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Attributed to Mr. Kelvin Li, Systems Sales Leader, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited

In today's rapidly evolving AI technology landscape, a robust IT infrastructure is essential for empowering business operations. At the IBM Hong Kong Technology Forum – the Panel Discussion of “Building the Right Infrastructure for Business Needs", we took the opportunity to sit down with esteemed industry experts, including representatives from United Asia Finance Limited, Manulife, and the Hong Kong Computer Society, to share their valuable insights on the significance of IT infrastructure and the key elements for optimizing it. Let's explore their perspectives and advice on constructing an infrastructure that meets the dynamic needs of businesses in the AI-first era.   

Unleashing the Power of AI through a Robust Infrastructure

Mr. Jim Man, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at United Asia Finance Limited, highlights the critical importance of fully harnessing the capabilities of AI as well as the three key aspects of AI infrastructure:

• Flexible infrastructure: Jim stressed the significance of having a flexible infrastructure to unlock the full potential of AI. This enables organizations to leverage public AI models like large language model (LLM) through cloud AI and empowers them to develop and deploy custom models. With such infrastructure, businesses can seamlessly transition between diverse environments, including on-premises setups and dedicated GPU farms, and scale up their AI capabilities.
• Interconnection between Data and AI: Recognizing the inherent connection between data and AI, Jim shines a light on the pivotal role of a well-structured data lake in managing data ingestion, extraction, analysis, and documentation effectively.
• Edge Computing and Cloud Connectivity: In the AI landscape, not all tasks need to reside solely in the cloud. Certain pre-processing tasks can be efficiently handled at the edge computing. When connecting an edge computer to the server, a hyper-connection is essential to ensure reliability and prompt response times. Similarly, when connecting to the cloud, a dependable and low-latency connection is vital for a fast and highly responsive AI experience.

Optimizing Cloud and On-Premises Access for Efficiency

Mr. Eugene Lai, Principal Architect at Asia Data Office, Manulife, leverages his 20 years of architecture experience in the financial and technology sectors to underline the importance of infrastructure in providing flexibility for leveraging both cloud and on-premises resources across multiple regions. He discussed key points including:

• Smooth Transition between Cloud and On-Premises Environments: Eugene puts particular focus on the importance of seamlessly transitioning between cloud and on-premises environments, enabling businesses to swiftly adapt to evolving regulations and market dynamics. With infrastructure as code (IaC), tasks that previously relied on traditional databases can now be executed more efficiently, allowing for greater flexibility during the shift from on-premises to the cloud. This integration facilitates easy access between data centers in different countries, allowing them to operate as a unified entity and fostering a hyper-connected environment.
• Effective Cost Tracking and Management: Eugene underscores the significance of tracking and managing costs right from the start when constructing a cloud infrastructure. By establishing a cost platform early on, businesses can effectively monitor and control their cloud expenses, ensuring optimal cost management throughout their operations.

Building Resilient and Agile IT Infrastructure

Mr. Dave Chen, Vice President of the Hong Kong Computer Society, with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and an impressive track record as Head of IT and Chief Architect on IT strategic planning and digital transformation initiatives, brings three significant aspects to the foreground for an optimized IT infrastructure:

• Availability and Agility: According to Dave, brief service disruptions can have a significant impact, as high availability has become crucial in today's fast-paced world. Additionally, agility is another essential aspect to consider, with the multitude of proof-of-concept initiatives and AI digital projects already on the horizon. To effectively address these demands, organizations require diverse infrastructure resources.  
• Enterprise Architecture Governance: As digital transformation increases the complexity of IT landscapes, Dave stresses the importance of enterprise architecture governance. This allows organizations to gain a holistic view of their systems, enabling better system planning, optimize resources, risk mitigation for third-party services, and enhanced risk management.
• Embracing the AI future: Dave foresees a future where AI is decentralized, extending to edge devices like AI-enabled PCs and mobile devices. This decentralization adds complexity to architecture planning, and IT leaders should anticipate this shift and plan accordingly.

Hybrid-by-Design for an AI-Powered Long-Term Growth

Considering everything the panel of industry experts have shared, the transformative potential of AI and hybrid cloud to drive immense change becomes clearer than ever. Indeed, businesses and organizations must have all hands-on deck to address the need for a robust, resilient, and agile infrastructure – harvesting the true business-driving potential of AI with businesses’ own data.

In view of this, business leaders continue to navigate a period of intense digital transformation, with high pressure to prove the value of their IT investments. Demonstrating ROI that goes beyond cost savings matters more than ever, especially because the average organization spends just 23%ⁱ of its tech budget on efforts that produce business income.

