IBM Expands watsonx Portfolio on AWS, Adds watsonx.governance to Help Clients Scale Responsible AI
At the IBM Think conference on May 21, 2024, IBM revealed its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate the full watsonx AI and data platform with AWS services.
Key highlights include the introduction of watsonx.governance on AWS, aimed at helping clients scale AI responsibly. This integration supports compliance with regulations like the EU AI Act by managing model risk and governance for AI initiatives.
The watsonx platform, including watsonx.ai and watsonx.data, will be available on AWS Marketplace, offering customers flexibility, scalability, and enhanced AI governance.
IBM's hybrid cloud strategy and collaboration with AWS aim to streamline workflows, accelerate AI projects' time-to-market, and manage AI across complex IT environments. This initiative is expected to add value to clients' AI endeavors and strengthen AI governance and compliance.
- Integration of IBM watsonx.governance with AWS services enhances AI governance and compliance, addressing regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act.
- Availability of watsonx.governance and Amazon SageMaker in June is expected to streamline workflows and accelerate AI project time-to-market.
- IBM's full watsonx platform, including watsonx.ai and watsonx.data, available on AWS Marketplace, expands flexibility and scalability for customers.
- IBM's collaboration with AWS combines strengths, offering secure and effective generative AI solutions, driving workflow improvements.
- IBM Consulting expands its generative AI expertise focused on AWS, helping clients establish responsible AI frameworks and demonstrating regulatory compliance.
- Support for hybrid cloud environments and seamless integration with AWS tools optimize and scale AI training workloads.
- No concrete financial data or revenue projections provided, making it difficult to assess direct financial impacts.
- Focus on compliance and governance may increase operational complexity and costs for clients.
- Potential dependency on AWS infrastructure for IBM's AI solutions could limit flexibility for some customers.
Insights
The integration of IBM's watsonx.governance with Amazon SageMaker is a substantial development in the AI landscape. This collaboration enhances AI governance capabilities, addressing compliance and regulatory requirements such as the EU AI Act. Combining IBM's expertise in AI governance with AWS's robust infrastructure provides a strong foundation for businesses to manage AI projects effectively.
From a technical perspective, the customizable risk assessment and model approval workflows will help organizations ensure that their AI models are not only compliant but also optimized for their specific needs. This is particularly important in industries with stringent regulatory requirements where the ability to audit and track AI decisions is crucial.
Furthermore, the availability of watsonx.data on AWS will enable businesses to seamlessly integrate and transform data across hybrid environments, thus facilitating the deployment of generative AI models. This integration is likely to accelerate AI adoption, providing a scalable and flexible solution for enterprises.
This strategic partnership between IBM and AWS could have significant financial implications. By extending the watsonx portfolio to AWS, IBM opens new revenue streams while also strengthening its AI and data governance capabilities. This move is likely to attract a broader customer base, particularly those already invested in AWS infrastructure, which could result in increased sales and market penetration.
In addition, the integration of watsonx.governance with Amazon SageMaker positions IBM as a leader in the field of responsible AI, which is becoming increasingly important. Regulatory compliance and risk management are critical concerns for enterprises adopting AI and IBM's offering directly addresses these issues.
From an investor's perspective, this collaboration is a positive indicator of IBM's strategic direction and commitment to innovation in the AI space. It not only enhances IBM's product portfolio but also leverages AWS's extensive reach, potentially boosting IBM's market share in the AI and cloud sectors.
The companies plan to integrate IBM watsonx.governance and Amazon SageMaker -- a service to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) and generative AI models with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows -- to help Amazon SageMaker and watsonx customers manage model risk and support compliance obligations in connection with recent regulatory requirements such as the EU AI Act. This integration rounds out the availability of the watsonx platform in AWS Marketplace, which already includes IBM watsonx.ai and watsonx.data as customer managed offerings.
"IBM's open AI and hybrid cloud strategy is critical to helping businesses get value from AI, with their own trusted data, no matter what technology they use or where they're using it," said Ritika Gunnar, General Manager, Product Management, Data and AI, IBM. "Watsonx.governance enables them to manage and govern their AI solutions in an automated way, with the ability to customize solutions to their unique needs as they bring on more AI capability and respond to evolving AI regulations around the world. Our expanded relationship with AWS combines IBM's leading AI governance with Amazon SageMaker, offering customers flexibility, scalability, and integration with other AWS services."
Available in June, watsonx.governance and Amazon SageMaker will help clients streamline workflows, accelerate time to market for AI initiatives, and manage AI across complex IT environments and ecosystems. They will be able to configure and track fully customizable risk assessment and model approval workflows across multiple stakeholders, providing an audit trail in both watsonx and Amazon SageMaker.
"Balancing the rapid progression of generative AI with growing governance and regulatory concerns is a delicate challenge all organizations are concerned about," said Chris Konow, CEO CleanSlate Technology Group, a cloud consulting company and AWS and IBM Business Partner. "The ability to seamlessly combine the power of AWS SageMaker with watsonx.governance will help address governance at the very foundation layer of AI projects."
"IBM watsonx.governance on AWS provides fit-for-purpose AI governance capabilities that allow us to leverage the power of Amazon SageMaker," said Adi Paz, CEO GigaSpaces Technologies, a provider of data platforms that enable natural language to query enterprise data. "Together these technologies create a highly trusted foundation for our Retrieval Augmented Generation Solution, GigaSpaces eRAG."
Further supporting clients on their generative AI journey, watsonx.data is available on AWS to make it easier for customers to access, visualize and transform data for use in generative AI workloads. Through the watsonx.data open data lakehouse on AWS, customers can access data across hybrid environments including Db2 Warehouse, Netezza and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Db2, and AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
In addition to the entire watsonx platform, IBM offers other software products and consulting offerings, including 44 listings, 29 SaaS offerings and 15 services, in AWS Marketplace across 92 countries. This includes the availability of a consumption-based license for Amazon RDS for Db2 to simplify workload management and enable faster cloud provisioning with on-demand licenses.
"Our collaboration with IBM will bring even more generative AI solutions to our mutual customers," said Ankur Mehrotra, General Manager of Amazon SageMaker at AWS. "By combining the strengths of Amazon SageMaker and watsonx.governance, we are empowering businesses to leverage generative AI effectively and securely, drive workflow improvements, and ultimately deliver greater value. We look forward to continuing to innovate together on meaningful AI solutions for our customers."
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod for Training IBM Models
Consistent with IBM's hybrid cloud approach, IBM Research uses a combination of on-premises and cloud-hosted infrastructure to train the IBM Granite series of large language models. IBM utilizes its AI super computers to train its models and additionally has seen value in leveraging Amazon SageMaker HyperPod. Its seamless support for the open source tools and orchestrators enabled the IBM Research team to optimize and scale their training workload across the AWS environment.
IBM Consulting Brings Expertise to Create Responsible AI Frameworks
IBM Consulting is further expanding its generative AI expertise focused on AWS to help joint customers operationalize responsible AI. With the integration of watsonx.governance and Amazon SageMaker, IBM Consulting will be able to help joint clients establish a responsible AI framework to support their Amazon SageMaker initiatives across the enterprise – while managing model risk, demonstrating regulatory compliance and monitoring model performance.
To learn more about how IBM watsonx and AWS are helping customers on their generative AI journey, please visit ibm.com/aws.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service.
Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
Contact: Paul DiPerna, Paul.DiPerna@ibm.com
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