VMware Cloud empowers customers to modernize, optimize and better protect apps, infrastructure and operations at every stage of their cloud transformation journey

VMware Explore 2023 — Today, VMware, Inc. announced the next generation of VMware Data Services Manager, designed to support today’s data-driven innovation by making data services as easy to consume as what VMware has achieved for virtualized compute, storage, and networking. VMware Data Services Manager will deliver best-in-class management for a wide range of data services, not just databases, as a natively integrated experience for VMware Cloud Foundation customers, serving the needs of IT admins, data teams, and developers alike. These capabilities, along with new data services partnerships with Google Cloud and MinIO, and new VMware Cloud advancements, will deliver developer-ready infrastructure to accelerate modern app innovation, provide multi-cloud flexibility and agility, and enable more secure and resilient organizations.

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers innovations from VMware’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings in a unified stack to enable a consistent and more secure environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or partner cloud environments. VMware Cloud Foundation is the underpinning for VMware Private AI and yields benefits for modern AI/ML and generative AI workloads such as simplified management, enhanced scalability, improved security, and optimized resource usage. VMware Cloud Foundation is delivered as a service by hundreds of Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), including those delivering VMware Sovereign Clouds.

“Whether residing on premises, across hybrid clouds, or in a sovereign cloud environment, data is the fuel for digital transformation. Through our new data services innovations and partnerships, we are making VMware Cloud Foundation the best platform to power the traditional, modern, and AI/ML applications that are central to business,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, cloud infrastructure business unit, VMware. “VMware Cloud enables customers to build, deploy, run, and protect a broad set of high value workloads across their data infrastructure on multiple consistent cloud endpoints, with the same operational model and service level objectives for performance, business continuity, and security.”

Simplifying Data Services Management

VMware will empower IT to consistently and more securely manage databases, object stores, streaming, warehouse, caching, and querying solutions running on VMware Cloud Foundation. This strategy will help customers accelerate their digital transformation by building, deploying, and operating a diverse and growing data estate. With VMware Data Services Manager, IT admins will benefit from the native VMware infrastructure management experience for data services, including full control of infrastructure policies. Data teams and database administrators will maintain full control over data policies and be able to deliver a self-service offering for databases and other best in class data services on-premises to their lines of business, enabling rapid innovation for developers.

VMware is also announcing that Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni will be the first third-party PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN. With AlloyDB Omni, customers will have access to an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL-compatible database, with Google Cloud support, on reliable, scalable, and highly secure VMware Cloud Foundation environments. With AlloyDB Omni running on VMware vSAN customers can experience more than 2x the transactional performance and up to 100x the analytical performance of standard PostgreSQL across a wide range of queries and workloads¹.

Additionally, VMware is announcing MinIO Object Store will be the first third-party object storage natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. MinIO is a highly performant and resilient object store offering active-active replication for mission-critical production environments. Running on VMware Cloud Foundation and managed through Data Services Manager, MinIO will be an ideal solution for data lake implementations and large-scale AI/ML use cases.

Comprehensive Detection and Recovery from Ransomware

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated as the data from companies becomes more lucrative. To help organizations combat this evolving threat landscape, VMware is announcing new solutions and technologies that enable organizational resilience.

Intelligent Threat Detection is a new capability in technology preview that will deliver proactive AI/ML-powered encryption prevention and response, allowing customers to see more to stop more and recover faster. Customers will be able to identify modern ransomware prior to encryption using aggressive behavioral analysis of powered-on workloads in a cloud-based isolated environment and detect encryption events across protected workloads by analyzing file system metadata, data change rates, and entropy.

VMware Live Recovery is a new offering that provides cyber and data resiliency for VMware Cloud. VMware Live Recovery delivers unified protection, secure cyber recovery and simplified consumption. Customers benefit from unified management of ransomware and disaster recovery across on-premises and public clouds, confident and accelerated recovery from modern ransomware, and flexible licensing for changing business needs and threats.

