International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening. Thank you for joining us for today's IBM Community webinar. I just want to go over a couple of housekeeping things before we begin. [Operator Instructions] Later today, you'll be sent a link to the on-demand recording as well as the link to download the slides plus a link to the IBM TechXchange Community where you can connect directly with our experts. So without further ado, I will hand it over to today's presenters.

Thank you, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, team, and happy LinuxONE 4 Express GA day. We are so happy to be here with you today, and we are streaming live from London. Why are we in London? Well, our very first LinuxONE 4 Express client is here, University College of London, and they will be joining us later in the session and couldn't be more excited for that. So our content is packed today for this event. And if you go through it, you'll be saying, there's not a lot of IBMers presenting today. As proud IBMers, we could fill the air talking about how superior we believe our technology is, but we think it's more compelling and certainly more exciting to hear from other people. So we have our ISVs who we couldn't do this without, we have our beloved business partners who we certainly could not do this business without, and of course, we have our most beloved clients with us today. It's going to be a really great event. We're very excited to have a GA for such an exciting product. So before we jump into it, I just wanted to share a couple of words. On February 6 is when we announced LinuxONE 4 Express. And so like I said, we can always as IBMers, write blogs, post and talk about how great it is. But when others do, it really is awesome. And some news outlets that are non-IBM picked up our story, our press release, and I wanted to just share some of the blurbs. I went back through LinkedIn and pulled up a few. So again, these are non-IBMer quotes that we think were really awesome to hear in the media. Easily integrate AI capabilities with mission-critical data. Significantly lowers cost and streamlines IT environments. Seamless integration, reducing both energy usage and data center floor space. Scalability to match growing workloads and performance requirements. Nothing short of fantastic. We all work really hard, whether we're IBMers, clients or ISVs. And when the world starts to embrace all of our hard work, it's something we're celebrating, and that's what today is. It's a celebration of IBM LinuxONE 4 Express. And also, we want you to be just as excited when the entire webinar is done. So again, thank you so much for joining us. Questions go into the chat. It will be monitored. We have marketing monitoring. And of course, Kenny is there, throw him all your technical questions, he's ready for them. So with that, I'm going to turn it over now to Melissa Fuller, our Product Manager for LinuxONE Express 4.

Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. So in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape -- challenges, how can an organization deploy underlying infrastructure operating more efficiently while simultaneously ensuring data privacy? With the exponential growth of digital information, companies lose work to safeguard sensitive data from the threat of computer breaches while also providing solid uninterrupted service for their customers. This downtime can result in damage to the reputation and lost revenue. Integration of artificial intelligence presents both opportunities and hurdles as businesses seek to harness its potential for insights and automation while also ensuring transparency. The trend to achieve these objectives while minimizing costs can add an additional layer of complexity, requiring innovative solutions. Now what if you could deliver cyber resiliency and build trust and transparency with your customers? What if you could leverage AI across your mission-critical applications? What if you have the flexibility to scale your IT resources to the needs of your business now and in the future? And what if you could do all of this while simultaneously reducing your cost of IT? Next slide, please. In comes the IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, a modern flexible rack-mount Linux server with up to 16 cores. The LinuxONE 4 Express brings the enterprise-grade AI, security and resiliency capabilities of LinuxONE to help clients address a wide range of use cases, now starting at a low entry price of $135,000. The new LinuxONE 4 Express is a cyber-resilient system with confidential computing capabilities designed to help protect data from external attacks and bad actors within an organization by automatically encrypting data in flight. And like other members of the LinuxONE 4 product family, the LinuxONE 4 Express is designed to deliver 89's availability, which is best in industry. The LinuxONE 4 Express comes equipped with the IBM Telum processor, which contains on-chip acceleration for AI inferencing, while a transaction is taking place is designed to help customers achieve business insights at scale across industries. This new LinuxONE 4 system is built to simplify the IT experience for small and medium businesses by offering 3 preconfigured machine sizes and pricing options as well as full solution add-on packages. Its flexible design allows you to scale beyond 16 cores as your workloads grow. Now with minimal energy requirements for additional cores, you can expect to see increased energy benefits and cost savings and you scale upwards. Businesses can now get these resiliency, AI and flexibility benefits of the platform at a lower TCO. We estimate that clients can save up to 52% on their total cost of ownership over 5 years by moving the Linux workloads from an impaired x86 system to an IBM LinuxONE 4 Express. With all these mentioned benefits and the reduced cost of IT, clients around the world are using the IBM LinuxONE 4 Express to create value for their businesses, and so can you. LinuxONE is a leading solution for digital assets use cases. The new LinuxONE 4 Express is equipped with Secure Execution for Linux, which provides scalable solution for individual workloads to help protect against cybersecurity attacks, such as those from malicious administrative access. LinuxONE is a great solution for consolidating your database workloads with consolidation ratios as high as 21 x86 cores to 1 LinuxONE core. And the more servers you consolidate, the more floor space you can see in your data center. Businesses are leveraging the IBM Telum processor's capabilities to run their AI workloads. Now one of the most compelling examples is fraud detection. Companies are using AI to review credit card transactions in real time, reducing losses due to fraud and protecting their organizations and their customers. You'll also hear from University College London later on how they're leveraging the benefits of LinuxONE for research and development. LinuxONE can help solve problems for these use cases and more. We have a jam-packed agenda today, so I'll pass it back over to Megan for our next segment.

