Cairo, Egypt - IBM announced the general availability (GA) of watsonx.governance in early December to help businesses automate AI lifecycle governance and proactively manage risk and compliance. This expands IBM’s industry-leading AI governance capabilities to help clients govern machine learning and generative AI tools, applications, and models in one place. Watsonx.governance is one of three software products in the IBM watsonx AI and data platform, along with a set of AI assistants designed to help enterprises scale and accelerate the impact of AI with trusted data. The platform also comprises the watsonx.ai next-generation enterprise studio for AI builders and the watsonx.data open, hybrid, and governed data store.   In the first release of watsonx.governance, clients using LLM models within watsonx.ai — including IBM-developed and various third-party models, such as Llama 2 and those from the Hugging Face community — will be able to govern them on the cloud. Consistent with IBM’s approach to open AI, IBM is expected to expand these capabilities in 1Q24 to allow clients to govern third-party AI models from any vendor — on cloud or on-premises — to orchestrate governance processes across their entire organizations. Watsonx.governance also can help clients facilitate compliance with internal policies, industry standards, current and future regulation. IBM believes in regulation at the use case level, with responsibilities on companies to operate trustworthy AI. To do this, there needs to be an understanding of how and with what data models are trained, how they arrive at their recommendations, and whether they are routinely screened for harmful bias. These priorities — transparency, explainability, safety and fairness — are the foundation of multiple proposals advancing worldwide for the regulation of AI. IBM watsonx.governance is designed to help clients manage their AI and prepare to meet those regulatory requirements head on.  IBM offers automated capabilities that cover all three major pillars of AI governance — lifecycle governance, risk management, and compliance. Expanded capabilities for LLMs include:  Monitor new LLM Metrics: Monitor and alert in both inputs and outputs of LLMs when pre-set thresholds are breached for quality metrics and drift, instances of toxic language — including hate, abuse, and profanity — and Personal Identifiable Information (PII).  Visibility into LLM development: Automatically collect information about the model building process, while explaining decisions to mitigate hallucinations and other new risks.  Transparency of AI Lifecycle for LLMs: Automatically document model facts across all stages of the lifecycle, monitor for drift for text models, and track health details such as data size, latency, and throughput to identify bottlenecks and compute intensive workloads.  Validation Tools for LLMs: Enable prompt engineers to map LLM outputs to provided context/reference data for Q&A use cases to determine whether the LLM is appropriately influenced by the reference data to help ensure it is relevant to the output.  IBM fosters open innovation and collaboration to help clients deploy AI in a transparent and responsible way. IBM Consulting helps clients scale responsible AI with both automated AI model governance and organizational AI governance that encompasses people, process and technology from IBM and strategic partners. Our consultants have deep skills in establishing organizational culture and accountability, AI ethics boards, training, regulatory and risk management and mitigating cybersecurity threats, all using human-centric design.IBM’s commitment to trust and transparency forms the foundation for its products. Recently, it announced intellectual property protection for its IBM-developed watsonx models. Watsonx.governance is a continued investment in helping to foster responsible AI practices across various business domains and industries.  