Modern, Consistent Cloud Infrastructure and Management for All Applications

New VMware Cloud Foundation advancements include:

• Enhanced networking and security with support for the vSphere Distributed Services Engine (DSE), modernizing data centers by offloading full stack infrastructure functions from CPUs to Data Processing Units (DPUs).
• Enhanced support for NVMe storage platforms with new support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) that enables customers to deploy next generation servers that deliver higher performance, more scalability, and improved efficiency.
• Unified experience and fast issue resolution delivered by VMware Aria Operations with updates that include the ability to understand sustainability posture across data center footprints as well as meaningful grouping of alerts enabled by AI to help manage alert storms and improve troubleshooting capabilities.

New VMware Tanzu platform enhancements and Spring with Spring AI, Spring Boot 3.2, and Data Services to fuel next generation of modern apps

VMware Explore 2023—VMware, Inc. today announced new updates to Spring, the leading Java development framework, plus enhancements across VMware Tanzu Platforms, VMware Tanzu Data Services, and VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services that will help teams develop, operate, and optimize higher-performing applications more quickly, cost-effectively, and securely.

Software development teams are at the forefront of business innovation, building modern applications that drive market share growth and revenue. However, the ability to quickly deliver applications that integrate leading-edge technology like AI and machine learning is often complicated by the need to learn new tools, platforms, and acquire additional skills even as more software delivery responsibilities shift left. Generative AI continues to reshape industries and presents a massive opportunity for all organizations.

“Today, the velocity of innovation is what differentiates companies from the competition. The value of next generation apps will be accelerated through new capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence and scalability across any cloud,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager of Modern Apps and Management Business Group, VMware. “We have been focused on providing developers with great tools and experiences for decades. As we mark the 20th anniversary of Spring this year, our latest enhancements and deep integration to the Tanzu Platform give application teams the ability to leverage more cutting-edge technology like AI in new apps and take those apps to production quickly, safely, and more securely.”

Modern Data Integration and Innovation with VMware Tanzu Application Platform

Modern application development and delivery is increasingly complex, leaving organizations with too many silos, inefficiencies, and risk. VMware Tanzu simplifies the experience of the underlying infrastructure, security, tooling, content and data services, and developer experience so application and infrastructure teams can better collaborate on the delivery of higher quality apps, securely and at scale, to any cloud, anywhere. VMware Tanzu has introduced the following enhancements across its app platform offerings to help developers and platform teams deliver business outcomes with software:

• Tanzu Application Platform adds DORA metrics with Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes in the developer portal, enabling teams to track and benchmark their software delivery performance to continuously assess and improve software delivery practices while providing greater transparency and accountability to business goals.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Runtime is now integrated in Tanzu Application Platform, including a commercial subscription to Spring tools with extended support for a seamless experience in building mission-critical Java applications with Spring.
• VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0 improves the developer experience with a new Postgres tile for DBaaS and AI tile (beta) with an included trained LLM available to the familiar “cf push” experience, reduces platform costs and improved disaster recovery workflows, and expands cloud availability with support for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Spring Enhancements Enable Developers with AI and App Security

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of Spring, the most common framework for Java development and the 10^th anniversary of Spring Boot which continues to grow 50% year over year for 5 years running¹. With Spring, developers can stay ahead of ever-shifting technological transformations by having innovative new capabilities integrated into a familiar Spring experience for a simplified path to building next-generation applications.

Today’s updates are designed to improve application performance, reduce costs, and improve security to be well-suited for modern operating models like cloud containers and serverless, including:

• The general availability of Spring Boot 3.2 and Spring Framework 6.1 release enables developers to create GraalVM native images that use Spring Boot and Java 21's virtual threads (Project Loom) to achieve better app runtime scalability, energy efficiency, startup time, and RAM consumption.
• Spring AI is a newly graduated project designed to simplify and streamline the development of AI applications by enabling developers to use the familiar Spring Framework with simplified commands to add AI capabilities to their application development process.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Health Assessment helps organizations understand their Spring application portfolio’s dependencies and identify security issues. This allows organizations to effectively remediate issues, improve software compliance, and mitigate risk.

Tanzu Data Services integrates Machine Learning (ML) and AI Capabilities and Simplifies Data Fleet Management

Integral to modern application architecture are data services, including messaging, caching, processing, and databases to power next-generation workloads across any cloud. Tanzu Data Services enhancements add new ML/AI capabilities, improve and optimize performance, and streamline management, including:

• Tanzu Greenplum’s automated machine learning agent (beta) to simplify and streamline machine learning set-up and tasks; VMware Tanzu GemFire Vector DB Extension to deliver low-latency querying for next generation use cases, such as generative AI and natural language processing; VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.6 for high throughput data messaging for resource-limited environments, including Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge applications.
• A simplified bundle of all of the data offerings, plus a new VMware Tanzu Data Hub (tech preview) that will unify and streamline fleet management of VMware Tanzu and ecosystem data services across multiple clouds and Kubernetes environments.