[indiscernible] forward to market, really appreciate it. Okay. So up next in our agenda here, we're going to do a fireside chat with Evolving Solutions, one of our business partners in the United States that we love working with. So I would like to introduce Gerard Howells. Gerard, welcome to our program.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Megan.

As I said earlier, business partners are so critical to the work that we do. And having the opportunity to have you join us here today is really fantastic. So thank you for being here. So we're going to jump right in. I have a couple of questions for you that I'm hoping we can talk about. The first is, why do you believe your clients are choosing LinuxONE technology?

I think there's a number of reasons. A lot of them were covered in the -- in Melissa's opening. And those really are concrete reasons that we're seeing people try to move to the LinuxONE platform. Consolidation of workload, because the scalability of the platform is a huge thing. And also the ability -- the advanced abilities of things like the Telum chip with the on-chip AI inferencing is absolutely huge because if you -- that distance to data that we always talk about, well, you're not having to worry about going out to an external source to do that inferencing, but you can do it within a transaction. The example of fraud detection is a really good example of that because you want to do that in real time, and you might have very tight SLAs to do so. And then also the consolidation is not just a thing that you do because of the efficiency of having a workload in a single place, but a lot of organizations now have initiatives where they want to be reducing their footprint in their data center, they want to be more energy efficient. They want to maximize the abilities of the pieces of hardware that are running these critical business -- critical workloads on without having to spread them out across the data center. So as the example of consolidating the security workloads, that might have a very large footprint because of the horizontal scalabilities of those platform isn't the same as LinuxONE is a really good example.

Well, and you just hit on a couple of topics that I want to dig a little bit deeper on. As far as cyber resiliency, sustainability, scalability, you just talked about some of that. Why do you think these topics are so important right now with your clients?

I think the vast majority of clients who are looking at these solutions are industries where they care about those things, either because they're motivated internally because of the criticality of the business function or they have regulations that mandate they have to do it. So they won't pass an order if they're not able to operate in the secure manners. So I think that a lot of organizations that are looking at these solutions really care about these things as a preemptive. We always talk about rather than cure, we talk about prevention. And migrating workloads to LinuxONE is a preventative mechanism where you can essentially say, we've done these things upfront. So now the auditor comes in and has their checklist and says, are you doing these things? You can say, absolutely, we've been doing these things from the kickoff, because of the inherent technologies that exist, things like pervasive encryption, things like acceleration of those encryption functions that are all on-chip for several generations now within this platform. That's the kind of thing that we're seeing motivates these moves to LinuxONE.

Yes. I love that when you say preventative, that's a great way to put it. And also compliance driven, you hit on that a little bit, but we are seeing some compliance driving these conversations and decisions around the world. Different countries have different regulations, but staying compliant is important no matter what industry you're in or what geo, right?

Undoubtedly. Yes. And it's a big issue to get into compliance. Being in compliance upfront is much easier and much more preferable than doing remediation later down the road because no one wants to get an audit finding and then have to go remediate it and figure that out and scramble. It's better to do that upfront. And that's what the power of something like LinuxONE 4 Express gives you the ability to do.