United Arab Emirates: IBM today announced that watsonx.governance will be generally available in early December to help businesses shine a light on AI models and eliminate the mystery around the data going in, and the answers coming out.While generative AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLM) or Foundation Models, offers many use cases for businesses, it also poses new risks and complexities, including training data scraped from corners of the internet that cannot be validated as fair and accurate, all the way to a lack of explainable outputs. Watsonx.governance provides organizations with the toolkit they need to manage risk, embrace transparency, and anticipate compliance with future AI-focused regulation.As businesses today are looking to innovate with AI, deploying a mix of LLMs from tech providers and open sources communities, watsonx enables them to manage, monitor and govern models from wherever they choose.  “Company boards and CEOs are looking to reap the rewards from today’s more powerful AI models, but the risks due to a lack of transparency and inability to govern these models have been holding them back,” said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. “Watsonx.governance is a one-stop-shop for businesses that are struggling to deploy and manage both LLM and ML models, giving businesses the tools they need to automate AI governance processes, monitor their models, and take corrective action, all with increased visibility. Its ability to translate regulations into enforceable policies will only become more essential for enterprises as new AI regulation takes hold worldwide.”IBM Consulting has also expanded their strategic expertise to help clients scale responsible AI with both automated model governance and organizational governance encompassing people, process and technology from IBM and strategic partners. IBM consultants have deep skills in establishing AI ethics boards, organizational culture and accountability, training, regulatory and risk management, and mitigating cybersecurity threats, all using human-centric design.Watsonx.governance is one of three software products in the IBM watsonx AI and data platform, along with a set of AI assistants, designed to help enterprises scale and accelerate the impact of AI. The platform includes the watsonx.ai next-generation enterprise studio for AI builders and the watsonx.data open, hybrid, and governed data store. The company also recently announced intellectual property protection for its for IBM-developed watsonx models.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Armonk, NY: Today, Riyadh Air and IBM announced the signing of a strategic agreement in which IBM Consulting will be the lead systems integrator to support creating, building and orchestrating the technology foundation that can help the digitally native airline to offer exceptional and seamless travel experiences.Together, Riyadh Air and IBM Consulting have already created the airline’s digital and technology strategy. Now, Riyadh Air has selected IBM Consulting to support building the key business and technology capabilities that underpin the strategy. That includes implementing and integrating more than 50 airline industry solutions and core technology capabilities, including security, infrastructure, integration and data platforms, using a hybrid cloud approach. IBM will also orchestrate the work of over 40 partners by providing program and technical governance, project management, quality assurance, change and communications management and training.The collaboration is expected to help position Riyadh Air strategically within the broader ecosystem to offer digital innovations and exceptional experiences for travelers and guests. Riyadh Air aims to create a world class airline with personalized and seamless guest experience powered by AI and state of the art digital technology, taking obsessive care for details that create memorable micro-moments across the traveler journey. It also includes empowering employees with data-driven insights and new ways of working to help Riyadh Air better serve their guests."Our ambition is to launch our first flight in 2025 and put Riyadh Air at the cutting edge of digital technology and innovation within the aviation industry, adopting the best international sustainability and safety practices to deliver an exceptional travel experience, for our guests locally and internationally," said Adam Boukadida, Chief Financial Officer, Riyadh Air. "IBM Consulting will be our principal partner driving us towards our vision with their deep expertise in managing large complex systems and integration programs as well as their expertise in the travel industry.""We're proud to be Riyadh Air's partner and help them bring this new era of the Kingdom's aviation industry to life," said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. "A technology foundation built with an open, hybrid cloud approach and AI can help them achieve the flexibility and agility needed to support their goal of delivering an exceptional travel experience for their guests."IBM Consulting will also establish and maintain Riyadh Air's hybrid cloud integration platform. With IBM CloudPak for Integration and Red Hat OpenShift, this platform will provide integration tools to connect applications and data within a unified and simple user experience.Riyadh Air's digital and technology strategy supports its mission and is aligned to the Kingdom's Vision 2030 to lead the aviation industry by transforming Saudi Arabia, given its unique strategic location, into a global aviation and trade hub.IBM Consulting helps accelerate business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry and business expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become a trusted partner to the world's most innovative and valuable companies, helping them modernize and secure their most complex systems. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply our proven co-creation method, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes. As the only major global systems integrator inside a technology company, we don't just advise -- we invent and build what's next together with our clients. Find out more at IBM.com/consulting.

