Demand for IBM’s revolutionary old and new solutions surges.

Global interest is being revitalised in IBM on the back of a fresh wave of game-changers from the 110-year-old innovation giant.

This is according to Craig Botha, Business Development Manager: Advanced Technologies: IBM at Axiz, who says IBM releases revolutionary new solutions so regularly that it has topped the US patent list for 28 consecutive years. With over 150 000 patents to its credit, IBM is stepping up its pace of innovation.

“IBM is leading the industry in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, quantum computing and security innovation. On top of that, IBM’s purchase of Red Hat is revitalising mainframe interest, and IBM’s recent game-changer, the world’s first 2 Nanometer chip, is making everyone sit up and pay attention,” he says.

The new chip, announced this month, is projected to achieve 45% higher performance at 75% lower energy use than today’s most advanced 7nm node chips. “That’s massive,” Botha says. “The leap in processing power is significant, but slashing power consumption will also quadruple the battery life of devices and slash the carbon footprint of data centres.”

Describing IBM innovation as ‘unstoppable’, Botha says many South African enterprises have in the past perceived IBM as an ageing computer enterprise, never fully understanding the breadth of the company’s innovation capacity.

“But we are seeing growing interest in IBM as global interest trickles down to South Africa. At Axiz, we are preparing for a wave of investments across IBM hybrid cloud, AI and security products in particular. We have bolstered our team with several IBM experts, and we have strengthened our partnership with IBM to help customers harness IBM innovations.”

Botha notes that IBM has, over the past 100 years, been behind game-changers such as Watson, Linux, magnetic stripe technology, laser eye surgery, DRAM, Data Encryption Standard (DES), a cryptographic algorithm, machine-aided translation, magnetic tape storage and every manned US space mission.

“In August last year, IBM announced the 7nm Power10 CPU memory inception with the ability to pool petabytes of memory between multiple servers, which was described as the industry’s ‘Holy Grail’. Every few months, IBM does something massive and they have been doing this for over a century. Organisations are realising anew that when you invest in IBM, you’re buying a whole blue stack of legendary innovation.”