Tanzu Intelligence Services Enables Proactive Governance and Continuous Optimization

Tanzu Intelligence Services, first introduced at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, helps organizations gain deep insights into, continuously improve, and proactively govern the cost, performance, and security of their apps and clouds by policy in near real-time to adjust to the changing needs of business. New capabilities include:

• VMware Tanzu CloudHealth empowers organizations to achieve cloud sustainability goals with GreenOps support (beta), giving visibility into power consumption and carbon emissions with recommendations for rightsizing the cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Guardrails enhances proactive governance and continuous compliance with reports to highlight key findings, including configuration drift, policy violations, and vulnerabilities across multiple cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Application Catalog enhances open-source content security with new customization of open-source artifacts to the base OS image and form factor aligned to corporate standards and the ability to centrally view and browse the inventory of open-source software bill of materials (SBOMs).

Capabilities within the Tanzu platform will continue to integrate into a common control plane, VMware Tanzu Hub. Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Tanzu Hub including a refreshed user experience and navigation; integrated observability solution from Tanzu Insights; migration planning and assessments from VMware Tanzu Transformer; cost reports from Tanzu CloudHealth including Cloud Smart Summary, Cost History, Rightsizing, Anomaly Detection; and enhancements to Intelligent Assist in Tanzu to search external sources like 3^rd third-party documentation in addition to environment inventory to better diagnose and resolve issues across environments.

Intelligent Assist, Increased Telemetry and Workflow Automation to Ease Connecting, Securing, and Managing Workloads for Enterprise and Telco Edges

New Integrations with Microsoft and Symantec to Help Customers Simplify, Better Secure and Modernize their Edge Environments

VMware Explore 2023—VMware, Inc. today announced new solutions and expanded partnerships to help customers accelerate their digital transformation at the edge. Building upon the recently introduced VMware Software-Defined Edge, these innovations and new integrations will help customers to simplify, better secure, and modernize their edge environments, and include:

• New VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities for better visibility of edge workloads.
• Introduction of Intelligent Assist for the VMware Software-Defined Edge to simplify the operational experience across multiple stakeholders.
• An expanded collaboration to enable VMware SASE customers to use Microsoft Security Copilot.
• New Workflow Hub for VMware Telco Cloud Automation to support the rapid rollout of cell sites.
• Initial integration with Symantec to better secure the software-defined edge.

VMware defines the software-defined edge as distributed digital infrastructure for running workloads across a number of locations, close to endpoints that are producing or consuming data. It extends to where the users and devices are – in the office, on the road, in a cell site, or on the factory floor. VMware addresses all three layers of the software-defined edge: the top edge compute layer which hosts the applications and workloads; the intelligent overlay where SD-WAN and security services run; and the underlay network layer, which runs the software for network connectivity across fixed and 5G networks to provide orchestration and network programmability.

“The introduction of the VMware Software-Defined Edge has resonated with both enterprises and Communication Service Providers,” said Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware. “It provides the right-sized compute footprint, the zero-touch orchestration and the network programmability architecture needed to run a variety of edge workloads. We see a proliferation of the software-defined edge at edge locations ranging from Telco 5G cell sites, smart factory floors, energy substations, retail 2.0 stores to branch offices across all distributed enterprises. We are helping customers across all four phases of deployment: edge telemetry being the first step, and then workload consolidation, support for edge AI apps leading to real-time applications on the smart factory floor. We deliver on these use cases by incorporating generative AI, enhanced security and advanced automation across our software-defined edge portfolio.”

Gaining Insight into Edge Workloads with VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator

To further operationalize edge workloads, VMware today announced new VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities to provide insight and visibility into edge workloads, identify end devices, and make available contextual information across workload, compute, and network to accelerate problem resolution. Originally introduced at VMware Explore Las Vegas, VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator will provide unified management for VMware SASE and the VMware Edge Compute Stack—an industry-first offering to bridge the gap between edge networking and edge compute.