Dubai: The UAE’s AI minister on Wednesday urged countries to come to a consensus on AI governance sooner than it came to the Paris Agreement, which took years to take shape and come into force.His Excellency Omar Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy & Remote Work Applications, said at the Dubai Assembly for Generative AI that countries need a fresh approach to governing AI.“I think the current global discussion on AI governance is a non-starter. Instead of attempting to govern the technology, we can govern the use cases,” he said.During the assembly – which witnessed over 2000 attendees coming big tech companies and consultancies such as Microsoft, Deloitte, PwC, IBM – Dubai Future Foundation launched the Dubai Generative AI Alliance, a new alliance of tech companies to help Dubai accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies and build one of the world’s most advanced and effective tech-enabled governments.Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of DFF, called on companies and innovators to join the alliance, which will focus on developing innovative technology pilots by leveraging AI, the metaverse and Web3. The Dubai government also launched ‘Dubai AI’, a generative AI-powered digital city concierge. The city-wide digital platform will offer comprehensive information and services, covering health, business, and education, to residents and visitors. It will transform government services, the assembly heard.The assembly also heard how the global banking sector could benefit by as much as USD 400 billion from the boom in generative AI.The global platform heard from experts from international tech corporations and consultancies. PwC said automation in the workplace is imminent, with generative AI likely to be able to execute everyday tasks, such as booking flights and generating reports autonomously, on a large scale within the next 18-20 months.Deloitte's leading digital expert said nuclear fusion, climate action and drug discovery will be some of the main beneficiaries of generative AI, while the industrial and pharmaceutical sectors are among those quickest to adapt to the emerging technology.Adel Al Redha, Emirates’ Chief Operating Officer, said by November, the airline will “empower cabin crew to leverage [generative AI] through delivering training on complex models”.

Dubai: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) at its annual Think conference, announced IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform to be released that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. Enterprises turning to AI today need access to a full technology stack that enables them to train, tune and deploy AI models, including foundation models and machine learning capabilities, across their organization with trusted data, speed, and governance - all in one place and to run across any cloud environment.Also at Think, IBM is announcing further planned advancements, including a GPU-as-a-service infrastructure offering designed to support AI-intensive workloads, an AI-powered dashboard to measure, track, manage, and help report on cloud carbon emissions, and a new practice for watsonx and generative AI from IBM Consulting that will support client deployment of AI.With watsonx, IBM is offering an AI development studio with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source models, access to a data store to enable the gathering and cleansing of training and tuning data, and a toolkit for governance of AI into the hands of businesses that will provide a seamless end-to-end AI workflow that will make AI easier to adapt and scale.“With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. “Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged. With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.” Clients will have access to the toolset, technology, infrastructure, and consulting expertise to build their own — or fine-tune and adapt available AI models — on their own data and deploy them at scale in a more trustworthy and open environment to drive business success. Competitive differentiation and unique business value will be able to be increasingly derived from how adaptable an AI model can be to an enterprise’s unique data and domain knowledge.The IBM watsonx platform consists of three unique product sets to address these needs:IBM watsonx.ai: A next generation enterprise studio, expected to be generally available in July 2023, for AI builders to train, test, tune, and deploy both traditional machine learning and new generative AI capabilities powered by foundation models through an open and intuitive user interface. The AI studio provides a range of foundation models, training and tuning tools, and cost-effective infrastructure that facilitate the entire data and AI lifecycle, from data preparation to model development, deployment, and monitoring.The studio also includes a foundation model library that gives users easy access to IBM curated and trained foundation models. The IBM foundation models use a large, curated set of enterprise data backed by a robust filtering and cleansing process and auditable data lineage These models are being trained not just on language, but on a variety of modalities, including code, time-series data, tabular data, geospatial data, and IT events data. An initial set of foundation models will be made available in beta tech preview to select clients. Examples of model categories include:fm.code: Models built to automatically generate code for developers through a natural-language interface to boost developer productivity and enable the automation of many IT tasks.fm.NLP: A collection of large language models (LLMs) for specific or industry-specific domains that utilize curated data where bias can be mitigated more easily and can be quickly customized using client data.fm.geospatial: Model built on climate and remote sensing data to help organizations understand and plan for changes in natural disaster patterns, biodiversity, land use, and other geophysical processes that could impact their businesses.As part of a new collaboration between IBM and Hugging Face, the watsonx.ai studio will build upon Hugging Face's open-source libraries and offer thousands of Hugging Face open models and datasets. This is part of IBM's commitment to delivering to clients an open ecosystem approach that allows them to leverage the best models and architecture for their unique business needs.IBM watsonx.data: A fit-for-purpose data store built on open lakehouse architecture that is optimized for governed data and AI workloads, supported by querying, governance, and open data formats to access and share data. The solution is expected to be generally available in July 2023 and:The solution can manage workloads both on-premise and across multi-cloud environments.Through workload optimization, with this solution, an organization can reduce data warehouse costs by up to 50 percent.