Unleashing the Power of AI with IBM Z

Tal Sharon: Hello, welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I’m your host, Tal Sharon, President, Life & Pension EMEA and IPELS Divisions at Sapiens. And I am so pleased that you’re out there listening. This is where we discuss the latest news, trends, and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology spectrum. There is [a] famous expression in the world of technology, “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It came from [the] famous Newton, Isaac Newton, where he describes how innovations existed because they are built on existing ideas and achievements. We could say that the same of today’s mainframes, which are high-performance computers that process billions of transactions in real time. Originally developed in the 1950s, the mainframes are critical to commercial databases, transaction servers, and applications, and now they themselves are being advanced by IBM’s new Z next system, which is driving further innovation in AI.

And joining us today to discuss IBM’s Z next system is none other than Rosalind Radcliffe, CTO of the IBM Z and Linux ONE ecosystem organizations. Rosalind is responsible for driving the technical vision and product strategy for the support of the ecosystem for both communities. She’s also a select speaker at Industry conferences, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology Leadership team, and author of Enterprise Bug Busting, which explains how today’s enterprises need to examine how to achieve high quality with their software development practices.

Rosalind, welcome to today’s program!

Rosalind Radcliffe: Thank you, Tal! Thank you so much for having me on the show!

Tal Sharon: So, Rosalind, we have so much to discuss! But before we get into the technology aspect of the program, why don’t you first tell us how you began your journey and career in tech and how that journey led you to IBM Z?

Rosalind Radcliffe: Thank you. I’ve been in the industry for 37+ years, and I was lucky enough out of college to start with IBM in the ISPF organization, though I didn’t know a lot about mainframes at the time, I quickly learned, because ISPF is fundamental to the platform, and over my time with IBM, I have spent time in all sorts of different parts working with clients in our services organization, working in our sales organization, and working with worldwide requirements. I’ve spent a lot of time with systems management solutions, and had the opportunity to work across all of the platforms and solve client problems. And so Z has been at the core of that much of the time. And Z and distributed working together. And so it’s, it’s been a lot of fun and a great opportunity for me to learn and continuously grow in the technology field.

Tal Sharon: Thanks, Rosalind. Technology careers often have fascinating origin stories, and yours is fascinating and is a role model, especially since we just celebrated International Women’s Day. So moving on, can you first explain how mainframes help scale AI solutions for large organizations?

Rosalind Radcliffe: Yeah, this is a really important factor for the mainframe. It has been designed from the beginning and from the core up to support large transaction processing, guaranteed reliability, always on kinds of systems. It is from the core, the chip and firmware through operating system, making sure that our system is designed to allow you to scale up when you need to. And so it can handle those Black Fridays or there was a large insurance sign-ups or whatever it is that hits the system. It is specifically designed to allow you to do that, and that’s with all of the processing that’s been done within the system to make it easy for clients to run their system with eight nines and eight nines of availability, the scale of Black Friday.

Tal Sharon: Thanks, Rosalind. Now, with regard to the IBM Z next system, can you walk us through its key features, in particular its AI capabilities, given the growing importance and popularity of AI today?

Rosalind Radcliffe: Yes, it’s absolutely amazing! Every time a new generation of the Z comes out, there is a focus on continued reliability, sustainability, and the capabilities that we expect in the system. Every generation improves the way that we work with energy consumption to ensure it meets sustainability goals. With the latest discussions, we have the Telum II and the Spyre chip, and both of these have been enhanced for additional capabilities for AI. The Telum II has an updated IO processing that allows even faster access to data, which the machine was already built to for high IO, and this increases the access purposefully, because of the amounts of data needed in AI, and the Tellum II has the updated AIU. So the specific processor for AI technology, so you can run machine learning, you can run traditional AI processes in line in your existing applications. And the Spyre, coming alongside of that, allows you to run those large language models to do the additional inferencing that we want to do today. So with this combination, we can do an ensemble AI, allowing all of the transactions to process through the standard AIU, understanding whether or not it’s fraud or not, in a fraud example. And if it can’t really completely determine it, it could be passed on to the large language model for additional checks. So we really have in the next generation Z, a large focus on ensuring it can satisfy the needs for AI today.

Tal Sharon: Thanks, Rosalind. So for my last question, if there [is] one key takeaway about the impact of IBM’s Z technology on your customers or end users that you hope our audience remembers after today’s session, what would it be?

Rosalind Radcliffe: When I think about the mainframe and IBM Z and LinuxONE, think about it as a big server, a very large environment that can scale up for your needs are always consistent data and it’s not so different. It runs Linux, it runs OpenShift. You can take your existing capability and run it on the Z platform, as a full part of your hybrid cloud to meet sustainability goals of today. Being able to do AI processing on a custom system designed at its core to be able to do this processing, instead of necessarily for this using a GPU, use GPUs for what their needs need it for. Look at the processor itself. Look at the chip, and understand that we have different systems built for different uses, and look at IBM Z as that scale-up, available consistent data platform and use it for that and work with, in the hybrid cloud, the full spectrum of system.

Tal Sharon: Thanks so much for your many insights today, Rosalind! IBM is a giant in the world of high tech, and the IBM Z next technology is just the latest in its long line of innovations. I can’t wait to see how it impacts the insurance space, and technology overall in the weeks and months to come! And it was a pleasure having you today – your own career path was so inspiring and we at Sapiens are incredibly lucky to have you and IBM as a partner.

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