Simplifying the Operational Experience at the Edge with Generative AI

Edge computing is going mainstream as enterprise application deployments accelerate at the edge. But as enterprises and service providers transform their edge environments, they can expect several challenges: edges that are too complex with Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, edge-native applications, users and infrastructure; tool proliferation leading to fragmented insights; and gaps in budget, staff and skillset that lead to poor operational experience.

To help customers and partners address those challenges, VMware is unveiling Intelligent Assist for VMware Software-Defined Edge to operationalize connecting, securing, and managing workloads, users and IoT devices at the edge. Based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the solution is expected to extend the power of VMware Edge Intelligence (formerly VMware Edge Network Intelligence) to accelerate automation, shrink the skillset gap, and speed up resolution. In August 2023, VMware announced Intelligent Assist, a family of generative AI-based solutions trained on VMware’s proprietary data to simplify and automate all aspects of enterprise IT in a multi-cloud era. According to Gartner, “In 2022, perhaps 5% of edge computing deployments involve some level of ML — but by 2026, at least 50% of edge computing deployments will involve it.¹”

Further Securing the Edge with Microsoft Security Copilot

Beyond operations, VMware will further help customers incorporate generative AI technology into their software-defined edge architectures. VMware today announced that it has joined the Microsoft Security Copilot partner private preview. Microsoft Security Copilot is a gen AI-based tool that helps customers to quickly detect and respond to threats and better understand the threat landscape overall. VMware and Microsoft will collaborate to offer VMware SASE customers the option to share insights from their SASE deployment with Microsoft Security Copilot. VMware’s participation in the Microsoft Security Copilot partner private preview will help to augment the security events the tool learns from to include network perimeter security information.

Enabling Rapid Rollout of RAN Sites with Workflow Hub

Today, VMware also announced VMware Telco Cloud Automation 3.0 featuring the general availability of Workflow Hub. Using a newly developed, no-code framework, Workflow Hub enables Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to easily define repeatable workflows and scale them out across their network so that they can save time, monitor and troubleshoot progress and reduce operating expenses. When it comes to the provisioning and deployment of RAN sites, for example, Workflow Hub allows an operator to quickly stitch together pre-built templates and tap into to third-party tools to construct an executable and repeatable workflow for cell sites. With Workflow Hub, an operator can then rapidly roll out new cell sites in a few hours—saving time, operating costs, and facilitating a complete network deployment at scale.

New Symantec Integration to Help Strengthen Edge Security

To deliver consistent security across all edge locations, applications, users, and devices, VMware today announced initial integration with Broadcom Inc.’s Symantec. VMware has extended its Security Service Edge (SSE) orchestration integration to include Symantec Cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG) (formerly Web Security Service). With this new integration and planned evolution, VMware expects to deliver an additional single-vendor SASE option with additional best-in-class networking and security capabilities.

NetApp StorageGRID adds VMware sovereign cloud integration capability to further support customers facing complex data residency and privacy regulations

NetApp®, a global data-centric, cloud-based software company, today announced the launch of NetApp StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud. The NetApp Plugin for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension enables sovereign cloud customers to more cost-effectively store, protect and preserve unstructured data while ensuring compliance with international data residency and privacy regulations. NetApp also announced the latest release of NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere (OTV 10.1), a solution designed to simplify and centralize enterprise data management in multi-owner vSphere environments.

The original text of this announcement, written in the source language, is the official version that is authentic. Translations are offered solely for the reader's convenience and must refer to the original language text, which is the only legally valid one.

- LTTS to use Google Cloud’s generative AI technology and tools to create its comprehensive API Hub

L&T Technology Services, a leading global digital engineering and R&D services company, today announced an innovative collaboration with Google Cloud to harness the power of its generative AI (gen AI) technology and tools for the development of its LTTS Developer Experience Platform, known as DevX. LTTS DevX is a groundbreaking platform for engineering services, serving as a comprehensive, unified destination for API-enabled solutions across major industries, from LTTS and its ecosystem partners.

The collaboration underscores LTTS’ commitment in achieving transformative AI-driven objectives in collaboration with Google Cloud. It will facilitate the creation of an expansive API catalogue and experience, redefining how customers interact with LTTS’ digital offerings. Both organizations will work in tandem to shape LTTS’ DevX framework, and seamlessly integrate Google Cloud's gen AI components into the overall architecture.