This is where IBM’s unique “Hybrid-by-Design” perspective comes into play, not only as it is the foundation for constructing an optimized IT infrastructure for the AI-first era, but also because hybrid-by-design users see actual higher returns – making it easy to justify digitalization and AI efforts in the boardroom and bringing along extensive business value amplification through generative AI. This requires business leaders to do three things:

• Maximizing IT Investments: By treating IT spend as an investment portfolio, prioritizing value-driven projects, and minimizing waste, organizations can align their tech portfolios with business returns.
• Shifting to Business Outcomes: Rethinking program design to prioritize business objectives and deliver higher ROI enables organizations to drive growth and stay ahead of the competition. This requires a shift from project-centric thinking to considering overall business outcomes.
• Taming Tech Sprawl: By creating a hybrid-by-design flywheel, you can sustain momentum and drive value over time. This requires a new approach to portfolio management and a willingness to make tough decisions.

Business leaders looking to achieve success in these three areas should be looking to partner with experienced technology providers, such as IBM, which can offer valuable expertise and resources to navigate the complex landscape of AI-driven infrastructure. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform, based on Red Hat OpenShift, can help clients move from architectures that are hybrid by default to architectures that are hybrid by design.  It enables companies to run workloads seamlessly on premise, across multiple clouds, both public and private, and on edge to simplify operations, unify data and applications, and accelerate innovations.

This hybrid-by-design approach, combined with IBM's watsonx platform, an enterprise-ready AI and data platform, provides clients the flexibility to manage multi-AI models across complex multi-cloud environments. It helps clients leverage AI and enterprise data to shape unique competitiveness and solve problems while mitigating risk, improving productivity, sustainability and data privacy, and preparing for a range of AI regulations taking shape worldwide – ultimately achieving higher financial results and long-term growth.

Leverage AI-powered Automation to Optimize Enterprises’ Infrastructure

AI and hybrid cloud are now revolutionizing the way enterprises operate their business, as they manage numerous cloud environments, thousands of apps, and vast amounts of data. With generative AI being projected to drive a billion apps by 2028ⁱⁱ, automation has now become more essential for saving time, resolving issues, and accelerating decision-making. In the AI era, businesses must efficiently utilize data, technology, and compute resources across multiple cloud and on-premises environments. IBM empowers organizations to optimize their technology and operations for AI workloads through automation and AI-ready hybrid cloud infrastructure by design.

Let’s look at IBM Concert, for example, which represents a new approach to the long-standing problem of siloed application data.  Powered by watsonx, it serves as the “nerve center” of an enterprise’s technology and operations, using generative AI to create an overall view of the application landscape. This is achieved by processing data inputs from connected toolsets and environments, whether developed in-house or provided by a third party, making it an efficient and effective option to analyze unstructured information from a data lake. By understanding the connections and dependencies within applications, its AI capabilities will provide generative AI-driven insights across enterprises’ portfolios of applications to identify, predict, and suggest fixes for problems, and create actionable recommendations that drive business outcomes quickly and seamlessly.

Indeed, AI is now taking a more significant place in today’s business landscape. Therefore, businesses must ensure that as early as today – they are already building a solid foundation that empowers their operations: optimizing technology for and with AI to drive innovation, ensuring that they are equipped and prepared for an AI-driven tomorrow.  

On that note, we’d like to thank our three guest speakers for participating in our forum and sharing their valuable insights. We look forward to continuing our infrastructure modernization journey with them and their organizations via IBM’s hybrid-by-design approach, leveraging our Hybrid Cloud as well as our AI-powered automation technologies and experience.

Mr. Jim Man (Left 2nd in the photo above), Chief Information Officer, United Asia Finance Limited, Mr. Dave Chen (Left 4th), Vice President, Hong Kong Computer Society, and Mr. Eugene Lai (Left 5th), Principal Architect, Asia Data Office, Manulife, attended the Panel Discussion of “Building the Right Infrastructure for Business Needs” hosted by me (Left 1st).  The three guest speakers joined Mimi Poon (Left 3rd), General Manager, IBM Hong Kong and me for a group photo after the panel discussion.

About the author:

Kelvin Li, Systems Sales Leader, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited
@LinkedIn

Kelvin Li is currently Systems Sales Leader of IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. Prior to that, he was zStack Sales Leader of IBM Greater China Group. Kevin is a seasoned IT infrastructure technology leader with over 20 years of IT experience.  He has taken multiple senior business leadership roles with IBM Technology in Hong Kong and across Greater China Group.

ⁱ Source: “ROI remedy: How hybrid by design can improve business returns on your tech investments”
https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/hybrid-by-design/hybrid-by-design-roi-remedy
ⁱⁱ Source: “IBM Unveils Next Chapter of watsonx with Open Source, Product & Ecosystem Innovations to Drive Enterprise AI at Scale”
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-05-21-IBM-Unveils-Next-Chapter-of-watsonx-with-Open-Source,-Product-Ecosystem-Innovations-to-Drive-Enterprise-AI-at-Scale