[1]Watsonx.data will allow users to access their increasingly robust data through a single point of entry while applying multiple fit-for-purpose query engines to uncover valuable insights.It will also provide built-in governance tools, automation and integrations with an organization’s existing databases and tools to simplify set-up and user experience.IBM watsonx.governance: an AI governance toolkit to enable trusted AI workflows. The solution, expected to be generally available later this year:Operationalizes governance to help mitigate the risk, time and cost associated with manual processes and provides the documentation necessary to drive transparent and explainable outcomes.Provides the mechanisms to protect customer privacy, proactively detect model bias and drift, and help organizations meet their ethics standards.With the watsonx platform, clients are enabled to meet the needs of their organization in five key areas of their business: interacting and conversing with customers and employees; automating business workflows and internal process; automating IT processes; protecting against threats; and tackling sustainability goals.IBM also plans to infuse watsonx.ai foundation models throughout all its major software products going forward, for example: Watson Code Assistant: A solution, expected later this year, that taps generative AI to allow developers to generate code with a straightforward English language command.AIOps Insights: AI Operations (AIOps) capabilities enhanced with foundation models expected for code and NLP to provide greater visibility into performance across IT environments, helping IT operations (ITOps) managers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) resolve incidents in a more expedient and cost-efficient way.Watson Assistant and Watson Orchestrate: IBM’s digital labor products are expected to be combined with an NLP foundation model to enable enhanced employee productivity and customer service experiences.Environmental Intelligence Suite: IBM EIS Builder Edition is planned to be enabled by the geospatial foundation model and available in preview later this year, allowing organizations to create tailored solutions that address and mitigate environmental risks based on their unique goals and needs.Also at Think 2023, IBM will announce a number of additional upcoming offerings that are planned to help drive AI adoption, including:New GPU offering on IBM Cloud: Addressing the global need for foundation models, IBM is announcing new GPU offerings on IBM Cloud, an AI-tailored infrastructure designed to support enterprise compute-intensive workloads. Later this year, IBM is expected to offer full stack high-performance, flexible, AI-optimized infrastructure, delivered as a service on IBM Cloud, for both training and serving foundation models.IBM Consulting Center of Excellence for Generative AI: IBM Consulting announces a Center of Excellence for generative AI with over 1,000 generative AI experts and plans to build a watsonx-focused practice which will actively build and deploy watsonx for clients. IBM Consulting has completed dozens of client engagements infusing generative AI with IBM Watson and a portfolio of ecosystem partners through its proven IBM Garage method.IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator: An AI-informed dashboard to enable clients to measure, track, manage and help report their carbon associated with their hybrid multi-cloud journey. Based on technology from IBM Research, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator is expected to be generally available later this year. The dashboard complements IBM’s existing sustainability solutions with a comprehensive portfolio of technology and expertise, including the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, IBM Turbonomic, IBM Planning Analytics and IBM LinuxONE, that help organizations accelerate their sustainability and business objectives.New study revealing generative AI is among seven trends shaping business: A new report from the IBM Institute for Business Value, titled Seven Bets, shares seven trends impacting business today and describes the seven bets worth making to enhance their business, including insights on why businesses should adopt an “AI-first” mindset and how leaders can most effectively capitalize on AI’s opportunities now and in the future, as well as manage the enhanced risks across their organizations.The Think 2023 broadcast can be accessed at www.ibm.com/events/think. During his keynote airing Tuesday, May 9, 8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m. EDT, IBM CEO and Chairman Arvind Krishna will be joined on stage by leaders from Delta Airlines, Citi, and Red Hat to discuss their visions for creatively turning challenges into opportunities with hybrid cloud and AI. On Wednesday May 10, 4:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. EDT, Darío Gil, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, will give a keynote on how generative AI can be applied for business use cases.Following the flagship event in Orlando, Think on Tour will travel to more than a dozen cities around the world. For updates on confirmed cities, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/events/think/on-tour/.

