Prague, Warsaw, Moscow – January 31, 2022: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the expansion of its Client Engineering team in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) for customers and business partners. Located in Prague, Warsaw and Moscow, IBM Client Engineering fosters innovation in the region by providing an enhanced customer experience, focused on co-creation, technical eminence, and speed.

IBM Client Engineering brings together teams of designers, technical developers, solution architects, data scientists, security experts, dev ops experts and more. They work side-by-side with clients to bring IBM Technologies and Services to life solving critical business challenges at speed - all before a contract is even signed. In CEE, a Serbian tech start-up Flamel.AI collaborated with the IBM team to create an AI-powered web app for tabletop role-playing games in only seven weeks. Built on IBM Cloud with IBM Watson, it gives gamers a richer experience with more play and up to 75% less prep.

The DSK Bank in Bulgaria, a member of OTP Group, recently collaborated with the Client Engineering team in CEE to co-create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for extending DSK’s integration layer. Over 20 experts from both the bank and IBM worked together hands-on, using Agile and DevOps practices to co-create assets and architecture that the DSK Bank could implement instantly after the MVP completion. “Through the MVP that we successfully co-created with the IBM Client Engineering team, we increased business efficiency of the technology evaluation process. It allowed us to quickly assess the initiative’s outcomes from a business and technical perspective," said Georgi Yotov, Head of Development at DSK Bank. The core of the solution was powered by Confluent Platform for IBM Cloud Pak for Integration installed on Red Hat OpenShift together with IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture (CDC).

Examples of Client Engineering led client engagements:

• In 4 weeks, transform the life insurance eligibility process for a provider using AI;
• In 3 weeks, lead a client from no cloud, no managed services and no automation to using Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud to transform their infrastructure and application management;
• For a public sector client with heavy data governance requirements, show how IBM technology can run analytics 8X faster for ½ cost, in a secure environment without copying or moving data.

“IBM Client Engineering is IBM’s unique framework for putting innovation at the heart of an enterprise and enabling innovation at speed and scale. They create an entrepreneurial “fishbowl” to deliver outcomes faster than would otherwise be possible. It’s fundamentally about delivering business value for our clients, while helping them infuse intelligence into their workflows,” says Wolfgang Wendt, IBM General Manager, Central and Eastern Europe.

COVID-19 has changed the entire landscape in which organizations worldwide operate. Customers and employees became homebound, supply chains and entire industries were disrupted. Organizations needed to reinvent their existing business models, speed digitization and technologies like AI, hybrid cloud and prioritize security to survive and emerge stronger.

“Our clients are in a world of massive uncertainty and it’s no longer clear how they should invest their money and what kind of return they can expect. They’re trying to figure out how to thrive and reemerge from COVID-19 as a different organization. This is exactly the type of holistic end-to-end transformation that IBM specializes in,” explains Martin Svik, IBM CEE CTO and IBM Client Engineering Leader.

IBM Client Engineering saw notable growth during the pandemic from almost 300 engagements in 2020 to over 2,500 in 2021 as businesses needed to connect virtually, make decisions faster with their time-sensitive journeys to respond quickly to disruptions and focus on outcomes.