IBM Think: 10 Biggest AI, Red Hat, Nvidia And GenAI Launches

From its new generative AI tool IBM Concert to new offerings with AWS, Nvidia, Microsoft and more, here are the 10 biggest product launches today at IBM Think 2024 in Boston.

IBM unleashed a slew of new products at IBM Think 2024 today—from its new generative AI tool IBM Concert to watsonx AI assistants, along with several new offerings with Nvidia, AWS and more.

“We firmly believe in bringing open innovation to AI,” said IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna today at the conference.

“We want to use the power of open source to do with AI what was successfully done with Linux and OpenShift,” said IBM’s CEO. “Open means choice. Open means more eyes on the code, more minds on the problems, and more hands on the solutions. For any technology to gain velocity and become ubiquitous, you’ve got to balance three things: competition, innovation, and safety. Open source is a great way to achieve all three.”

IBM Think 2024

Thousands of partners, customers and developers flocked to IBM Think 2024 in Boston to learn about IBM’s strategy, vision and new innovations.

The $62 billion Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant is striving to find new ways for partners to make money, collaborating with AI market leaders to increase open source and is launching new products to win over AI customers.

Several important launches at IBM Think 2024 include the release of its Granite models into open source, the launch of InstructLab in collaboration with Red Hat, and expanding ecosystem access to watsonx for AWS, Meta, SAP, Nvidia and others.

CRN takes a deep dive into the ten biggest new products launched at IBM Think 2024 today at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center that every IBM partner, customer and investor should know about.

IBM’s Unveils New GenAI Tool: IBM Concert

IBM is continuing to advance its automation portfolio by unveiling its new generative AI-powered tool called IBM Concert, that will serve as the “nerve center” of an enterprise’s IT operation, according to IBM.

Powered by AI from watsonx, IBM Concert will provide new generative AI-driven insights across clients’ portfolios of applications to identify, predict, and fix problems — helping them reduce risk and compliance processes.

The new tool integrates into clients’ existing systems, using generative AI to connect with data from their cloud infrastructure, source repositories, CI/CD pipelines and other existing observability solutions to build out a 360-degree view of their connected applications.

By allowing clients to eliminate unnecessary tasks and accelerate others, Concert is designed to make teams more informed so they can be fast and responsive in addressing issues and solving problems before they happen. Concert will initially focus on helping application owners and IT leaders gain insights about and more quickly address issues around cybersecurity risk management, compliance management, and certificate management.

IBM Concert will become generally available next month.

New watsonx AI Assistants

IBM unveiled new AI Assistants to help accelerate the deployment of AI solutions.

The new AI Assistants include: watsonx Code Assistant for Enterprise Java Applications; watsonx Assistant for Z to transform how users interact with the system to quickly transfer knowledge and expertise; as well as an expansion of watsonx Code Assistant for Z with code explanation to help clients understand and document applications through natural language explanation.

In terms of general availability: watsonx Code Assistant for Enterprise Java Applications is planned for October, while both watsonx Assistant for Z and watsonx Code Assistant for Z are set to be released in June.

IBM Granite Released

IBM has now open-sourced its most advanced and performant language and code Granite models.

By open sourcing these models, IBM said its inviting clients, developers and global experts to build on these strengths and push the boundaries of what AI can achieve in enterprise environments.

Available today under Apache 2.0 licenses on HuggingFace and Github, the open-source Granite models stand out for their development process, quality, and efficiency.

The Granite code models range from 3 billion to 34 billion parameters and come in both base and instruction-following model variants targeting use cases such as application modernization, code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, and maintaining repositories.

InstructLab Launch With Red Hat

IBM and Red Hat have co-launched InstructLab—a revolutionary approach to advancing true open-source innovation around LLMs.

With InstructLab, developers can build models specific to their business domains or industries with their own data, so that they can see the direct value of AI rather than just the model providers seeing the value.

IBM plans to harness these open-source contributions to bring additional value to its clients through integrations with watsonx.ai and the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) solution.

RHEL AI comprises an enterprise-ready version of the InstructLab, IBM’s open-source Granite models, and the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to simplify AI deployment across hybrid infrastructure environments.

