Today’s IT estates are massive, comprehensive and increasingly difficult to manage. IT leaders want to be more efficient, intuitive and sustainable — but they often don’t know where to start.

“Enterprises today are sitting on mountains of data that, in many cases, they do not know how to mine, analyze or use to benefit their business,” said Antoine Shagoury, global CTO of Kyndryl.

To address this problem, the multinational IT infrastructure services provider introduced its intelligent open-integration technology services platform Kyndryl Bridge in September. Over the last 10 months, the platform has experienced significant gains, including an estimated $1 billion in annualized customer savings, the IBM-spinoff company has announced.

“With this type of platform, customers can monitor all their resources,” David Tapper, IDC VP for outsourcing and managed cloud services, told SDxCentral. “This is a high priority. They need this type of system to be able to manage and orchestrate across all cloud resources.”

Widespread adoption, numerous use cases for Kyndryl Bridge

Kyndryl Bridge was introduced as a portfolio of services accessible through intelligent data layers using AIOps and automation, Shagoury explained. Previously, these services were delivered independently.

Kyndryl now has 500 global customers on the platform and is delivering services alongside tech industry partners Amazon, SAP and Red Hat.

Initial results include 84% reduction in time to resolution, 70% reduction in incident volume and 25% improvement in cloud resource costs, Shagoury said. Additionally, the company claims that it has helped customers avoid $670 million in costs by preventing thousands of incidents, and $370 million by reducing required maintenance windows. Kyndryl expects 1,000 customers to be on the platform by year-end.

Kyndryl was initially part of IBM until its separation in November 2021, launching with $2 billion in cash, 4,000 enterprise customers in more than 60 countries and revenues around $19 billion.

Expanded Kyndryl services, use cases

Cost-effectively managing infrastructure is an increasing concern for enterprises, said Tapper. Based on IDC research, it will be a top priority over the next several years.

The type of technology that Kyndryl offers — also referred to as control plane or managed cloud service — is critical for enterprises that have multiple providers both private and public, he explained.

“The need for a multicloud management platform to control all on-prem and cloud resources is paramount for enterprises in migrating and modernizing technology to the cloud while transforming their businesses,” he said.

He emphasized that multicloud management platforms like Kyndryl Bridge can support public cloud providers, automate development and deployment processes, accelerate generating business outcomes and provide comprehensiveness of visibility into technology operations.

These platforms also use AI to drive efficiencies and align consumption with user-specific needs, and FinOps to optimize spend across cloud resources, map costs to business units and forecast spending and budgeting, he added.

Tailoring control planes the greatest challenge

Kyndryl competes in a variety of categories with the likes of Accenture, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, NTT Data and former parent IBM Consulting.

As Tapper explained, all are focused on the same goal of observability, managing and monitoring IT environments while offering DevOps, security and sustainability capabilities. “The goal is to be all encompassing,” he said, adding that “not everybody has all the parts yet.”

He also noted that, “it’s a simple concept, but it is a complex platform.”

Enterprises have an incredible amount of data, and the goal for providers like Kyndryl is to wrangle that complexity for users of different personas — CEOs, CIOs, IT professionals — and align tools with their different requirements and use cases.

“To make that complexity of information consumable in a way that's easy for users to navigate: That's to me the big challenge of these platforms,” he said. “It’s not just one view for everybody.”

Helping reduce costs, drive more efficient data use

Kyndryl intends to expand to 190 services by the end of the fiscal year (March 2024), according to Shagoury. These services are in categories including apps, data and AI; cloud services; security and resiliency; network and edge; and digital workplace.

For instance, enterprises can integrate data to prevent cyber threats, manage security incident workflows and factor in local and global data compliance requirements. Or they can use an AI-powered carbon footprint calculator to measure energy consumption in real time and use data to analyze and generate recommendations to improve efficiencies.

Using Kyndryl Bridge, one global food company reduced the time to consolidate, distribute and verify department costs across its IT organization by 85%, Shagoury pointed out.

Irish utility company Bord Gáis Energy, meanwhile, sees Kyndryl Bridge as a “strategic tool guiding us on our transformation journey,” said Andy Nason, head of service and infrastructure. The platform provides an “open view into the full landscape of our technology environment,” he said, including security, servers and storage. This allows the company to gain insights to “quickly observe, correlate and take actions to transform more effectively as we progress with our cloud migration journey.”

Kyndryl is also partnering with AWS around its data lake and machine learning (ML) services to help joint customers more effectively leverage their data.

SAP, similarly, is working with Kyndryl to integrate migration techniques and automation to reduce project timelines. This helps to provide a comprehensive view of SAP and non-SAP workloads from a single view that “helps customers gain important insights and understandings from their enterprise data,” Steffi Kuebler, SAP’s SVP and head of business and data transformation solutions, said in a statement.

Expanding into generative AI, ESG and XOps

With all Kyndryl services now platform-enabled, the company can streamline customer experiences, offer cross-service bundling, and reduce time to design and deliver services, Shagoury said.

The platform has been successful, he noted, because it offers access to real-time, cross-platform provisioning, analytics, insights and recommendations, “allowing customers to take action to prevent downtime and better forecast future needs and costs.”

The service also provides out-of-the-box integrations, native partner collaboration and an expanding marketplace of third-party services. This allows enterprises to “grow their digital businesses, collaborate, create and innovate.”

In the future, Kyndryl Bridge will incorporate generative AI to “drive data-driven conversations with customers,” said Shagoury. The company is also investing and looking into innovations in areas including environmental and social governance (ESG), manufacturing and edge use cases (Industry 4.0), cyber resiliency and cross-functional operations (XOps).

“We will leverage Kyndryl Bridge to radically transform the service provider industry by offering fully digitized and AI/ML based enterprise services that our customers need — from consulting all the way to highly managed services,” Shagoury said.