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IBM announces new products and features at TechXchange Conference

21 October 2024

 

Author

Jon Parker

Staff Writer

At the annual IBM TechXchange Conference, technologists and business practitioners who use IBM products get hands-on learning targeted to their industry and specialty, led by experts from IBM, user groups and sponsors.

It’s an opportunity for developers of all levels of experience to dive deep into the heart of IBM solutions and keep their skillsets at the forefront of innovation. It’s also the perfect time for IBM to introduce dozens of new products and features that attendees can learn about during the conference. Here’s an overview.

Top stories

IBM introduces Granite 3.0 AI models

IBM’s third-generation Granite™ flagship language models outperform or match the performance of similarly sized models from leading model providers on top benchmarks with best-in-class performance, cost efficiency, transparency and safety.

New IBM® Granite™ models available now:

  • General-purpose language models: Granite 3.0 8B Instruct, Granite 3.0 2B Instruct, Granite 3.0 8B Base and Granite 3.0 2B Base
  • Guardrails and safety models: Granite Guardian 3.0 8B and Granite Guardian 3.0 2B
  • Mixture of experts models: Granite 3.0 3B A800M Instruct and Granite 3.0 1B A400M Instruct

The Granite 8B and 2B models are designed as “workhorse” models for enterprise AI, delivering state-of-the-art performance and cost efficiency for tasks such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), classification, summarization, entity extraction and tool use. These compact, versatile models are designed to be fine-tuned with enterprise data and seamlessly integrated into any business environment or workflow.

The new Granite Guardian models permit application developers to implement safety guardrails by checking user prompts and large language model (LLM) responses for a variety of risks. The Granite Guardian 8B and 2B models provide one of the most comprehensive set of risk and harm detection capabilities available in the market today.

The new mixture of experts Granite models provide an excellent balance between performance and cost. Granite 1B A400M and Granite 3B A800M are smaller, lightweight models that could be deployed for low latency applications as well as CPU-based deployments.

IBM watsonx Code Assistant boosts developer productivity

IBM® watsonx Code Assistant™ leverages generative AI and automation to boost developer productivity and shorten the software development lifecycle.

Developers can accelerate workflows across Python, Java, C, C++, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript and more, with generative AI assistance that is fine-tuned for enterprise code.

General availability: 15 November 2024

New features in watsonx.ai empower developers

Collaborative AI studio watsonx.ai™ has been enhanced with a powerful toolkit for developers and model builders. New low-code/no-code tools simplify the development and deployment of AI applications. The new AutoAI for RAG provides templates for easy experimentation with grounding documents. New features also include an expanded suite of APIs, SDKs, tools, models and runtimes, support for agentic workflows, and support for tuning and updating LLMs on private datasets using InstructLab™.

General availability: 4Q 2024

See previews of these new products and features at TechXchange

IBM® Guardium® AI Security

Manage the security risk of sensitive AI data and AI models. Discover AI deployments, meet compliance requirements, mitigate vulnerabilities and protect sensitive data in AI models through a common view of data assets.

IBM® Guardium® Quantum Safe

Discover, assess and prioritize cryptographic vulnerabilities through a common view of data assets. Protect your critical data from both conventional and emerging quantum-enabled risks.

IBM watsonx™ Orchestrate AI Agents for HR

Enable employees and managers to automate HR tasks through a trusted, AI-powered chat experience. Users can get instant answers to key HR questions and quickly complete complex tasks using digital automations designed to orchestrate resolution across HR systems, apps and policy documents.

IBM Environmental Intelligence

Build climate-resilient solutions with more accurate and reliable environmental and geospatial datasets.

IBM Concert® Resilience Lens

A single, unified solution that aggregates data across multiple tools to provide a comprehensive view of your application’s resilience. Measure resilience across critical dimensions such as availability, recoverability, and scalability.

IBM Db2® Generative AI for database assistant powered by watsonx ™

The next generation of data management, powered by generative AI. Solve common database problems faster, reduce costs, simplify and optimize queries and build gen AI apps with trusted enterprise data.

New product features announced at TechXchange

Data platform

IBM® Guardium® Data Security Center

IBM® Granite™: Models for Salesforce and AWS Bedrock

IBM watsonx.data™: Data ingestion and orchestration with the modern data stack and common policy gateway

IBM Manta Data Lineage with IBM Knowledge Catalog governance metadata​ and data intelligence assistant

IBM watsonx™ Orchestrate®​: AI Agent Chat, a next-generation user experience with LLM-based routing and orchestration capabilities, enabling users to quickly and easily engage AI agents to help them get work done.

IBM watsonx™: Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics

IBM® Fusion for IBM Netezza® Performance Server  

IBM® Planning Analytics on Microsoft Azure

IBM DataStage® Flow Designer, natural language generative AI assistant

IBM DataStage® code generation enables SQL pushdown to watsonx.data™ lakehouse

IBM® StreamSets Python SDK for developer extensibility

IBM Data Integration for Unstructured Data enables ingestion, transformation and pre-processing for RAG use cases

IBM watsonx.governance™: Evaluation studio and Guardrails

IBM® Process Mining assistant with generative AI

Automation platform

IBM Sterling® Secure Proxy with outbound security capabilities

IBM Apptio™ essentials for costing, planning, billing and benchmarking

IBM Rhapsody® Systems Engineering cloud-native model-based systems engineering (MBSE) solution built on SysML V2

IBM® webMethods integration platform as a service

IBM® Targetprocess on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

IBM API Connect® with generative AI assistant

IBM Project Ripasso

IBM MaaS360® automated deployment of mobile threat defense

IBM Maximo® with generative AI assistant

IBM NS1 Connect® Zero Trust Connect

IBM Instana® Observability: Automated resource optimization powered by Turbonomic®

IBM DevOps Automation with AI assistant

IBM Instana Observability: Generative AI observability on AWS

IBM Envizi™ ESG Suite Scope 3 Financed Emissions for the financial sector

IBM Verify Digital Credentials

IBM Maximo® renewable energy asset management

IBM Apptio™ Enterprise Business Management analytics platform