KUALA LUMPUR: IBM has unveiled the z16, its next-generation system with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator, designed to deliver latency-optimised inferencing.
According to the company, this innovation is designed to enable clients to analyse real-time transactions, at scale - for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions. Building on IBM's history of security leadership, the IBM z16 also is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today's encryption technologies.
"IBM is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-critical data lives," said IBM Malaysia's managing director and technology leader, Catherine Lian.
"This opens up tremendous opportunities to change the game in their respective industries so they will be positioned to deliver better customer experiences and more powerful business outcomes," she said.
Lian said there is a problem consistenly popping up across the industry, which is the skillset and workforce issue. This has been hindering the transfromation journey and this is where IBM comes in.
"Today, we don't only provide consultation to our FSI, government, manufacturing and other sectors, we are also the consultant to the government agencies and ministries. It's a priviledge to be part of the journey, and having or on board means we will be able to shape the Digital Blueprint of 2023," she said.
Why the need for IBM z16
IBM's vice president worldwide, sales IBM z and Linux One, Jose Castano. said the digital economy and transformation are the two factors that have been accelerating the IBM z16 and the z system mainframe.
He said the IBM z15 is the current mainframe in the market today, but with the z16, IBM solved more compute power than ever in history of mainframes.
"Over the last 10 years, the amount of capacity of the platform has grown thee and a half times. We grow the capacity because of the digital economy and transformation," said Castano.
"If we look all the major industry, we have the top banks in the world, the top insurance companies, airlines and governments as well. So we are a part of the global economy. So as the global economy shifts towards the digital economy IBM zSystem is part of that. That why the mainframes continue to perform and outperform," he explained.
Castano also explained how the z system is designed.
"Normally when we designed a new system, we do it 5 to 7 years before we announce it, and this is where we talk to the customers, asking them where they would be in the next digital economy," he said.
"So when we designed and developed the IBM z16, we had three things in mind - artificial intelligence and optimisation of data, the cyber resilience which means business continuity and cyber security, ad finally the hybrid cloud," he added.
The combination of public, hybrid and on premise clouds give companies the ultimate possibilities and capabilities.
When we built the IBM z16, we have intelligence of decision making (decision velocity), security, resilience, business continuity and hybrid cloud.
IBM innovations, including the IBM z16, have formed the technology backbone of the global economy for decades. Today's modern IBM mainframe is central to hybrid cloud environments, valued by two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, 8 of the top 10 insurers, 7 of the top 10 global retailers and 8 out of the top 10 telcos as a highly secured platform for running their most mission-critical workloads.
For example, according to a recent IBM commissioned study by Celent report "Operationalising Fraud Prevention on IBM Z," IBM zSystems run 70 per cent of global transactions, on a value basis.
Real-time enterprise AI
Financial institutions worldwide struggle with the impacts of fraudulent activities on their revenues and consumer interactions.
According to a new study from IBM and Morning Consult "2022 IBM Global Financial Fraud Impact Report," credit card fraud is the most common type of fraud among consumers in the seven countries surveyed. Furthermore, respondents said they believe that banks and payment networks should be most responsible for preventing fraud. But running deep-learning models at scale in real-time has not been possible due to latency issues, meaning fraud detections models are only run on less than 10 per cent of high-volume transactions – a significant amount of fraud is going undetected.
IBM said the z16 uniquely brings together AI inferencing, via its IBM Telum Processor, with the highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing IBM is known for. For the first time, banks can analyse for fraud during transactions on a massive scale: IBM z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one millisecond of latency.
"IBM zSystem is part of the world economy.You can't make a reservation, you can't do a credit card authorisation without a mainframe at the back," said Castano.
For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card. For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid frustration associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions.
Other threats including tax fraud and organised retail theft are emerging as challenges for governments and businesses to control. Real-time payments and alternative payment methods like cryptocurrencies are pushing the limits on traditional fraud detection techniques. Applying the new capabilities of IBM z16 to other industries can help create an entirely new class of use cases, including:
1. Loan approval: to speed up approval of business or consumer loans
2. Clearing and settlement: to determine which trades and/or transactions may have a high-risk exposure before settlement
3. Federated learning for retail: to better model risk against fraud and theft
Securing data with the industry's first quantum-safe system
In a hybrid cloud environment inclusive of on-premises and public cloud resources, it is critical to protect against today's threats and posture against cyber criminals who may be stealing data now for decryption later. Building on IBM technologies like Pervasive Encryption and Confidential Computing, IBM z16 takes cyber resiliency a leap further by protecting data against future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing.
As the industry's first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is underpinned by lattice-based cryptography, an approach for constructing security primitives that helps protect data and systems against current and future threats. With IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can future-ready their applications and data today.
With secure boot (meaning that bad actors cannot inject malware into the boot process to take over the system during startup), IBM z16 clients can strengthen their cyber resiliency posture and retain control of their system. Also, with the Crypto Express 8S (CEX8S) hardware security module will offer clients both classical and quantum-safe cryptographic technology to help address their use cases requiring information confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation. IBM z16's secure boot and quantum-safe cryptography can help clients address future quantum-computing related threats including harvest now, decrypt later attacks which can lead to extortion, loss of intellectual property and disclosure of other sensitive data.
Modernising for hybrid cloud
IBM has spent the last three years making significant investments in service of our commitment to embrace open-source technology on the IBM zSystems platform and establishing a common developer experience across the hybrid cloud.
These solutions are designed to help our clients leverage their investments in — and the strengths of — their existing IT infrastructure, clouds and applications in a seamless way, while giving them the flexibility to run, build, manage and modernise cloud native workloads on their choice of architecture.
Recent announcements as part of this effort include:
1. IBM Z and Cloud Modernisation Stack: to help clients increase agility and accelerate their transformation including support for popular open-source projects.
2. IBM Z and Cloud Modernisation Center: a digital front door to a vast array of tools, training, resources, ecosystem partners and industry-specific expertise from IBM Consulting to help IBM zSystems clients accelerate the modernisation of their applications, data and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture.
3. Tailored Fit Pricing: a full-stack approach to enable our clients to quickly respond to changes in dynamic workloads and needs of the business with cloud-like pricing.
4. Bringing Anaconda to Linux on Z: one example of bringing popular data science frameworks and libraries to these enterprise platforms, providing a consistent data science user experience across the hybrid cloud.
5. Streamlined Support: IBM Technology Support Services offers IBM z16 clients turnkey support to help predict and prevent unplanned disruption, and technical services that accelerate how businesses take advantage of the opportunity hybrid technology environments present.
With IBM z16, IBM used a highly collaborative, client-centred approach that deeply engaged hundreds of individuals from more than 70 clients, a practice that is already underway for future IBM mainframe systems. IBM z16 will be generally available on May 31, 2022.
"We already have two interested customers here in Malaysia from the financial industry who have already working very seriously on planning and configuring their environment," said Lian.
"Close to 95 per cent of the financial industry is powered by IBM, and here we have the opportunity to partner with the financial services industry to help them with their digital transformation journey," she added.