IBM opens first infrastructure innovation centre to boost India-led AI work

IBM has launched its first Infrastructure Innovation Centre in Bengaluru, bringing together engineering teams to accelerate development of secure and scalable enterprise AI and infrastructure systems

IBM has launched its maiden Infrastructure Innovation Centre within its India Systems Development Lab (ISDL) campus, as it continues to focus on advanced infrastructure engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) innovation in one of its key markets.

 

Designed as a collaborative engineering hub, the innovation centre will bring together IBM’s systems architects and infrastructure specialists from ISDL to co-create AI solutions with clients, software makers, system integrators and GCCs. By bringing together cutting-edge infrastructure technologies, hybrid cloud capabilities and AI solutions under one roof, the center is designed to accelerate the development and deployment of secure, scalable and responsible enterprise AI systems.

 

“We have added a lot of new missions, scope, and products that are completely getting done and delivered from India,” said Subhathra Srinivasaraghavan, vice president of ISDL.

 

“But this one is a big one for us because we are bringing together some of the related teams. People who work across the stack, for example, someone who is designing the processor, writing firmware code, operating system code, virtualisation — all of them are going to now operate from the same building. So it's going to increase the speed of innovation and the collaboration between the teams,” she added.

 

ISDL is the largest development hub in IBM’s infrastructure business, which includes mainframes, servers, storage, cloud, and technology lifecycle services (TLS) business. India plays a critical role in modernising IBM’s mainframes, the backbone for some of the most critical applications in the world of banking, airlines, retail and government.

 

Srinivasaraghavan said the labs in India, based in Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad, have been contributing more to the company in terms of ownership levels.

 

For the power class of servers, a lot of core banking applications that run on the system are handled by the Indian engineers.

 

“The next generation of the processor that will go into the system is developed and going from the lab. We've always had some participation in the past, but the role has expanded and the ownership levels have expanded.  Likewise, across the stack, we have ownership for some operating systems that run on this platform,” she added.

 

While many consider mainframe to be a legacy technology and perhaps any technology conversation does not revolve around it any more, it remains critical to innovations in enterprise businesses. The mainframe business, within infrastructure vertical, is one of the fastest growing for IBM.