IBM has announced plans to deliver 20 new cloud-based business solutions that can be personalized to support a client's unique business requirements. The offerings combine the scale, speed and ease of cloud with the industry insight of IBM consulting services to address specific industry verticals and business functions such as mobile, asset management, and analytics.
Today's announcement builds on IBM's significant investments in cloud computing. Called IBM Cloud Business Solutions, the portfolio includes multiple components packaged into a single client agreement and delivered "as a service" for speed and simplicity. This includes consulting services, pre-built assets from IBM Research, software, advanced analytics, ongoing support and cloud infrastructure delivered via Softlayer, an IBM company. Pricing is based on a subscription model. Clients pay a set-up fee up front, and then ongoing subscription or usage-based fees.
This approach recognizes the mandate for speed and time to value, along with the requirement of clients topersonalize business solutions to their own processes and deploy them via the cloud.For example, a healthcare provider could start by moving their existing solutions to the cloud and then addpre-built IBM assets to counter medical fraudor address a range of additional business priorities. The solution would then be customized with consulting services and support aimed at transforming their business, thus establishing a competitive advantage.
"Our clients view cloud as the catalyst for entirely new business models, not just technology innovation. The decision to use cloud to support business priorities is being strongly influenced — if not entirely determined — by leaders across the C-Suite," said Kelly Chambliss, chief technology officer, IBM Global Business Services. "IBM Cloud Business Solutions represent the next evolution in high-value business services, in line with the expectations and priorities of our clients. We're providing access to the best IBM has to offer — from cloud to data analytics — as a simple, accessible and customizable service."
TP Vision, which manufactures the Philips TV brand, uses IBM's Customer Data Cloud Business Solution to deliver a personalized consumer experience and manage its smart TV service, capturing and analyzing data in order to fuel the development of new services. Smart TVs have changed the business landscape for both the manufacturer and service provider by offering direct interaction with consumers. TP Vision uses a cloud-based environment to manage and collect data from these interactions. By being able to quickly analyze it, the company can constantly update the personalized user home screen for the customer, personalizing every interaction.
"IBM's Cloud Business Solutions allow us to place the service and application intelligence into the cloud and reduces the complexity of managing software in the TVs for our consumers," said Albert Mombarg, director Smart TV, TP Vision. "This provides an economic, more flexible way to create new services for our viewers, driving ongoing business innovation. The user experience is constantly fine tuned and upgraded in the cloud, eliminating the need to continually update the actual TV set to accommodate new applications and services. This helps reduce costs for both the consumer and the manufacturer."
IBM will initially offer 12 solutions, with plans to bring at least20 industry-focused solutions to market this year. Many of the solutions come with deep analytics prowess from industry-tested assets developed by IBM Research. Each solution includes multiple, industry-specific versions to adapt with ease to variances across industries, while leveraging common cross-industry patterns. The first Cloud Business Solutions include:
Care Coordination – With a goal of improving patient outcomes while reducing healthcare costs, this solution enables different stakeholders in a healthcare ecosystem to collaborate across the continuum of care. It integrates the capabilities of care coordination, management, analytics and patient engagement.
Customer Data – To help clients gain insights and apply them rapidly to business processes, this solution brings together disparate, internal and external data sources to improve marketing operations and planning performance across all channels. By leveraging analytics, clients maximize marketing return on investment.
Mobile – Mobile initiatives increasingly span enterprises and spur business transformation. This suite of solutions for industries such as banking, retail, healthcare, insurance and travel and transportation provides clients the assets and agility needed to re-imagine and define mobile engagement models with employees, customers and partners. It includes mobile accelerators, mobile designs and development models that support an agile, iterative development process.
Predictive Maintenance – A lack of visibility into equipment health and inability to accurately forecast downtime results in expensive, unscheduled maintenance. The Predictive Maintenance solution enables a proactive analysis process using equipment and application data to plan, monitor, manage and mitigate equipment failures.
Smarter Asset Management - Asset management is critical to business operations, but not an area in which business leaders want to invest significant capital. Smarter Asset Management provides clients with minimal resources and low capital investment, optimized for maximum performance.
This article was originally posted “IBM Introduces Customizable Cloud Business Solutions” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.