Turn data into knowledge with IBM Concert

Technology is advancing faster than ever.  But new technology leads to new complexity. 

Worldwide IT Spending on software is expected to exceed $1 trillion in 2024*. When this is combined with AI and modern development practices, it could fuel a growth in the number of cloud-native applications from 531.3 million in 2024 to over 1 billion by 2028** 

Each new application can bring an overwhelming amount of data, hundreds of dependencies, tangled interconnectivity, a reliance on external services,
and different tools to manage it.

Gone are the days of easy-to-track, simple, monolithic applications. Now, business applications are a complex ecosystem built and managed using an ever-expanding arsenal of tools and services deployed across hybrid cloud environments.

Deciphering, analyzing, and making informed decisions from the vast data created can become a Herculean task. App owners and SREs may find themselves managing instead of enhancing those applications and so miss the opportunity to drive innovation and value for the business.

The question is, how do you navigate this complexity and accelerate your team’s adoption of new technology?  The answer: AI-powered automation.

Introducing the upcoming IBM Concert, powered by watsonx AI

IBM Concert puts you, the user, in the driver’s seat with insights into how your applications really work. It can provide application owners with a detailed understanding of their connected applications and toolsets, so they can find opportunities to streamline compliance processes.

Powered by AI from watsonx, Concert can generate analyses, visualizations and recommendations that you can quickly turn into action. By helping you discover gaps, prioritize insights and instrument changes, Concert helps to reduce complexity and streamline operations so you can make your business more resilient, more innovative, and more cost-effective.

What exactly does IBM Concert do?

Powered by AI from watsonx, IBM Concert will provide you with tools to help you streamline application operations and create a holistic, detailed view of your connected applications with recommendations for actions. Concert can also be configured to trigger automations based on the recommendations it provides.

Setup is simple.

Step 1. Connect to your existing supported applications and toolsets. IBM Concert uses these to automatically discover relevant data about your applications’ operations, giving you a holistic understanding of your app ecosystem from the very start.

Step 2. IBM Concert then uses its AI engine to delve deep into your application architecture, revealing intricate connections, dependencies, and opportunities.

Step 3. IBM Concert can provide recommendations on everything from where your apps are deployed to how they can be secured, and trigger automated actions. 

What is the IBM Concert 360 view?

After gathering all of the data, Concert creates a single view of your application, providing visibility into your predefined application topology. This can eliminate the need to sift through multiple, siloed dashboards.

Then, when you log in, you will see a summarized overview of your applications inside a dynamic interface. It provides:

• A central view of your application environment along with dependencies
• Critical information around risk in one place
• A synthesis of collected data from multiple applications – regardless of their different languages and outputs – to reveal common flows, which were previously unavailable

Concert can also generate both operational and strategic suggestions to enhance your applications’ performance and resilience. These recommendations are tailored to your specific application architecture, empowering you to make informed decisions that can help drive real results.  SRE’s can leverage automations like Terraform, Ansible and Turbonomic  that interface directly with the prioritized recommendations.

With Concert, you can ask questions using natural language to deepen your understanding and explore the potential impact on your application. For example, you can ask “what can I do to fix this problem?”, or, “What is the biggest risk here?”  Concert can generate insights for you to take action.  The recommendations that IBM Concert provides are guided by the potential business impact the changes could have, helping you provide access to information for employees and business leaders alike.

Risk, compliance and certificate management: IBM Concert use cases

We will be introducing IBM Concert with an initial focus on three use cases: 

• Application Security Risk Management
  Risk mitigation is a significant challenge for enterprise organizations, both in terms of cost and the thousands of hours employees spend each year on risk mitigation.  Concert helps you tackle these challenges by enabling proactive prioritization, mitigation, and tracing of application vulnerabilities. IBM Concert provides you with concrete suggestions for mitigation and helps to proactively reveal vulnerabilities before integration into the codebase. With these app-centric insights, IBM Concert helps organizations prioritize risks based on application impact and delivers near real-time insights with context to enhance operational efficiency.

• Application Compliance Management
  IBM Concert helps streamline compliance management by helping you manage your security standards as applications grow to help you minimize resource usage and enhance security. Its unified view of compliance impacts helps enable seamless collaboration across app, security, and compliance teams. By tracking deviations from your selected standards and helping to prioritize actions, Concert helps foster proactive compliance practices. This allows compliance monitoring to be integrated into the app lifecycle, both in development and as apps evolve. By helping you to monitor, analyze and evaluate risk and compliance across your IT estate, Concert allows you to adapt to changes and evolution in near real-time.

• Application Certificate Management
  Addressing compliance requirements also means efficiently managing security certificates and application performance. With automated visibility from Concert, you can identify and track the lifecycle of certificates, receiving insights into expiration dates and potential risks. IBM Concert also ranks certificates based on their potential impact severity, enabling organizations to prioritize renewal efforts and mitigate potential disruptions effectively. And with automated workflows and contextualized insights, IBM Concert helps you make informed decisions to optimize certificate management and to manage renewals in timely fashion to help you prevent operational disruption.

Additional risk use cases are planned to be introduced over time, as well as other focus areas like cost, observability, security, networking and more.

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

Get started with Concert

Technology may be accelerating — and with it, complexity — but there is an answer.

By leveraging generative AI to help provide a detailed view of your application landscape, IBM Concert can help unlock new opportunities for optimization and innovation, helping your applications operate at peak performance.  IBM consultants can help clients establish their AIOps strategy, with focus on risk, compliance and certificate management, and apply IBM Concert and other technologies to combat IT complexity across hybrid cloud environments. IBM Concert is planned to GA on June 18 with an initial focus on the application risk management, compliance management and certificate management use cases.

Learn more about Concert

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 * Source:  Gartner Press Release:  Gartner forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 8% in 2024, October 18, 2023.  GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

 **Source: IDC Market Note: 1 Billion New Logical Applications. April 2024, IDC #US51953724