Expanding Nvidia GPU Offerings

On the AI hardware front, IBM is expanding its Nvidia GPU offerings.

IBM’s offering with Nvidia now includes GPU L4 and L40s models, as well as support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) and OpenShift AI to help enterprises and developers address the needs of AI and other mission-critical workloads.

Additionally, IBM is using deployable architectures for watsonx to enable quick AI deployment. The goal is to help clients accelerate time to value for AI, while also empowering customers with security and compliance capabilities to help them protect their data.

IBM Boosts AWS Collaboration With Amazon SageMaker

IBM unveiled today that the company is partnering with AWS to bring together Amazon SageMaker and watsonx.governance on the AWS cloud.

The solution equips Amazon SageMaker clients with advanced AI governance capabilities for their predictive machine learning and generative AI models. Clients can now govern, monitor and manage their models across platforms, simplifying risk management and compliance processes for their AI operations.

Amazon SageMaker and watsonx.governance on the AWS is now available.

Furthermore, the entire watsonx platform is now available in the AWS Marketplace.

New Meta Llama 3 Partnership

On the large language model (LLMs) front, IBM unveiled the availability of Meta Llama 3 on watsonx today.

Meta Llama 3 is Meta’s newest open LLM that IBM aims to help customers innovate on.

The addition of Llama 3 builds on IBM's collaboration with Meta to advance open innovation for AI.

In 2023, the two companies launched the AI Alliance—a group of leading organizations across industry, startup, academia, research and government—which has grown to more than 100 members and collaborators.

Meta Llama 3 on watsonx is now available.

IBM Unveils New MSP Program For Partners

In terms of IBM partner news, IBM executives unveiled a new MSP program aimed at providing a set of MSP-ready offerings to IBM partners.

“We are doubling down on our commitment to the MSP community,” said Kate Woolley, general manager of IBM’s ecosystem, during IBM Think 2024. “MSPs have a unique opportunity in the market so to make it easier for them to work with us we will be launching an MSP program in the coming months.”

Woolley said the new MSP program is “specifically tailored and focused on a set of MSP-ready offerings from our automation portfolio to deliver differentiated value to MSPs.”

“As part of this [new program], our MSP partners can expect simplified on-boarding, resources and access to our benefits, all aligned to how they prefer to transact,” said Woolley.

The new MSP program is expected to officially launch in third quarter 2024.

Expanded IBM Rise With SAP Collaboration

IBM Consulting and SAP are launched a new collaboration aimed at finding ways to help more customers accelerate their cloud journeys leveraging RISE with SAP.

IBM’s RISE with SAP offering is a managed cloud service that helps organizations using on-premise ERP software to migrate to the cloud securely and smoothly. The goal is to get customers to achieve the transformative benefits of generative AI for business in the cloud.

The expanded partnership seeks to expand on IBM and SAP’s collaboration around embedding IBM Watson AI technology into SAP solutions.

As part of this initiative with SAP , the IBM Granite Model Series will be accessible for use across SAP's portfolio of cloud solutions and applications, which is underpinned by the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core.

Other IBM Collaboration News: Adobe, Mistral AI, Microsoft, Salesforce

IBM announced many new strategic partnership with other vendors including Mistral AI, Adobe, Microsoft and Salesforce.

IBM’s new partnership with Mistral AI brings its latest commercial models to the watsonx platform, including the leading Mistral Large model, which the company plans to make available soon. IBM said it looks forward to collaborating with Mistral AI on open innovation by building on both companies’ work in the open-source community.

On the Microsoft front, the IBM watsonx platform is now available to run on Microsoft Azure and to purchase through IBM and the Azure Marketplace.

IBM and Adobe are also collaborating on hybrid cloud and AI bringing Red Hat OpenShift and watsonx to Adobe Experience Platform. IBM is also introducing a new consulting service to advance client adoption of Adobe Express.

Finally, IBM and Salesforce will make IBM Granite model series available later this year for use across the Salesforce Einstein 1 platform, with the aim to provide clients access to more models to enhance decision making for AI CRM use case.