LTTS has multiple objectives for the alliance. Firstly, it aims to expand the mindshare among developers globally, positioning DevX as a go-to platform for engineering solutions. Secondly, it seeks to enhance consumption by streamlining the discovery and implementation of LTTS’ solutions and services for end-users, ultimately resulting in higher customer satisfaction. The collaboration also aims to deepen developer engagement with content by creating a “developer playground” experience and extending it with API discovery and accelerators.

The rollout will unfold in two distinct phases: In the initial phase, LTTS will combine its expertise with Google Cloud for the development of DevX, focusing on select use-cases, including automating the process of generating test cases from requirement documents thus streamlining the development workflow; expediting the unit test case generation process by integrating gen AI into the development code; and automating code generation, thereby significantly reducing manual efforts and boosting development efficiency.

Building on the success of this phase, LTTS and Google Cloud will take the next leap by creating a custom gen AI platform seamlessly integrated into the overarching LTTS DevX ecosystem. This advanced platform will empower developers with even more sophisticated AI-driven capabilities.

LTTS has a track record of breakthroughs in AI, with popular AI solutions like Chest-rAi™ and AiKno^®, for the medical, industrial and transportation sectors, positioning it as a partner of choice for AI-enabled digital transformation initiatives. Cognitive Meta Data extraction modules from its AiKno^® platform automates the tedious task of digitalizing physical data, thereby greatly improving efficiencies and significantly reducing the time taken for manual digitalization. The LTTS API Hub, developed using Google Cloud’s offerings, including Vertex AI, will help enhance operational efficiencies and capabilities for end customers worldwide. Vertex AI combines data engineering, data science, and ML engineering workflows, enabling global engineering teams to collaborate using a common toolset and scale myriad applications using the benefits of Google Cloud.

The collaboration aims to address complex challenges, such as generating test cases from unstructured data sources.

“We are excited to join forces with Google Cloud to unlock new dimensions of AI-led innovation,” stated Abhishek Sinha, Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board at L&T Technology Services. “This partnership not only propels us closer to our gen AI goals but also cements our commitment to revolutionizing engineering and digital solutions for the benefit of multiple industries. As LTTS and Google Cloud embark on this transformative journey, the engineering landscape stands on the cusp of a new era. With the power of AI-driven innovation at the forefront, the future promises unparalleled possibilities for industries worldwide.”

“Google Cloud is committed to providing the industry’s most open cloud and helping customers accelerate their digital transformations,” said Chandra Sankholkar, Director of Partnerships, Google Cloud. “Through this new partnership, L&T Technology Services will use Google Cloud’s infrastructure to power new capabilities that can improve operations and create real-world value for businesses.”

Brillio, a leading digital transformation services and solutions provider, today announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to co-develop cutting-edge industry and horizontal solutions using the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.  

Combining Brillio's extensive industry and digital expertise with Microsoft's AI and analytics platforms, these intelligent solutions ─ to be offered via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace ─ will enable organizations across various industries, including healthcare, life sciences, retail, consumer packaged goods, banking, financial services, and insurance, to transform business models, accelerate innovation, and unlock new growth opportunities.

This announcement expands the close relationship between the two companies dating back to Brillio's inception in 2014. Since then, the two companies have collaborated extensively on developing cutting-edge enterprise products and solutions to help Fortune 1000 enterprises become digital-first businesses.

As part of the collaboration, Brillio will integrate Azure OpenAI Service with its own suite of pre-built AI industry solutions and intellectual properties to offer a wide range of generative AI solutions spanning assessment and advisory services, governance, risk and compliance assessment, and many other areas. Brillio has already commenced work on solutions to accelerate and optimize claims processing, intelligent search, investment strategies, financial modeling, and so on.

"Our 360-degree collaboration with Microsoft reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation and client value creation," said Raj Mamodia, Chief Executive Officer of Brillio. "It positions Brillio as the go-to partner for clients seeking to infuse the power of AI into their businesses. With our specialized digital capabilities and focus, we aim to lead the way in delivering generative AI-driven transformations at scale. By deeply using Microsoft's AI capabilities, we look forward to creating cutting-edge solutions that personalize experiences, optimize operations, and create new possibilities. Together, we will use AI to pave the way for a more intelligent and efficient world."

