Watsonx is IBM’s commercial cloud offering for generative AI. It offers a platform for AI tasks like NLP (Natural Language Processing) and LLM (Large Language Model), also offering pre-trained models. A data platform, allowing for better complexity, cost, and governance management on large data volumes. They further build upon that with their governance platform using AI governance tools to improve risk mitigation, regulatory compliance, and more.
StreamSets is an end-to-end data integration platform with plenty of data ingestion options. It offers analytics, data science, and smart applications in a hybrid or cloud-based environment. The acquisition will add those capabilities to Watsonx bringing a more complete data ingestion offering to their platform.
IBM ACE (App Connect Enterprise) is an enterprise service bus platform allowing data to flow from and to multiple hardware and software platforms. This is achieved by integrations and exposure of services in a service oriented architecture (SOA) way.
Software AG offers software for process management, integration, and big data analytics.
What’s next
The merger will bring new integration and API management tools for hybrid multi-cloud environments. Part of this offering is webMethods, which will be a great addition to IBM’s ACE enterprise service bus.
In summary Software AG will build upon the current offering of IBM but will also add value in the vastly growing cloud and AI business which is becoming more prominent in the last few years.
IBM has, at the moment of writing this article, not yet announced how and when they will concretely merge the functionalities of the platforms. But it’s clear they are building on a more comprehensive platform to build your integration, data, and AI workloads with a focus on cloud. These platforms and their capabilities form a strong offering to grow business value in a fast but resilient way.
We’ve been working with both IBM and Software AG’s platforms to bring solutions for our clients FMSB and Colruyt. So we are therefore looking forward to seeing what this merger will bring.