Thank you for giving me some insight into clients that you're working with. But now I would like to turn it a little bit and ask you about you and your colleagues at Evolving Solutions. And what is it that interests you about LinuxONE technology, wanting to share it with clients? And we know why it's important, but what excites Evolving Solutions about LinuxONE?

I think the thing that really excites me about it is it's kind of -- it's giving this platform a new lease of life. We've seen Linux on this platform for 20 years at this point. But having a dedicated solution that allows you to leverage the massive capabilities of the architecture is something that's really exciting to me as someone who's been in this industry and been on the platform for a number of years. And communicating that to why we take place -- take part in events like this is because getting that to our clients and potential clients is absolutely huge. So we have at IBM, an innovation lab at [indiscernible] Minnesota. And I've stood up a bunch of Linux infrastructure on there that allows me to demonstrate some of the capabilities of this amazing, amazing platform. And I think showing that in both -- not just to customers, potential customers, but internally to other people who might not know this technology exists, you think of the dreaded L word and -- L word, legacy. This isn't a new platform, this is a highly advanced platform that allows you to really leverage the capabilities that are inherent in the architecture and are constantly being developed in a bleeding edge. And I think that's what really gets us energized is being able to communicate that message to coworkers and to the customers that side.

Yes. That's awesome. I love it. We're very excited. There's so much momentum around the platform. And like you said, Linux has been on Z for decades, right? And LinuxONE has been around for, I believe, 9-ish years now. But we're at a high, right? It has never been as embraced as it is right now. So before I let you go, I just want to say thank you again to Gerard, and to Evolving Solutions for partnering with us. Like I said, we couldn't do it without you. So thank you for sharing your perspective and joining us today, Gerard.

Thank you so much, Megan. I really appreciate the opportunity. And yes, I'm excited to continue working on this amazing platform. So yes, it's going to be a great day. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. Let's keep trucking down on our agenda with hearing from other people other than IBMers. So we are going to hear from an ISV panel. Love our ISVs. If you've ever heard me present before, you've heard me use the analogy of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and locking arms of your business partner and your ISVs to go work with your clients. It's something that we must do, and our ISV ecosystem is super important to us. Yes, we know you want more platform support. We get that, but we are working so hard, and we are so lucky to have ISVs with us today, such as, where is my panel? Where is Rivi? Where is John? Where is Clemen? We have the best panel. So gentlemen, please introduce yourselves to the audience. Rivi?

Hi, my name is Rivi. I'm the CEO of Clari5. We are in something called as a real-type cross-channel enterprise fraud management for banks. What we essentially do is analyze everything that happens in a bank in real time when a transaction is in flight.

Excellent. Clemen?

Hi. Everyone. My name is Clemen and...

Go ahead, Clemen. Sorry about that. I think we're having some technical issues to the audience that we are waiting for John to join us from Exponential AI. So Clemen, sorry about that. Over to you.

Thanks, Megan. Hi, everyone. My name is Clemen Chiang, and I represent Spiking. We are very, very excited to announce that we have joined the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator program for 2023, and we are taking the lead in the industry model for solving problems in the capital market. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you both again for being here. So let's hop into it with a question for both of you to answer, okay? The first one, because we're going to really hit upon AI and LinuxONE in this discussion with you guys. Can you share with us, Rivi, starting with you, some AI use cases that you're seeing with your clients? What are they adopting? What are they interested in? Can you share some perspective with us?

Okay. So Megan, when we look at fraud in banks, people typically take a segmented siloed view. But if you look at the screen here, fraud is no longer a siloed perspective. It is a wider perspective, it has to cover everything that the bank does across the 20-odd channels. And it has to analyze everything that I know about that customer in that 20 years of relationship with the customer. And what -- how much time do you have? You just have 30 milliseconds to do these calculations, okay? And you need to now -- every time a transaction is in flight, take 30 seconds, do a segment of one AI to help that customer prevent fraud, make the transaction compliant or make money or whatever. So we are seeing the rise of something called as extreme precision AI with respect to a single transaction. I will call it as a segment of one precision AI when a transaction is in flight. And this just sums up what is the need of AI at this point of time. And this particular problem can only be solved by a platform like LinuxONE.

