Ushering in the Future of the World: The Synergy between Tech Mahindra and IBM

An era of rapidly changing technology, fuelled by the recent advances in generative AI, is redefining businesses across the globe. The digitalisation wave has brought artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and generation, analytics, big data into the foray; making it more possible for the machines to emulate humans and in turn, do most things exceptionally well.  At its peak, we expect the traditional operations to be replaced with operations driven by speech recognition, natural language generation, artificial intelligence, and secured by quantum. There will be new key roles emerging in facilitating machine learning (helping machines become intelligent) and analytics.

In fact, this has a major impact on how we view digital – the new way of creating services as well as consuming and servicing them—which is dramatically changing the traditional customer supplier equation and is driven by the evolving technologies that offer a new lifestyle and insights.

The era of the customer reaching out to the product is gone. Now it is the service that must seek out the customer and that too through peer influence. The word ‘convenience’ has assumed an all-important role in not just discovering a service but also in delivering and managing.  Product lifecycles have become short placing a very high demand on the traditional ways of creating and delivering products. Often, the very nature of time required to release a product makes it either obsolete or unable to deliver the intended return on investment (ROI). 

Organizations now must work together combining their strength and serve this dynamic world. The Synergy Lounge in Singapore between Tech Mahindra and IBM reflects that ideology.

CATAPULTING STRENGTHS

It would be an amiss by not stating that this Synergy Lounge primarily brings in two of the most unique organizations— those which have collaborated in the past, and those who have created magic before. It gives me double the joy, being an ex-IBMer and a current TechMighty, when I see these two entities working together in tackling key challenges.

IBM as an organization comes with the following strengths:

• IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise.
• It helps clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on its hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely.
• Nearly 97% of banks worldwide use IBM products. That’s its reach, even in the security domain where IBM monitors 70 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries.
• Today IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to their clients.
• It is a pioneer in quantum computing and its hardware and Qiskit software is now being used for both educational and prototypes all over the world. IBM calls Condor the world's largest quantum processor – with its architecture resembles that of IBM's Osprey processor, the new processor contains over 1,000 qubits, a significant improvement from the 400+ qubits of its predecessor.
• It is known for being a first mover like when it moved to cloud computing in 2007. The “Blue Cloud” program was designed to offer hardware and software solutions for enterprises that were willing to have their own private cloud. 
• IBM, as a whole, offers hardware (servers, storages), software (enterprise content, service, and information management) and services (cloud, software, data centres) all related to each other, which enable the company to provide one stop solution for enterprises and integrated product for the customers. 

Tech Mahindra, on the other hand, is not just India’s but the world’s premier IT service, technology, and consultancy organization:

• We have as wide customer base including telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare.
• We have a comprehensive and balanced service portfolio. The range of services offered by Tech Mahindra includes telecommunications and business solutions, IT infrastructure services, business outsourcing (BPO), and business services.
• Tech Mahindra’s R&D arm, the Makers Lab, has funnelled innovation across the world in diverse domains and some very complex arenas giving a tick mark to the company’s R&D policy.
• We have an established partner program specifically designed to develop tools to support technology products.
• We have an early advantage of synergizing with IBM R&D unit on unique ideas of quantum computing and neuroscience inspired AI.

SYNERGY LOUNGE

The partnership between these two giants thereby provides unique capabilities in the lounge for customers, students, and partners to visit and see. For example, customers visiting the synergy lounge would be able to see TechM solutions uniquely deployed on IBM cloud in domains like agritech, generative AI, and quantum computing use cases.

Visitors can also see research in motion which includes:

• Algorithms like Q GANs (quantum generative adversarial network) being deployed for drug molecule generation, a solution made by the Makers Lab and deployed on IBM cloud,
• Project Indus built by TechM to serve indigenous languages of India.
• Project Garuda on Bahasa.
• Metaverse based projects would also be available for visitors to enjoy using VR based hardware.
• New research on spiking neural network (SNN) says that once it mimics the brain to reduce compute, the infra cost would be visible and so would be techniques being used for governance of large language models, and that will be a push towards Responsible AI.

In conclusion, The Synergy Lounge represents not just a crossroads in the corporate partnership but serves as a pedestal for technology of the future.