, yet instantly accessible. Consumer mandates for data privacy and protection wherever their data lives require the extension of enterprise-level security beyond your data center’s on-premises architecture. This requires data-centric audit and protection (DCAP): protecting information at the data level rather than broadly at the IT infrastructure level. Think of this level of protection as having encryption everywhere.

Introducing IBM Data Privacy Passports, exclusively for IBM z15™

IBM Data Privacy Passports, a leading-edge DCAP solution available in beta on the new IBM z15, empowers you to  build customer trust by keeping data private and secured wherever it goes.

With Data Privacy Passports, you control how data is shared and accessed. Now you can protect and provision data while revoking access to that data at any time, regardless of where the data is located. Data Privacy Passports extends encryption everywhere, enforcing data privacy by policy even when the data leaves your data center and extending IBM Z enterprise-class protection to data from other sources. It enables you to enforce the appropriate use of data across private, public and hybrid clouds at the data level. It does this all without impacting system performance.

A simple example demonstrates how Data Privacy Passports creates strong data privacy and protection for your customers. Consider an international bank that does business with a financial technology company. The bank sets rules governing the company’s use of the bank’s customer data through agreed-upon terms and conditions. Using Data Privacy Passports, it can enforce these rules and limit or revoke access to data as appropriate.

Keep data protected and private

Here’s a closer look at how Data Privacy Passports keeps data private and secured while simplifying compliance and data management.

◉ Protect data wherever it goes. Data does not stay in one place and typical solutions are often fragmented or siloed. Data Privacy Passports addresses this by introducing Trusted Data Objects (TDO), which provide data-centric protection that moves with the data–even with unauthorized copies.

◉ Ensure privacy with controlled data usage. Data Privacy Passports is designed to establish and enforce an enterprise-wide data privacy policy where different views of data are surfaced to different users based on their need to know. TDO technology can also be used to prevent collusion between data owners to use data inappropriately. It does this by breaking the referential integrity between data tables with different owners or limiting that connection based on policy.

◉ Track provenance and consumption of data. Track the data from point of origin to point of consumption, with a central point of auditing information for data access and aggregation for your compliance obligations. End-to-end tracking is achieved by encrypting the data as a Trusted Data Object, so it does not need to be tracked throughout its journey but only when opened with a passport controller. If a user whose access you have revoked tries to access the data through the passport controller, it fails and that fail is logged.

◉ Simplify data management with Embedded Key Management. Data Privacy Passports provides all required key management for TDOs created and distributed throughout your enterprise and beyond. This greatly reduces the complexity of implementing the solutions and provides simple management of data as it moves between systems and across hybrid multiclouds.

Source: ibm.com

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Supercharge your next tech project with virtual co-creation

You know your business inside and out. You’re aware of its IT needs and challenges, and you want to take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies. Perhaps you’re looking to get supercharged on the latest tech trends and see how to employ them in your organization. What if your IT team could join forces with infrastructure specialists to co-create enterprise-scale solutions quickly?

Co-creation is the concept of generating shared business value through partnership between a company and its customers. It can be used to brainstorm new products or services, solve problems or boost performance. In the IT industry, businesses might co-create IT solutions by working together to identify potential projects, define their scope and chart a plan for implementing them.

Co-creating with IT infrastructure experts

The IBM Systems Co-Creation Lab provides a collaborative environment where you and IBM IT infrastructure experts work side-by-side to create first-of-a-kind strategies and solutions. IT architects from around the world design and develop applications with you in technologies like hybrid multicloud and AI.

Co-creation workshops with IBM have helped organizations across industries to quickly innovate IT solutions:

◉ A major apparel retailer used co-creation to explore a new AI application for fashion recommendations with AI vision capabilities.

◉ A financial services company pursued a co-creation approach to help modernize its storage infrastructure for greater cyber resiliency after an outage impacted its business.

◉ A large bank used co-creation to discover how cloud and AI could help it address regulatory and resiliency issues, enhance its mobile platform and expand retail operations.

Co-creation workshops led by IBM Systems Worldwide Client Experience Centers can be hosted at your location, IBM Business Partner sites, IBM locations around the world or virtually. Virtual workshops, such as our 90-minute virtual Discovery workshop, have successfully helped businesses quickly explore and launch new IT solutions.

Technology focus areas for our co-creation workshops include:

◉ Infrastructure modernization

◉ AI, machine learning and deep learning

◉ Hybrid multicloud and Red Hat

◉ Enterprise security

◉ Storage

◉ Analytics

◉ Blockchain

Working in one or more of these technology areas, you can choose from four types of co-creation workshops, depending on where you are in your IT project.

The Co-Creation Lab workshops

Discovery workshop

A discovery workshop is an opportunity for CIOs and other business executives to work with IBM infrastructure experts to identify market opportunities, discuss their business challenges and brainstorm use cases for potential technologies. This workshop can help you gain deeper insight into your infrastructure and find innovative ways to grow your business by working smarter and faster. A no-cost discovery workshop is a multi-hour event, and you’ll come away with a report identifying the results of the co-creation discovery process.

Design Thinking workshop

Enterprise Design Thinking methodologies help teams learn how to focus their work around users’ needs. A Design Thinking workshop is an opportunity for various stakeholders across a business to align on a business opportunity and use case. Using tools like storyboarding, empathy mapping and retrospectives, this multi-day workshop helps you evaluate current business and IT processes and define the minimum viable product (MVP) for a solution your organization wants to put in place.

Architectural consulting

In an architectural consultation, you work with an IBM Systems Co-Creation Lab architect to determine the design and scope of your project, and to validate a use case with stakeholders. This workshop brings together your knowledge of your IT strategy, users and ecosystem with an IBM architect’s leadership and guidance on architecture design for your project.

MVP build

When you’re ready to develop a functioning solution, an MVP build gives your development team the opportunity to work with agile experts from IBM Client Experience Centers who can help you learn fast, test hypotheses and iterate quickly as you build and deploy your MVP. Your developers and IBM developers work side-by-side to build and deploy the solution. Employing agile and DevOps practices encourages rapid, iterative user feedback, test-driven development, continuous integration and delivery.

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