Thank you, Rivi. Clemen, you're up to give you answer.

Thank you, Megan. We are solving 3 major use cases. Number 1 is large language models. And this is really important to us because we are constructing the Holy Grail portfolio. Now what does that mean? Today, we are able to track every single money manager on Wall Street, what stocks they are buying in real time. But more importantly, we also like to know why these stocks they invested in. Large language models allow us to do that. Number 2 is exploiting proprietary knowledge. This is really important. By utilizing generative AI, money managers are able to build upon past successes and thereby helping them to unearth future investment opportunities. Number three, transforming the roles of analysts. We believe we can potentially replace traditional analyst functions on Wall Street because machines can process and analyze data much, much faster, thereby empowering businesses and individuals alike. Thank you.

Thank you both for those answers. Real time, I love it. I mean you're hitting on all the words that we hear all the time. And I think you both would probably agree that AI is the hottest topic when you get in front of your clients. And then it spawns a lot of other conversations about other opportunities that our clients are seeking, other ways we can support them and how to work within the realm of AI as we start to enter it together. So thank you both for that. And I just want the audience to know, we were supposed to have John Keith from exponential AI joining this panel discussion, and he's having some technical difficulties. Exponential AI is a wonderful new ISV that we're supporting on the platform. We have done some enablement with them, and we will make sure when we send out the content for today's event, we will include more content from Exponential AI so you have the opportunity to hear all about them as well. So moving on to our second question that I have for you guys. Why do you think LinuxONE and Hyper Protect Services are a great platform for your AI applications? We know why and we know why we love it so much. But again, your perspective that you could share with everyone that's listening in the audience, what do you think makes it so special?

So Megan, I will take a shot at it first. Now think about it, imagine a bank. A bank could be a small bank, large bank, medium bank, we don't know. But one thing is a reality, okay? You might have 1 million transactions, you might have 50 million transactions, you might have 100 million transactions, okay? So you need to have a single system, which can scale at whatever level, okay, from the smaller system to the biggest system, wherein, in a predictable fashion, okay, do a segment of one AI analysis in a 30-millisecond timeframe. Now this is only possible in a LinuxONE kind of platform. You could go for the smallest express addition to the biggest machine. It's a single box, all your problems are sorted out on a single box. That's it. It's a one-box solution for whatever be the scale of the bank. That's number one. While you do this, you need extreme amount of AI acceleration, AI power available on chip when a transaction is in flight. LinuxONE solves that problem for me. Now when I do an analysis like this, the entire data of the bank is sitting with me. Now don't I need to be the most secure solution on the planet? And that's where LinuxONE has the solution for me. I already addressed the equation of scalability and so on. But now let's come back to the TCO. In our lab, when we did -- when we do massive throughputs, in our lab, when we did an Intel versus LinuxONE comparison, on a single IFL, we were able to get 250 transactions per second, 250 transactions per second with Extreme AI. So can you imagine the power of the smallest LinuxONE box to the biggest LinuxONE box, you just need a single solution. Now while you do this, we have customers from 0.5 million accounts to 300 million accounts. They had 30 machines, 40 machines all running together. It's a single box, think about the sustainability and so on. So it allows us high performance, AI acceleration, security, scalability, lower TCO, sustainable in a single box. Imagine how easy it is to maintain and run the system in a bank, the smallest of the banks to the largest of the banks. That's what excites us about LinuxONE, Megan.

Well, if I could just bottle you up, please, Rivi, and make sure that I can throw that out there to anyone that's listening. And team, that's why our ISVs are so important because they are out there talking to our clients too, and sharing the value. Clemen, your thoughts, your perspective that you can share with us?

Yes, the key -- 3 key takeaways, Megan, I want to share regarding Hyper Protect Services. Number 1 is unmatched security. We're in the business of Wall Street. And that's the reason why data privacy, financial security, sensitive financial data, these are all really, really important to us. Number 2 is the scalability of the performance. Now we are handling billions of data output per day basis. Just think about the Wall Street filings that go through every public listed stocks as well as pension funds, retirement funds, billionaires, millionaires that requires very dynamic demands of AI workloads. More importantly, is to process the very large data sets. Now this involves running very complex models for us to run the large language models as well as the generative AI. Thirdly, the most important point is the very innovative ecosystem. LinuxONE's support for a broad range of development tools is really important to us because of the continuous advancement that gives us a fertile ground for AI development. Thank you.