IBM Security released its annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index finding that although ransomware’s share of incidents in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) held steady at 18%, globally defenders were more successful detecting and preventing ransomware. Despite this, attackers continued to innovate, with the report showing that globally the average time to complete a ransomware attack dropped from two months down to less than 4 days. According to the 2023 report, the deployment of backdoors, which allow remote access to systems, emerged as the top action by attackers in the MEA region last year. Backdoor deployments were detected in 27% of the cases X-Force responded to in this region in 2022. Ransomware and worms tied for the second-most common attack type in the region at 18% each. The uptick in backdoor deployments can be partially attributed to their high market value. X-Force observed threat actors selling existing backdoor access for as much as $10,000, compare this to stolen credit card data, which sells for less than $10 per card today.As organizations across the MEA region try to address the ever-evolving cyber threats landscape, Frida Kleimert Knibbs, Security Leader at IBM MEA, stressed the critical role of threat intelligence in safeguarding against these threats. She commented: “Proactively managing security risks and evolving cybercrime tactics is a critical priority for organizations across MEA. The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index findings demonstrate the continued threat of ransomware and the increasing use of thread hijacking tactics.”She added: “To safeguard against these threats, it's imperative that companies remain vigilant and focus on effective incident response planning. As the security landscape evolves, it is crucial to prioritize threat intelligence and strengthen defenses”.The IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index tracks new and existing trends and attack patterns – pulling from billions of datapoints from network and endpoint devices, incident response engagements and other sources.Some of the key findings in the 2023 report include:Extortion: Threat Actors Go-to Method. The most common impact from cyberattacks in 2022 was extortion, which was primarily achieved through ransomware or business email compromise attacks. Extortion and financial loss each accounted for half of identified impacts in incidents across the MEA region in 2021. Manufacturing was the most extorted industry globally in 2022, and it was again the most attacked industry for the second consecutive year. Manufacturing organizations are an attractive target for extortion, given the extremely low tolerance for down time.Cybercriminals Weaponize Email Conversations. Thread hijacking saw a significant rise in 2022, with attackers using compromised email accounts to reply within ongoing conversations posing as the original participant. X-Force observed the rate of monthly attempts increase by 100% globally compared to 2021 data. Over the year, X-Force found that attackers used this tactic to deliver Emotet, Qakbot, and IcedID, malicious software that often results in ransomware infections.Legacy Exploits Still Doing the Job. The proportion of known exploits relative to vulnerabilities declined 10 percentage points globally from 2018 to 2022, due to the fact that the number of vulnerabilities hit another all-time high. The findings indicate that legacy exploits enabled older malware infections such as WannaCry and Conficker to continue to exist and spread.Phishers “Give Up” on Credit Card Data. The number of cybercriminals targeting credit card information in phishing kits dropped 52% globally in one year, indicating that attackers are prioritizing personally identifiable information such as names, emails, and home addresses, which can be sold for a higher price on the dark web or used to conduct further operations.Finance and Insurance Remain Prime Targets for Cyberattacks in MEA: In the Middle East and Africa, Finance and insurance was the most-targeted industry in 2022, accounting for 44% of incidents and down slightly from 2021 at 48%. Professional, business and consumer services accounted for 22% of attacks, with manufacturing and energy tying for third place at 11%.The report features data IBM collected globally in 2022 to deliver insightful information about the global threat landscape and inform the security community about the threats most relevant to their organizations. You can download a copy of the 2023 IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Report here.

