IBM is assigning Watson to help enterprises streamline IT, launching a services platform for enterprise operations to help CIOs improve IT and business.

The IBM Services Platform with Watson, launched Wednesday, is designed to allow businesses to autonomously manage IT operations, IBM says. The IBM Platform has already managed more than 10 million incidents across enterprises before those incidents became a a problem for the CIO, building at a rate of nearly a million incidents per month, according to the vendor.

Food delivery services giant Sysco has reduced critical issues by nearly 90% using Watson tools, and reduced the time to solve problems from hours to minutes. And Danske Banke is using the IBM platform to provide its clients with a banking platform, IBM says.

Figure 1: A human computer (right) works on an IBM 704 machine computer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Photo source: NASA

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The Watson service can run diagnostics and execute actions to address the root causes of problems, and can read unstructured emails and chats in natural language to find and execute the solutions to problems.

The service supports "the entire managed services life-cycle," from design to building and running services, IBM says.

AI-driven IT infrastructure management is offered by a couple of startups, including Heili and SunView Software.

Cisco is making a strategic push for network automation, which it calls the "network intuitive." (See Cisco Makes 'Intuitive' Bet to Reconquer Networks.)

The IBM IT service comes as financial analyst Jefferies says that IBM will face challenges in making Watson successful, including a high services requirement and stiff competition for AI talent. (See IBM Watson Faces Tough Road – Analyst.)

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