The Power of Collaboration: Persistent and IBM Accelerate Enterprise Modernization for a Digital Future

By Sandeep Kalra, CEO and Executive Director
June 2, 2021

There is significant power in collaborating to drive creative disruption. Throughout Persistent Systems' 30-year history, we have been fortunate to work with some of the most innovative companies in the world - often as part of a long-term, multifaceted collaboration. We are especially proud of one of our earliest and longest-standing relationships with a true pioneer in open hybrid cloud and AI technologies-IBM.

We believe that few technology partners are better positioned to deliver innovative solutions. From doubling down on hybrid cloud to pushing boundaries in artificial intelligence, IBM makes decisive and strategic moves that help to enable its partners-and their clients-- accelerate their growth. IBM's mission inspires us, and we are grateful to be included as a partner that is embracing industry clouds to accelerate modernization by IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in his 2020 letter to investors.

A shared journey: past, present and future

We began our journey with IBM more than 20 years ago with a small pilot project in security. Today, our collaboration spans more than 400 shared customers across 50 IBM brands and 125 IBM products. Our work is supported by over 2000 Persistent engineers dedicated to the IBM relationship.

Much of our collaboration is rooted in helping customers modernize. While digital transformation is a strategic lens through which many view organization-wide change, modernization underpins many of those initiatives. Legacy and new systems, platforms and software solutions that organizations adopt must be transformed in order to optimize operations and address future-ready infrastructure for the long-term. This effort underscores a mutual mission in helping customers modernize and accelerate their path to digital transformation.

'Our longtime collaboration with Persistent across industry sectors fuels our shared mission to help enterprises and their customers accelerate their digital transformations with Red Hat OpenShift,' said Evaristus Mainsah, GM, IBM Hybrid Cloud and Edge Ecosystem. 'Together with Persistent, we're delivering the hybrid cloud and AI strategies that customers need to succeed in the marketplace.'

Investing with IBM for digital modernization

We are making decisive moves in people, process and tools to help our clients deploy IBM solutions, to innovate more quickly. We have made significant investments to enable the adoption of hybrid cloud environments, support security modernization and drive industry-focused transformation. Across each area, we bring a combination of expertise, deep product development experience, and strong horizontal technology capabilities across core IT modernization, data and security.

We are supporting IBM to build, service and sell in three key areas:

Hybrid Cloud Modernization: Containerization platforms with technologies like Red Hat OpenShift are at the core of hybrid cloud deployments. Responding to demand from our clients, we are expanding our Red Hat Center of Excellence by integrating it with our innovative approach to co-engineering pods. This effort will help enable IBM customers to tap into Persistent's nimble, customer-ready teams focused on advanced product engineering and technology. We already have over 2,000 Kubernetes-trained engineers and more than 300 Red Hat sales and delivery accreditations worldwide.

Security Modernization: We recognize that security underpins any digital modernization effort. We already use IBM security solutions across many of our own security operations centers (SOCs). We are a development and support partner across multiple IBM Security products and are leveraging our deep product capabilities to support deployments with shared customers. We recently aligned our 600-person security services practice with IBM Global Business Services to help clients modernize their footprint with cross-vendor security products.

Industry Modernization: Companies in industries with highly-regulated, mission-critical workloads are turning to industry clouds that are designed to address unique requirements. We are helping shared customers deploy the IBM Cloud for Financial Services and began to onboard our own Persistent Digital Banking Solution to the platform to help accelerate the use of industry clouds in the marketplace. In the rapidly growing area of telecom, we will build and deploy our Telco Network Cloud Manager solution on the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications to help unlock the power of 5G and edge.

A multifaceted relationship

We believe that relationships like the one between Persistent Systems and IBM transcend one-off results. They thrive on shared learning, mutual value and the sustained impact of speed to market, flexibility and innovation for customers. Recently at Think 2021, IBM's flagship technology conference, we announced our intent to join a growing ecosystem of partners using IBM's new Automation Foundation and IBM Cloud Paks for Automation to modernize mission-critical workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Our latest collaboration marks our mutual commitment to help partners and their customers gain a competitive advantage in today's market.

More than ever, organizations realize the urgent imperative to not only become digital-first, but also to build and scale with modern, future-ready technologies and solutions. Together with IBM, we have helped companies successfully modernize their operations and infrastructure to increase resilience. We look forward to driving this innovation together for another 20 years and beyond.

Sandeep Kalra
CEO and Executive Director, Persistent Systems