As a collection of advanced data and AI tools, the IBM Cloud offers more than 170 products and services that can be used to improve business operations and transforms startups into major enterprises. With numerous cloud and industry options, as well as flexible account options, it has quickly become a desirable tool for companies looking to upgrade to a more sophisticated cloud strategy. Here are a few interesting problems IBM Cloud is solving today.
Startups Require High-Performance Solutions To Handle Growth
When startup companies start to see success and are ready to expand their operation, transferring IT operations is necessary in order to handle growth and the influx of new customers. Bitly was created to shorten website links and took off, quickly becoming the industry standard, and found themselves looking for an IT operation that would allow their company to reach enterprise standards.
Bitly Chief Technology Officer Rob Platzer explains, “We needed to evolve the technology infrastructure behind our platform. We were colocated in a data center environment with a single point of presence [POP]. We were procuring hardware the traditional way, buying tranches of servers and then having to live with that investment over the course of a 3-year or 4-year lease. Every time we made a technical decision and wanted to ship a new product, we would have to do some trading around internally to make it happen.”
The IBM Cloud provides Bitly with a high-performance hosting solution they need to expand their business with worldwide data centers that will allow them to take the next step towards releasing new products and services.
“The difference is like night and day,” says Platzer. “We can spin configurations of chassis up within our 4-hour SLA [service level agreement] instead of a 6-week lead time. We can rack and stack a server by clicking a button, have it up and running in hours, pay for it month to month, and spin it back down if we need to reduce capacity.”
Self-Service Technology Products Are On The Rise
Customers today expect instant access to services and information, making reliable digital channels essential to a business’ success. When American Airlines decided that they needed to improve customer experience with a new technology platform, they partnered up with IBM to find a solution through their cloud products. In order to get ahead of the competition, they needed to improve their digital channels with updated technology, generate faster response times, and provide better self-service products. By converting to the IBM Cloud, American Airlines was able to improve customer experiences with their Dynamic Rebooking app in airports.
The Managing Director of Customer Service Recovery at American Airlines, Julie Rath, explained, “The Dynamic Rebooking tool finds the best solution for each customer, walks them through the rebooking process, handles the ticket reissue, serves up the boarding pass, and sends a reroute message for their baggage. By giving control back to the customer, we make a positive impact on their experience.”
Not only does this improve the customer experience by allowing them to handle rebooking on their own without having to wait on a customer service line, but the system improves itself by learning from feedback.
Streaming Services Experience Lagged Videos
A video streaming service that lags can’t expect to remain in business very long. This is why when GameFly began production on its video game streaming service, they knew they’d need a cloud service that would produce the same quality as gaming hardware. In order to be successful, they would have to ensure that video graphics were up to par and that users didn’t experience any lagging.
Elad Dror, Senior Vice President at GameFly explained their decision to go with IBM Cloud saying, “Not many cloud providers offer servers with GPU [graphics processing unit] technology. It was great for us to discover that we can build servers with GPU in IBM facilities around the world.”
GameFly successfully found a solution to this problem by partnering with IBM, offering gamers the option to stream games online not only without the need for video game hardware but without reducing the video quality. “The locations of the IBM Cloud data centers allow us to get close to users and offer sufficient network round trip delay,” says Dror. “I’m happy to say we’ve managed to achieve an average network latency of 25 milliseconds in the US and 32 milliseconds in Europe.”
Conclusion
With so many products available in the IBM Cloud, it’s able to provide answers for an endless amount of dilemmas. How they’re used in each industry is up to the innovative professionals partnering with IBM who are coming up with these interesting solutions, and changing how business is done.
About the Author
Carl Linkletter is a Senior Cloud Architect for Stone Door Group, Docker Certified Associate, VMWare Certified Professional and Google Certified Architect. He is one of many consultants at Stone Door Group, a DevOps Solutions Integrator, who helps companies transform into a modern cloud enabled digital enterprise. Learn more about how we refactor applications and implement modern CI/CD practices. To talk with consultants like Julie about your next cloud transformation project, drop us a line at letsdothis@stonedoorgrooup.com