"Brillio is focused on developing industry-specific and horizontal solutions to harness the full potential of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service," said Jim Lee, Vice President, Americas Global Partner Solutions at Microsoft. "We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Brillio as they deliver the full value of GenAI and uphold our shared commitment to customer success."

As a Microsoft Managed Solution Partner (MSP), Brillio has gained recognition as an early adopter and leader in advanced data analytics, responsible AI frameworks, and large language models (LLMs). A case in point is Brillio's proprietary virtual assistant, an LLM-powered chatbot that enhances customer experiences and streamlines customer support services across industries, utilizing its capabilities for summarization, Q&A, and rapid information retrieval. Additionally, Brillio's AI-enabled business intelligence (BI) solution harnesses generative AI's language processing capabilities, offering instant access to real-time business insights through natural language queries.

Elevating Point-of-Sale Marketing: Tokinomo's Visibubble Merges Innovation and Interaction to Transform Retail POSM Displays for in-store Brand Activations

Tokinomo, a leading startup in interactive shelf activations, proudly introduces Visibubble — a cost-effective point-of-sale marketing (POSM) solution. The new in-store advertising solution brings Mobile Messaging to the shelf, increasing shopper engagement. Products and brands can now communicate via text messages with the shoppers directly on their phones.

Visibubble's Transformative Features:

• Dynamic Customization: Display branding with adaptable messages and colors. With magnetic covers, changing the messages is a breeze — catering to diverse campaigns and products.
• QR Code Interaction: Pilot implementations revealed that with Visibubble, the QR codes were scanned 17 times more than in the case of a static QR code. When the Shoppers scan the QR code, they enter a dedicated landing page for the campaign, where the brand starts a conversation with the shoppers, enhancing the brand-customer connection at the purchase point.
• Shopper Detection Sensor: Activating on shopper proximity ensures advertisements are more interactive and eye-catching, reaching the customers as they shop.
• Engaging Notification Sounds: Crafted to captivate, these sounds mirror mobile app notifications, amplifying product prominence.
• Battery-Powered Versatility: Unrestricted by cords, Visibubble can grace any store location, with unparalleled flexibility in any environment.

Ionut Vlad, Tokinomo’s CEO, shared his enthusiasm, "Visibubble isn't just a product; it's a vision of reimagined in-store marketing. It symbolizes Tokinomo's commitment to cutting-edge, cost-effective solutions that genuinely resonate with shoppers. As we venture into this new chapter, we're eager to witness the transformative effects Visibubble will usher in for our partners and their customers."

Empowers security analysts and AI to work side by side more effectively with modernized foundation and redesigned UX

IBM today announced a major evolution of its flagship IBM QRadar SIEM product: redesigned on a new cloud-native architecture, built specifically for hybrid cloud scale, speed and flexibility. IBM also unveiled plans for delivering generative AI capabilities within its threat detection and response portfolio – leveraging watsonx, the company's enterprise-ready data and AI platform.

Today's hybrid cloud environments are evolving and scaling at an exponential rate, creating a larger and more complex attack surface to protect. This growing IT footprint makes it harder to quickly find the true threats amongst the noise – slowed down by siloed technologies, manual searches and an overload of alerts, without clear context or visualizations. In fact, SOC professionals get to less than half (49%) of the alerts that they're supposed to review within a typical workday, according to a recent global survey.¹

The new cloud-native QRadar SIEM is built to maximize the power of today's security teams. It is designed to augment and up-level security analysts daily work – tapping AI to manage time-consuming and repetitive tasks while empowering security analysts to find and respond to high priority security incidents more effectively.

"Our new cloud native SIEM is a core element of IBM's mission to usher in the next generation of security operations, built for the hybrid cloud and AI era," said Kevin Skapinetz, Vice President, Strategy and Product Management, IBM Security. "Instead of forcing analysts to work around the complexity of security technologies, we're designing technology to remove the complexity – weeding out the noise, simplifying the user experience, and empowering analysts to tackle urgent threats with greater speed and confidence."

IBM's cloud-native SIEM builds on QRadar's 13 years market leadership and analyst recognition² for deep security analytics – with a redesigned architecture for highly efficient data ingestion, rapid search and analytics at scale. Built on an open foundation, it is the newest addition to QRadar Suite, IBM's integrated portfolio of threat detection and response software.