Thank you, Clemen. I think we all -- you both established and we all agree, supporting our clients is the most important. And to our clients that are out there in the audience, you drive us to make sure we are staying innovative, right? Clemen, you just hit on that, and that's really important. Because for us to be able to do our job well, you need -- our clients need to be able to do their job well. So ISVs, you remain super important to us because you're so important to our clients, and we will always partner together to keep making sure we're moving everyone forward. So thank you both for joining us today. And again, we will get John Keith's content out to everyone that's tuning in today, too. I'm sorry, weren't able to have him on the panel. But Rivi, thank you again. Clemen, thank you. And we'll talk to you guys soon. Thank you.

Thank you, Megan.

Thank you.

Okay. So now, I'm very happy to have slide in here to share the camera with me, is Owain from University College of London. Don't you feel like we're like Saturday Night Live news desk reporting? So Owain, please introduce yourself to the audience.

So I'm Owain Kenway, I'm the Head of Research Computing at University College London, which means I am responsible for the team that looks after and provides all the research platforms that are used by our researchers. So we are kind of the enablers for all the fantastic scientists we have at UCL to provide storage and compute and all that stuff...

Super exciting. If any -- we probably should have done this live when Owain first got here, and we were both very excited talking about what Owain is doing with LinuxONE technology. And it's just so exciting. And what I love about what you guys are doing amongst a million things is that there's nothing legacy involved here. You guys are bringing something new to the platform, something that is AI-inspired, data, research at the university level. It is -- your blog said it was much cooler than other technologies. I think what you guys are doing is the coolest. So could you tell us a little bit more about the areas you're researching?

Obviously, UCL has a very wide research portfolio. I think the only area of research we don't do is veterinary sciences for some -- there's just some weird block. But personally, of course, I am -- the main focus is looking at how we can provide better services for our researchers. So that's better in terms of user experience, efficiency. We have 50,000 customers who are students and they're very upset about how much power my systems consume. And obviously, having a lower power consumption is fantastic. And also, obviously, because of the explosion of AI, I've been looking at how we can provide those services to users as well.

Well, you hit on something so important, the sustainability and the students really caring about how much energy the systems at the school are using. This is the generation that's going to be making all the decisions going forward. They will be the next C-suite, right? So it's really important that we understand their concerns, their motivations and we work with them. So fantastic there. So tell me, tell everyone what you will use. You're -- the Vindicator, which is -- and I'll let every -- you tell everyone what the Vindicator is, but what will you be using it for?

So Vindicator is, I think you said the first LinuxONE 4 Express...

Very first.

In the world, which is fantastic. It is a system we have bought to sort of evaluate the architecture for a number of problems that we currently do badly. So someone used the L word earlier, and I'm going to use it, say, the legacy x86 systems.

We'll take legacy when you use it that way.

Yes. We have, I think, like at least 2 areas we do badly. One of them is in high-performance computing, we are very focused on applications for physics and chemistry, which generally bound by floating point performance. And then there, x86 is very good and our GPUs are very good. What we have been less good at is efficient systems where there's a lot of I/O. So that systems like in biosciences where you're processing terabytes, petabytes of gene sequences, that's very much like transaction processing in a mainframe. It's very integer based, it's very I/O based. And so this has always looked to me like an architecture that this would work very well on, but of course, it was gated behind mainframes that were big, expensive and difficult, whereas LinuxONE 4 Express is small and convenience and fits in a rack. And the second area related to that because, of course, alongside biosciences, there's biomedical stuff, and we provide secure environments for biomedical data. Just like you don't want people's financial data wandering off into the wild, you don't want people's medical wandering off. And those systems are definitely where the legacy x86 lives, because they're basically -- I look at them and they look like mainframes, but they're built out of PCs with like layers of third-party production. There's a VMware and some access controls. It feels like having a single integrated solution can do the security features and hardware as a solution. And of course, finally, now that machine learning has happened, doing AI, you were talking about a really interesting case around processing cancer images, right? That is exactly the kind of thing we want to be able to do in a medical context securely with that kind of assurance that pictures of people's internals are not going to end up on the dark web.

