IBM CEO heralds 'chapter two' of digital transformation

Ginni Rometty says AI and multi-cloud have now gone beyond the experimental phase

The industry is entering a new era of maturity in digital transformation, according to IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty, who claims that customers are no longer just experimenting with technology such as AI and multi-cloud.

Rometty (pictured) used her keynote at IBM's Think 2019 conference to tell delegates that this year enterprises will move beyond just implementing AI and will instead start scaling it across their entire organisations.

"When I say chapter two, I think digital and AI becomes about scale and embedding it everywhere in your business," she said.

"This chapter two, when it comes to cloud, is hybrid and this chapter two is driven by mission-critical apps now moving. But underpinning that for all of us in chapter two is trust. And that is going to be about responsible stewardship."

Rometty's declaration comes just months after IBM boldly claimed it had "reset" the hybrid cloud market after acquiring open source vendor Red Hat.

She went on to claim that customers are now moving mission-critical workloads across on-prem, public cloud and private cloud environments.

"Twenty per cent of your workloads have moved to the cloud and that has mostly been driven by customer-facing apps, new apps you're putting in. The next 80 per cent is the core of your business, the mission-critical work. That means you've got to modernise apps to get there," she said.

"So we're going from an era of cloud that was app driven to now transforming mission criticals. So while at one time we were adding, now we have to transform.

"The challenge a lot of you have is: you weren't born this morning; you have an existing estate, you have new requirements for regulation, compliance, data, location and you already have anywhere from five to 15 clouds, all different kinds, including ours. So the destination is very clear to me as hybrid."

Rometty also announced the launch of Watson Anywhere, which will enable IBM's flagship AI offering to run on-prem as well as in public and private cloud.

"This is a response to what you told us about data. Some data you want to move, some you want to trade one place for another. This is what it will let you do. This will be the most open, scalable AI for business in the world, announced today," she said.