Expanded AI-Powered Data Quality, the Latest Strategic Partnership, and more

Oct 20, 2025

Sonja Soderlund is an Oregon-based B2B freelance writer. Whether writing about mainframe computers, educational technology, or sustainable retail, she strives to bring clarity to complex issues. Connect with her or LinkedIn.

IBM and Groq Partner to Deliver Faster Agentic AI Capabilities

On October 20, IBM and Groq announced a strategic go-to-market and technology partnership designed to provide clients with ultra-high-speed, low-latency AI capabilities at a cost that accelerates agentic AI deployment.

Enterprises moving AI agents from pilot to production still face challenges with speed, cost, and reliability, especially in mission-critical sectors like healthcare, finance, government, retail, and manufacturing. This new partnership combines Groq’s speed, cost efficiency, and access to the latest open-source models with IBM’s agentic AI orchestration to deliver the infrastructure needed to scale.

For example, one of IBM’s clients, a health insurance provider, receives thousands of complex patient and provider questions simultaneously. With Groq, IBM’s AI agents can analyze information in real-time and deliver accurate answers immediately, enhancing patient experiences and helping the organization make faster, smarter decisions. This technology is also being applied in non-regulated industries such as retail. Another IBM client, an eyewear retailer, uses Groq for its HR agents to automate HR processes better and increase employee productivity.

IBM will offer access to Groq’s capabilities starting immediately, and the joint teams will focus on delivering the following capabilities to IBM clients:

  • Ultra-low latency and high-performance inference that unlocks the full potential of AI models and agentic AI, powering use cases such as customer care, employee support and productivity enhancement.
  • Secure, compliant AI deployment designed to meet the most stringent regulatory and security requirements, enabling trusted execution of complex workflows.
  • Seamless integration with IBM’s agentic product, watsonx Orchestrate, providing clients flexibility to adopt purpose-built agentic patterns tailored to diverse use cases.

The partnership will also add vLLM and Red Hat’s llm-d on the Groq inferencing system to offer different approaches to common AI challenges developers face during inference. The solution will enable watsonx to leverage capabilities in a familiar way and let customers stay in their preferred tools while accelerating inference with Groq.

Source: IBM

Precisely Expands Access to AI-Powered Data Quality with Natural Language Interfaces in the Data Integrity Suite

Precisely has announced expanded access to high-quality, AI-ready data with new enhancements to its Data Integrity Suite. The latest release introduces powerful AI-driven features that enable organizations to operationalize high-quality, AI-ready data even more quickly and intelligently.

Building on Precisely’s proven track record of innovation, the new updates deliver AI-powered assistance across the data quality lifecycle, removing barriers for both business and technical users. Precisely also continues to ensure enterprises have choice and control over their AI usage within the trusted framework of the Data Integrity Suite.

The new capabilities include:

  •  Natural language interfaces: Data quality tasks described in plain language are automatically converted by AI into custom code, making advanced data quality accessible to both technical and business users.
  • AI-Powered rule and description generation created from natural language prompts reduce manual complexity and increase time saved.
  • AI-generated sample data validates logic, accelerates deployment, and increases confidence in results. 
  • LLM integration in pipelines with support for “bring your own LLMs,” enables more intelligent automation while maximizing flexibility.

Empowering Teams Across the Enterprise

The enhancements tackle longstanding challenges organizations have faced with data quality, including accessibility, deployment speed, and pipeline flexibility. With intuitive no-code interfaces, both technical practitioners and business users can now more easily contribute to data quality efforts. Meanwhile, expanded support for external LLMs allows enterprises to align Precisely’s trusted framework with their preferred AI models, ensuring freedom of choice, operational control, and faster time-to-value.

“At Precisely, we’re committed to applying AI in ways that deliver measurable impact for our customers,” said Chris Hall, Chief Product Officer at Precisely. “This release marks another milestone in equipping organizations with intuitive, AI-powered tools that make data quality faster, more accessible, and more flexible than ever before – unlocking the true value of data across the enterprise.”

Source: PR Newswire

IBM Announces Advancements to Help Enterprises Operationalize AI

At IBM’s TechXchange conference this week, the company unveiled new product capabilities designed to help organizations move beyond experimentation to the full adoption of generative AI. The newly announced products specifically address the challenges that organizations face—from fragmented hybrid environments to gaps in data quality and AI readiness—with products built for production readiness, real-time governance, and seamless integration across hybrid cloud ecosystems.

“AI productivity is the new speed of business. These features will help clients remove bottlenecks across their entire technology lifecycle,” said Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President of Products, IBM Software.

Enhancing Trust and Performance for Agentic Orchestration

IBM’s agentic AI framework centers on watsonx Orchestrate, which provides more than 500 tools and domain-specific agents. Orchestrate is tool-agnostic, enabling scalable deployment and governance across environments.

One key addition coming to Orchestrate is AgentOps, an observability and governance layer that gives real-time transparency into agent behavior. By monitoring actions, applying policy-based controls, and flagging anomalies as they occur, AgentOps helps ensure security, reliability, and compliance.