Okay. Well, that's certainly some place we don't want it to go. But like I said, there's nothing legacy about the work you're doing. It's very fascinating. What you talked about, you could say is complex to those of us that are more IT and not scientists because you are a true scientists. We joked before that Owain has his other job, which is teaching, right? So yes, so heavily involved in the technology and installing it and getting everything up and running. But can you tell us why you chose LinuxONE?

So a little bit, I've already said, right, I felt for a long time that the way we provide these virtualized environments is really inefficient and difficult to manage, and the TCO is very high, right? You have to learn a lot of technologies. I don't know, there will be lots of VMware customers who will feel a little bit of pain at the moment because of the acquisition, right? So I've always been interested in that regard. I think the architecture is quite interesting, right? Doing all this stuff in hardware has the potential for a lot of efficiencies. I think the fact that it's based around Linux, right, we're not locked in to z/OS, which in the nicest possible way, is a completely different environment. Like we're very used to Linux on the science side. Everything has been Linux since it wiped Unix pretty much out in the early 2000s. And that makes porting our applications over easy. It makes it easy for us to give users a user experience they're used to. And recently, we started moving doing a lot more containerization. And obviously, that's very much supported with LinuxONE. So it looks like an ideal platform and the fact that we can now get a test system that fits in a rack, as an affordable price, and the Express is fantastic. And so kind of a bunch of things came together at the same time, and it's been really good.

And that's why we were so excited when Owain got here to talk about that, because that is something to celebrate, the rack mount, right? We didn't really -- Melissa hit on it before, but that's -- you would never associate rack mount and a mainframe in the same sentence. But in so many ways, it's the heritage of the platform, but it is not a mainframe, it's not z/OS, and it's affording new workloads to come on to the platform and people like yourself and other universities to really embrace the technology and bring something new, new life into the technology. So for that, I want to say thank you. And earlier, I talked about how important business partners are. And Evolving Solutions was here with us, but a very important business partner is Logicalis, that's very large here in the U.K. and Ireland, and they helped you with this. And I'm sure from a Logicalis standpoint, this was new to them too, because it was the first rack-mount system that we were offering, and they had to work through it. So logistically, I'm sure Logicalis may have a perspective about configurations. But can you tell us a little bit about how it was working with them and the support?

So obviously, we've had a relationship with Logicalis for a while. They are actually our supplier for a lot of our HBC equipment. So when I found out that they also worked with IBM, they were the natural people to go to for this procurement. They did a lot of work with us in making sure that our data center was ready. So although this goes into a rack mount, there's a whole bunch of extra paperwork to do and planning that you have to do. So they were very helpful, and the IBM team were very helpful with that as well. And also -- we're not familiar -- like using the word IFL, right? For me, that is a surprising piece of terminology. And I'm still thinking of things in cores and threads and whatever, and they were really helpful in helping demystify that and also a little bit derisk it as well by having a known partner as opposed to an unknown one.

Well, that's awesome. So on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being super complex, would you say going to LinuxONE was so complex as an x86 background, PC background, oh my goodness, it was so difficult? Or would you say that there was some ease to it that -- once you got through with Logicalis?

I think it's surprisingly easy. There are the odd pitfalls with some packages, which are just not ready for big endian, because everyone is so used to x86, right? There's a bunch of things -- but yes, it's been remarkably smooth.

Remarkably smooth. You heard it here, folks. Remarkably smooth. So before I let you go, Owain, I could keep you here forever to talk more about what you're going to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about future plans with LinuxONE, what you're thinking?

So obviously, once we've done those initial projects, we're really keen to work with like local SMEs, partners. I know that we want to do a porting project with Logicalis. They have a particular stack of software called Ubiquity that's a sort of a cloud-like environment for HBC. We'll begin to work with them on that. And also I want to start teaching students as well, because I think mainframe skills are missing in the curriculums, and I think that would be really good...

Absolutely, and we want to work with you on that as well and get those skills out there and these students that care about sustainability working on the most sustainable platform there is. Outstanding. Before you go, anything else you would like to talk about?

