What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas? Not quite. For the very first time, IBM brought all of its fields of expertise together at one location: the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas. And of course, Integration Designers was there as well.
Smart as monkeys
Ginni Rometty’s keynote speech made clear how IBM is focusing on (hybrid) cloud and AI. Three customers joined IBM’s CEO on stage to talk about how digital transformation is changing their businesses and how IBM is helping them on that journey. Later that day, I got the chance to meet one of my heroes, Dr. Michio Kaku, the physicist. He shared his view on the future and the technological trends coming our way. According to Kaku, we still have to wait until the end of this century to see AI robots that will be as smart as monkeys. Progress is made, but not as fast as some hope – or fear. Kaku strongly believes that man and machine will collaborate more over the next decades, and that this will be beneficial to the human race.
In a session on Digital Business Automation, we learned about IBM’s view on how Robotic Process Automation, BPM and Case Management will help companies automate their processes. Together with our colleagues of RoboRana, we will start looking at this solution to address the Belgian market.
In-depth discussion
At the final day of the conference, my colleague Jef and myself attended a face-to-face session with Ben Thompson, Chief Architect of IBM App Connect Enterprise (formerly known as IBM Integration Bus). Originally planned to last 45 minutes, we ended up talking almost an hour and a half. We went through our well-prepared list of questions and Ben responded openly and with passion. We discussed a wide variety of topics: lightweight integration, mapping technologies, deployment models, best practices, future development and the features we believe are still missing. Needless to say that this was a very interesting session.
Integration Designers: a unique combination of integration expertise, the cutting edge solutions of IBM,and our creative and innovative minds. Integration Designers is an Xplore Group company.
Author: Dirk Maes, 11 may 2018