The new cloud-native QRadar SIEM will be generally available as SaaS in Q4 2023, with plans to offer software for on-premises and multi-cloud deployment in 2024.

Open at its Core
Built on Red Hat OpenShift, QRadar SIEM is designed to be open at a foundational level – allowing for deeper interoperability with multi-vendor tools and clouds. It leverages open source and open standards for core functions including detection rules and search language – allowing it to work across companies' broader security and technology stacks. 

• Harness Security Community Detections: Leverages common, shared language for detection rules (SIGMA) – allowing clients to quickly import new, crowdsourced detections directly from the security community as threats evolve.
• Investigate Across Data Sources: Offers unique federated search and threat hunting capabilities built on open-source technologies, allowing analysts to proactively search for and investigate threats across cloud and on-premise data sources in a single, unified way – without moving data from its original source.
• Deep Partner Network: Builds on the QRadar ecosystem, one of the largest partner networks in the industry with more than 700 pre-built integrations.

Full Suite for Connected, Proactive Security Response
As part of QRadar Suite, the new cloud-native SIEM offers customers access to a wide set of integrated capabilities which can allow for more proactive detection, investigation and response across toolsets. With QRadar Suite, organizations can gain visibility into their exposed assets via attack surface management (ASM) capabilities, search for threats across toolsets, protect at the endpoint with EDR, and connect to automated playbooks to speed response (SOAR). QRadar SIEM empowers users with shared insights and automated actions across their core toolsets – accessed directly from their primary user interface, without needing to shift between tools.

Enterprise-Grade AI Speeds Response to Critical Threats
QRadar SIEM applies multiple layers of AI and automation to improve the quality of alerts and the efficiency of security analysts. These mature AI capabilities have been pre-trained on millions of alerts from IBM's vast network of clients and are refined further post-deployment to account for each client's unique environment. For example:

• Reduce Noise and Improve Alerts: Alert prioritization capabilities use AI to automatically de-prioritize low priority alerts, while automatically grouping, contextualizing and escalating high priority alerts – factoring in risk context from ongoing threat intelligence and analyst response patterns. This capability allowed IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Services to automate 85% of alert management for clients,³ and to accelerate their threat triage timelines by 55% in the first year of use.⁴
• Jump-Start Investigations: AI capability automatically runs federated searches across connected systems, generating a visual attack timeline, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and recommended actions – giving analysts a significant head-start on investigation tasks.
• Automatically Update Detections: QRadar SIEM's analytics are automatically updated with new detection rules and threat intelligence on an ongoing basis, to keep pace with evolving threats.

IBM's AI security capabilities are embedded natively into the QRadar Suite analyst interface, bringing contextual insights to analysts' fingertips and helping them take advantage of AI more intuitively within their regular workflows. 

Generative AI to Advance SOC Productivity
IBM also plans to release generative AI (GAI) security capabilities for QRadar Suite in early 2024 – built on watsonx, the company's AI and data platform. IBM is designing GAI to help optimize security teams' time and talent by managing certain tedious tasks on behalf of analysts, while also making it easier for them to perform more challenging, higher value work. For example:

• Automate Reporting: Create simple summaries of security cases and incidents that can be shared with a variety of stakeholders in a single click.
• Accelerate Threat Hunting: Automatically generate searches to detect threats based on natural language descriptions of attack behaviour and patterns – helping to accelerate response to new threat campaigns.
• Interpret Machine-Generated Data: Helping analysts to quickly understand security log data by providing simple explanations of events that have taken place on a system – lowering technical barriers and expediting their investigations.
• Curate Threat Intelligence: Interpret and summarize highly relevant threat intelligence, honing in on campaigns that are more likely to affect clients based on their unique risk profile.

IBM is also developing predictive generative AI security capabilities which will be trained to create active responses that optimize over time – for instance, helping security team find similar incidents, update affected systems and patch vulnerable code.

Beyond these use-cases, IBM plans to embed generative AI across its broader security software and services portfolio. These capabilities will leverage watsonx infrastructure as well as watsonx AI models, which have been trained on curated, domain-specific datasets – designed to offer greater trust, transparency and accuracy.