For developers, IBM has also integrated Agentic Workflows to Orchestrate to replace fragile scripts with reusable, standardized flows. And Langflow Integration will allow non-coders to configure agents visually and quickly.

Additionally, IBM is extending these capabilities to the mainframe with watsonx Assistant for Z. Purpose-built IBM Z agents support proactive system management by understanding context, automating operational tasks, and maintaining enterprise-grade compliance. Building on the IBM z17 platform, this experience is designed to streamline workflows and improve productivity for mainframe teams.

Advancing the Foundation for Trusted Context

With its acquisition of HashiCorp, IBM is introducing Project Infragraph, an intelligent control plane that replaces fragmented tools and manual processes with a unified view of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. It eliminates silos by providing live visibility into an organization’s entire estate—whether within HCP or external systems—down to individual clusters and components.

Instead of relying on emails and spreadsheets to track vulnerabilities, teams gain near real-time insight into exposures and patch status across environments. Looking ahead, Infragraph will connect HCP with IBM’s broader software portfolio, including Red Hat Ansible and OpenShift, watsonx Orchestrate, Concert, Turbonomic, and Cloudability, enabling consistent management of infrastructure, security, and applications under a common policy model.

Accelerating Developer Productivity

Moving beyond today’s AI coding assistants, IBM is previewing Project Bob at TechXchange, an AI-first developer tool system that will fundamentally transform software development Life Cycles (SDLC) by working alongside developers to write, test, upgrade, and secure software. Project Bob uses and orchestrates between industry-leading LLMs including Anthropic Claude, Mistral, Llama, and IBM Granite.

Key capabilities include:

  • Multi-language Support: Optimized for Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python, with additional coverage for RPG, Go, C#, Rust, PHP, Kotlin, and more, enabling teams to work across today’s diverse technology stacks.
  • End-to-End Java Modernization: Automates upgrades, framework migrations, and multi-step refactoring across large codebases.
  • Agentic, Context-Aware Execution: Coordinates coding, testing, and remediation tasks while preserving context across sessions.
  • Enterprise-Grade Security and Scale: Embeds security into workflows with “shift-left” vulnerability scanning, accelerates FedRAMP hardening, and enables quantum-safe cryptographic migration.

Source: IBM

Mainframe Technology Vendors DataVantage and PopUp Mainframe Announce Strategic Partnership

PopUp Mainframe Ltd, an enterprise software company dedicated to revolutionizing mainframe system delivery, and Direct Computer Resources, Inc, owners of DataVantage, a leading data management solution, today jointly announce their new working partnership to empower and accelerate mainframe innovation.

Harnessing the potential of the latest PopUp Mainframe X and Z Edition products and DataVantage DME Data Masking Express™, the partnership and reseller agreement promises to offer a highly capable solution to mainframe-based organizations looking to accelerate their business-critical application deliveries without compromising on data compliance.

By providing businesses with their own low-cost, on-demand environments, PopUp Mainframe revolutionizes mainframe delivery. The PopUp Mainframe X and Z Editions provide a functionally equivalent environment to z/OS to ensure the behaviour is predictable, regardless of the platform chosen.

Separate editions offer flexibility for customers who want to be able to choose between x86 / cloud-based platforms (X Edition) or running on LinuxONE, or inside the mainframe IFL/KVM Linux environment (Z Edition).

Source: PopUp Mainframe

Introducing IBM Guardium Cryptography Manager

With sensitive data spreading across hybrid environments and quantum computing imminently threatening widely used encryption algorithms, a recent IBM report found that only 30% of organizations have completed a cryptographic inventory, leaving most unprepared for current and emerging risks. 

Building on Guardium Quantum Safe, which assessed cryptographic vulnerabilities, IBM has introduced Guardium Cryptography Manager, an AI-powered solution for visibility, centralized lifecycle management, encryption, and post-quantum remediation, helping enterprises move toward crypto-agility.

IBM combines decades of cryptographic innovation, enterprise experience, and leadership in quantum computing. According to Heather West, PhD, Research Manager, IDC, “IBM’s approach to crypto-agility reflects a broader understanding of the evolving cryptographic landscape. By aligning its data security strategy with emerging quantum risks—and leveraging its expertise in quantum computing—IBM is well-positioned to help organizations prepare for the next era of encryption.” 

Key capabilities of Guardium Cryptography Manager include:

  • Cryptographic Visibility & Control: Provides deep insight into cryptographic assets, risk scoring, audit-ready reporting, and automated remediation to support migration to quantum-resilient encryption.
  • Centralized Lifecycle Management: Automates discovery and management of keys and certificates, including creation, rotation, expiration, and remediation. Integrates with HashiCorp Vault PKI to detect weak or expired certificates and trigger automated fixes.
  • Agentless Transparent Database Encryption: Delivers centralized,agentless visibility into database encryption, identifies gaps, and automates remediation using native encryption capabilities.

Availability

Guardium Cryptography Manager is available now, with certificate lifecycle and database encryption features coming November 2025. 

Source: IBM

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign up to receive the latest mainframe information

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Read More