No, I'm just very excited and looking forward to spending more time using the system.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Owain. It's such a pleasure to have you here. All right. Moving on in our -- see, told you, chock-full of new stuff and great perspectives. It makes us so happy to have everyone here and to share that and all the remarkable work that everyone does, to have University College of London and so many other clients onto the platform. So when we talk about everyone partnering together, a very big piece of that is the IT economics team. They are a no-fee service that all of our clients have access to and their job is to help demonstrate the art of the possible as far as the TCO goes, your total cost of ownership. We understand that while we talk today about AI and scalability and sustainability and all the things that everyone needs, cyber resiliency, you also have a budget. Everyone still has to work towards a budget. You don't want to compromise anything that you need for the sake of hitting your numbers, right, and your budget numbers. So the IT Economics team does a really fantastic job working with our clients to say, hey, what is the environment you're thinking about moving to LinuxONE? Let's do a study and talk about what your TCO could look like. How much could you save on software licensing? How much could you save on floor space, power saving? As you heard Owain said, there's a lot of power that gets generated used from the grid for x86 and other distributed systems that you don't necessarily need to have as a worry when you go to LinuxONE. So with that, I want to turn it over to JaiPaul, who's going to introduce himself and tell you a little bit about what they're doing over in IT economics land. Over to you. JaiPaul, we can't hear you.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, we can.

Okay. I think I was double muted somehow. So let me take it from the -- thanks, Megan, for the wonderful introduction to the IBM IT Economics team. I'm JaiPaul Antony, I'm the principal with IT Economics team at IBM. And here, what I'm going to talk about is the various TCO scenarios that we have looked at for LinuxONE 4 Express, right? What we do at IT Economics team is look at different solutions and looking at solutions and see the costs and technical benefits of it being deployed on different platforms and show the business the value of deploying solution on one platform versus the other, right? So that's -- so then the business can make a very good solid business case and decision based on all of those facts, right? What I've looked at is comparing 7 scenarios here. There are many more that we can put together. But for brevity, I've limited this to 7 scenarios of various workloads, of various sizes on LinuxONE 4 Express platform that we're releasing today. And what you see here, I'll go a little bit quick here, is -- there's a nice chart on the table, so as a nice chart. But if you look at it, right, we see TCO savings, a 5-year TCO savings in all those 7 scenarios, right, ranging from 16% to all the way to [ 50% ], right? And some of these workloads, if you look at it, I know we have heard from Rivi of Clari5, right, these are new workloads that are coming on to the platform with AI capabilities being taken advantage of. So it's not just the traditional databases, the services and containerized solutions, but also we're looking at more and more of these newer types of workloads that are coming in, NBF, seeing good TCO savings even with those scenarios, right? And if you look at the core consolidation ratios, this is how many cores of LinuxONE is required to replace the number of cores on x86. We see 1:9, 1:14, 1:15, of course, as a ratio, which is pretty good, right? So it not only reduces your footprint in your data center, but also like Megan and others have said in the meeting, reduces your overall energy consumption and so on, right? We have also updated our TCO and carbon emissions calculator. This is a web-based tool that can be used -- that can be accessed by anyone, right? It's out there in the open. And this one, you can use this one to quickly assess the TCO for various scenarios, various workloads using this platform, comparing it to x86 platforms and then determine that not only just the TCO, but also the carbon emissions -- compare the carbon emissions across these 2 platforms. If -- I mean, these are scenarios that are -- you can customize this, but if you need additional help with any of these studies or if you have a specific case that you want us to evaluate, please reach out to us. We can be contacted at [email protected]. Thanks, Megan. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, JaiPaul. Really appreciate it. And again, thank you to the IT Economics team for all that you do for our clients and for the IBM team in general. So that brings us to close on our webinar. We hope you are as excited as we are on this GA Day. There is a lot to celebrate. We celebrated rack mount, we celebrated new use cases, we celebrated ISVs that are finding value running their products on our platform, and we're finding business partners that are excited to work with you, our clients to bring all of this technology together. It's been a great day having this time with all of you. We hope you're excited enough to reach out to your local IBM team to hear more information. IBMers, you know where to find us if you would like some more information on this exciting announcement. And to our business partners, thank you. Thank you for all that you do. We hope you are ready to rally around LinuxONE 4 Express with our clients. So with that, I wish you all a wonderful day, and thank you again for joining us.