IBM today announced IBM Partner Plus, a new program that reimagines how IBM engages with its business partners through unprecedented access to IBM resources, incentives, and tailored support to deepen their technical expertise and help speed time to market. The program is designed to fuel growth for new and existing partners, including resellers, hyperscalers, technology providers, independent software vendors and systems integrators, by putting them in control of their earning potential. IBM Partner Plus is central to the company’s Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy and aims to empower partners to help clients automate, secure, and modernize their businesses.IBM Partner Plus offers partners a transparent, simple, and modern experience. By growing technical expertise and demonstrating sales success, participants can progress to three tiers - Silver, Gold, and Platinum - which unlock specialized financial, go-to-market support and education benefits. In the new program, badging will become the standardized measure of skills and validated solutions will demonstrate expertise. The enhanced IBM Partner Portal consolidates and tracks all expertise, revenue, and deals globally, offering each partner a clear line-of-site into their progression through the program. “IBM Partner Plus introduces a new way for IBM to deliver value to new and existing partners by helping them gain skills, grow faster and earn more,” said Kate Woolley, General Manager, IBM Ecosystem.“We’ve heard from partners that they want a simplified experience that helps them win with clients. I’m confident these changes and our continued investment in our ecosystem will make IBM the partner of choice across the industry, and together we can drive growth for partners, clients, and IBM.”IBM Partner Plus results from the company’s journey to put partners at the center of IBM's go-to-market strategy and act as a growth engine to help capture the $1 trillion hybrid cloud and AI market opportunities. IBM has invested in elevating the role of partners and accelerating partner-led sales by enabling the ecosystem to become a preferred route to market, offering clients an optimal mix of technology, services, and consulting expertise. To drive continued growth, IBM will increase its capacity to support partners by doubling the number of partner-facing brand and technical specialists to help them prospect and win additional client business.“The Partner Ecosystem is at the heart of IBM’s growth strategy, and the new IBM Partner Plus program is the next step in our mission to grow with partners, as together we cocreate and help our clients in MEA to transform their business,” said Zaidoun Arbad, Vice President Partner Ecosystem IBM MEA. He added: “The program demonstrates IBM’s investments in its partners’ ecosystem to motivate, support and reward partners who invest with IBM, by helping them win with clients and meet their growth goals.”IBM Partner Plus brings all partner types and programs together – whether they sell, build on or with, and/or provide services for IBM technology – into one integrated ecosystem. For example, to help broaden the market opportunity and create new revenue streams for its ecosystem, IBM recently enabled partners in North America to resell IBM products through other cloud marketplaces. This allows for independent software vendors to embed IBM Software from partner marketplaces into their own solutions. All partner sales through the marketplace accumulate towards their progression in IBM Partner Plus. “The IBM Partner Plus is a great example of how IBM is enriching the role of partners, offering access to skills and opportunities that will help us win in the market and support clients better,” said Sami Abi Esber, President for MDS System Integration and Board Member at Midis Group. “We look forward to IBM’s new and modernized partner experience that will fortify our collaboration and fuel growth as we work together to support our clients with best of breed solutions from IBM that helps them accelerate their digital transformation journey.”Competitive incentives Partners can advance through tiers to unlock benefits and demand generation programs which could offer them up to a threefold increase in total investment from IBM. The IBM Partner Portal gives partners real-time visibility into the incentives they are eligible for, predictability into potential earnings, and includes an automated deal share engine that helps them surface quality leads. This has improved deal registration and introduced partners to more than 7,000 potential deals valued at over half a billion dollars globally.* IBM investments in co-marketing campaigns and co-sell support with partners can also help bring solutions to market and generate demand.Insider access IBM Partner Plus builds on the successful release of its October badging and selling enablement materials to partners, which has driven more than 15,000 partner enrollments in sales and technical badges. Offering partners the training, enablement, and experiential selling resources available to IBMers at no cost can help better equip them to win with clients. Additionally, access to IBM’s seller tools can help them generate competitive and transparent pricing. Partners can also attend IBM’s quarterly Sales Kickoffs together with IBM sellers, and participate in live training sessions and other global technical advocacy events to help upskill, increase eminence, and engage with technical experts. For new partners, IBM is launching the IBM New Partner Accelerator, which provides onboarding, training, and other benefits during their first six months in the program to help accelerate their path to profitability.Enhanced support and benefitsPartners can grow skills, develop solutions, and build sales expertise with technologies like AI, security, and cloud on an open hybrid cloud platform by leveraging technical experts from IBM. IBM will also assist partners in the development of minimal viable products, proofs of concept, and custom demos to help them win client business and accelerate growth. In addition, as partner businesses grow with IBM, they can unlock additional benefits designed to help them expand capabilities and find new clients.PartnerWorld will transition to a new IBM Partner Plus experience on January 4, 2023, with the new incentive program taking effect on April 1, 2023. Registered PartnerWorld members will maintain their current tier through July 1, 2023 and can progress to the new tiering system during this time as they meet criteria.