IBM VP On Power11 Release: ‘It’s More Tools In Our Partners’ Belts’

‘We are not going to be successful driving adoption, sales of any of these things without our ecosystem of partners—the service partners, the MSPs, pretty much the entire constituency,’ says Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM vice president of product management for Power.

IBM will incorporate its Spyre Accelerator in future Power products—including its Power11 system releasing next year—and plans a code assistant for the Report Program Generator (RPG) language used with its i operating system as part of a series of advancements solution providers can bring to customers.

Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM vice president of product management for Power, told CRN in an interview that services partners will serve an important role in upgrading customers from Power10 and bringing other 2025 releases to market.

“We are not going to be successful driving adoption, sales of any of these things without our ecosystem of partners—the service partners, the MSPs, pretty much the entire constituency,” he said. “It’s more tools in our partners’ belts to go have that conversation—either around fit-for- purpose AI, if you will, where customers can get going quickly, simply with the platform that they trust and know. And now also can start with a modernization discussion where the entry point is a simple, ‘Hey, let me help you explain and manage your code.’ But it can certainly expand more value creation and value capture opportunities for the channel.”

IBM Power11 in 2025

Spyre Accelerator brings scalable capabilities for complex AI models and generative AI use cases, according to Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM. It has 32 individual accelerator cores on board and a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card. The chip sends data from one compute engine to the next and uses lower precision numerical formats to better use energy and memory.

The code assistant for RPG will leverage GenAI to help i software developers understand existing code, create new RPG functions with a description in plain English and automatically generate test cases.

Code assistant should save IBM customers from the expense, performance degradation and risk of refactoring RPG-based applications into Java and other languages, according to the vendor.

“The goal of this for our clients, for ourselves, is not just to increase the productivity of existing RPG developers, but equally important, if not more importantly, enable that next generation of talent and developers who have little skill coming up, get up to speed and be productive super quickly,” Balakrishnan said. “It is around things like code explanation—explain my massive decades of code—help me generate new freeform RPG code. Help me generate test scripts so that I can make the testing function enterprise-ready, as well as modernize my old fixed-format RPG code to freeform, more modernized versions of the RPG code base.”

As for the next iteration of Power processor, Balakrishnan encouraged partners to look to gain more wallet share from the existing install base.

Power continues to be the leading platform for SAP HANA and other ERP deployments, core banking deployments, Oracle and other commercial database deployments and other mission- critical use cases, Balakrishnan said. Adding as-a-service adoption for customers and using OpenShift from IBM subsidiary Red Hat for modernization are some growing areas of new business with users.

The shift in IT spend to AI-driven projects makes the technology “the entry point to a lot of infrastructure decisions these days,” he said. “Entering and participating in that conversation doesn’t mean selling something AI, but it does mean showing a future-proof platform that can do something today and protect your investment tomorrow for certain use cases and workloads.”

It’s also not too early to talk to customers about IBM’s quantum-safe approach with Power. In fact, on Wednesday, during its inaugural Quantum Developer Conference in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., IBM revealed that its researchers have delivered a quantum computer capable of running quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations powered by the second revision of the IBM Quantum Heron.

“[It’s] important for service providers to play a big role in helping clients on that journey,” he said.

Other compelling AI use cases with Power include fraud detection, anomaly detection and supply chain optimization. But partners can bring generative AI to traditional AI use cases, such as adding summary generation to summarize log data for anomaly detection.

Giving an example of hybrid cloud and AI coming together to solve a customer’s problem—as well as how IBM developing chips doesn’t necessarily create competition with other vendors—he said a large hospital in Asia that works on cancer detection in patients used Nvidia products for training and Power for inference and deployment.

“This is about infusing AI everywhere. It’s not about one and only one use case,” he said. “We are seeing increased demand more and more [for hybrid solutions] simply because of data sovereignty, supply considerations. And I think the world is quickly realizing it is fit for purpose. It is hybrid in nature. That trend is here to stay.”