At its annual flagship event “Think”, IBM’s top executive said during his keynote address that 2021 will be remembered as the year when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the world to embrace digitalization unreservedly.
“We will look back at this year as the moment the world entered the digital century in full force,” IBM chief executive officer Arvind Krishna said during the online event.
Krishna, the first Indian-born executive to lead the US-based tech icon, said the hybrid cloud is allowing the world to “enter an era in which computing can – and must – happen everywhere, from data centers to public clouds, to the very edges of the network.”
“In the same way that we have electrified factories and machines in the past century, we will infuse AI into software and systems in the 21st century,” he said.
He noted that the percentage of AI adoption is still in the single digits. “So, we’re extremely optimistic about the possibilities ahead,” the tech executive said.
Krishna said the forces of digital technology are turning economies on their head, with companies rebuilding their entire business models around the possibilities of digital technologies like hybrid cloud and AI.
“And by doing so, they are infusing greater intelligence into the core processes that underpin their business. This is why having a strong digital foundation is no longer just seen as a source of competitive advantage, but an existential priority,” he said.
He said IBM is betting heavily on hybrid cloud and AI because it sees the immense possibilities it can open up for organizations everywhere.
“Our hybrid cloud strategy is about meeting you where you are in your journey. And it’s about giving you the tools to deploy and leverage the capabilities and benefits of the cloud across a whole spectrum of environments, including at the edge,” Krishna said.
The IBM big boss noted that with only 25% of workloads having moved to the cloud, hybrid cloud is slated to define the technology strategy of businesses over the next decades.
“The only way we know to make sense of the phenomenal amount of data at the scale and pace at which it is being created is artificial intelligence. That is why IBM has invested massively in building rich and powerful AI capabilities for business,” he said.
“The future must be built on a foundation of deep industry collaboration. At IBM, we’ve been hard at work building a powerful ecosystem of partners to help realize the true potential of hybrid cloud and AI,” Krishna added.
