Kyndryl services blitz to target AI, security, sustainability

Kyndryl Bridge has found early success with nearly 1,000 customers expected by the end of the year, and the integration platform has several new services on tap – including for AI, security and sustainability efforts – to help enterprises better manage their infrastructure resources.

Announced last September, Kyndryl Bridge has roughly 60 digitally enabled services to date, and the company expects to grow that to 190 Bridge services by March 2024, according to Kyndryl CTO Antoine Shagoury.

Bridge integrates all manner of management tools, intellectual property, and processes that Kyndryl has cultivated through years of delivering services – it was, after all, a division of IBM until November 2021. It then takes that centralized information and uses it to deliver as-a-service capabilities and applications that help control and manage enterprise infrastructure. It also uses AI and ML to analyze the aggregated data in real time to provide IT operations teams with the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance, Kyndryl says.

“The functionality of the Kyndryl Bridge offering looks to deliver a simplified portal for observability and telemetry and enable the transition to more automation of operations,” according to a report from The Futurum Group about Bridge. “This transition will ultimately enable Kyndryl customers to form a holistic overview of service requests and also provide insight into how incidents are resolved.”

In addition, customers will be able to consume, access, and control integrations and services via one console, which gives users a more simplified way to manage their estate and gain insights into the operational landscape, Futurum stated.

Bridge is aimed at helping engineer success around modernization, transformation and technology management, Shagoury said, “and that’s really the sweet spots that we operate in.” Bridge services concentrate around five core areas: manageability, visibility, operations, sustainability and developing marketplaces for services.

“We focus on ‘how do you make data really usable, and how do you gain the insights around the information flows, and how do you make it a part of the lifeblood of an organization?’ and we use it to accelerate the business,” Shagoury said. Customers will see new services focus on these areas in the future, he said.

What’s next for Kyndryl Bridge?

Some of the forthcoming services will build on the platform’s AI technology, which is already substantial, according to a recent IDC report on Bridge:

“The Bridge platform provides real-time observability by leveraging different spectrums of data (such as logs, metrics, and traces), AI, and automation to detect, resolve, and prevent issues from happening. Further, the platform compares the existing IT environment with best practices and helps in running stable and reliable IT that helps in better understanding the IT environment, making logical predictions and taking quick actions. The data-driven insights improve efficiency by enabling flexible decision making, minimizing cost, and optimizing performance,” IDC stated.

Bridge has a growing library of data and AI services, which customers can use not only to build a solid data foundation but also to securely implement and scale AI for greater visibility into their technology estate’s performance, Shagoury said. Among the potential benefits are reduced incident resolution times, lower energy consumption to meet net zero goals, and greater cyber resilience.

“In the AI arena, we see strong interest from CIOs and CTOs about how AI and AIOps can impact their business, from a technology and financial, cost point of view. And you’ll see new services around that,” Shagoury said.

Other focus areas for new AI services will be around helping customers deliver industry-specific outcomes – from enabling smart industry 4.0 manufacturing practices and reducing production quality risks to identifying new markets to develop and selling products at scale, Shagoury said.

“We want to help customers build the infrastructure for AI in the right way,” Shagoury said. “Issues such as ‘how do we use the right data?’ Without clean data or attributed data AI is useless.”

Another focus area for Kyndryl Bridge will be to deliver more capabilities for clients to infuse AI at different levels of their businesses, Shagoury said.

An AIOps team may want to explore auto-resolution of problems, for example. “How do we help customers build that? And what can be done to make AI and AIOps more agile and valuable? That’ll be a part of the extensions,” Shagoury said.

Automation technology, too, will be part of forthcoming feature sets.

“Helping customers get to the point where they can let automation get in front of an issue – like a self-healing operating model – is one of the things that we’re doing in this next set of releases,” Shagoury said.

On the environmental front, an AI-powered sustainability intelligence and carbon footprint assessment calculator will measure real-time energy consumption and emission data to help customers analyze, simulate, forecast, and generate actionable recommendations to improve energy efficiency across an entire IT estate, Shagoury said.

In the security realm, services to help organizations manage security incident workflows and stay on top of local and global data-compliance requirements, for example, are also on tap.