Kyndryl bolsters its Bridge infrastructure services

Kyndryl is targeting new AI, mainframe modernization, and security services in the coming months as it looks to build out its Bridge infrastructure integration platform. Bridge is one of Kyndryl’s major services offerings, which include consulting, hybrid cloud, security, and applications services.

Bridge integrates management, observability, and automation tools while using AI and machine learning to analyze the aggregated data and provide IT operations teams with the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance, according to Kyndryl CTO Antoine Shagoury. Using Kyndryl Bridge, customers can reduce complexity and gain actionable insights to understand, predict, and act for better business outcomes, Shagoury said.

“Bridge has matured to the point where customers can think of it as a digital operating system that can be personalized, if you will, for each business to integrate our services, manage their data, and gather insights or patterns they need to operate at a highly efficient way,” Shagoury said.

“What makes it unique is how we’ve created, or how we stitched together, organizational information, systems, applications, and more. [It enables] this concept of personalization, access to this knowledge base and the solution bases that are targeted to help provide the operating efficiencies,” Shagoury said.

Recent results point to growing success for Kyndryl Bridge. “Kyndryl’s initiative to automate service delivery through Kyndryl Bridge yielded $575 million in annualized savings, exceeding its raised target by $25 million,” according to an IDC Link note written by Jason Bremner, research vice president, IDC Worldwide Services, and published this week.

Through Kyndryl Bridge, the company has introduced more than 190 new services in the past couple of years. Kyndryl Bridge is also providing customers with productivity benefits totaling nearly $2 billion a year as a result of avoiding major incidents and planned maintenance costs, Bremner stated.

There are now more than 1,200 clients using the Kyndryl Bridge platform, including approximately 450 clients added in the most recent quarter, according to Bremner. “Adding 450 clients in the quarter highlights the scalability of Kyndryl Bridge. As Kyndryl brings more clients and services onto the platform, Kyndryl Bridge will leverage an expanded operational data set to provide more insights than the 3 million insights it generates monthly now and provide clients more savings,” Bremner stated. 

AI-readiness services on tap

Moving forward, there are a number of areas Shagoury said the company is focused on developing with Bridge. AI services will be a key part of that development, including options that will help customers build the infrastructure, trusted data foundation, and models they need to take advantage of AI, Shagoury said.

New offerings will include frameworks for machine learning operations and large language model (LLM) operations, along with Kyndryl’s Data and AI Console, which creates a unified view of customers’ data for improved insights and AI enablement, the company stated.

“We are looking at AI services that are going to be more tailored toward individual customer business, their semantics, their context, and how our clients can query our operating environments as services so they can query solutions or enact solutions that allow them to improve the services we deliver,” Shagoury said.

AI networking is another area Kyndryl is targeting.

“AI networking is definitely in its early days, but we have been in a few consulting engagements about that,” Shagoury said. “A lot of our push in our consulting business is helping our clients think through how to architect that and deploy it. So we’ll do a lot of work around how to create the operating environments, the compute or the storage or the GPU as-a-service models to really start to test and play with the operating capability, or help them define how to move their operating workloads into those environments effectively,” Shagoury said.

“Going forward, if we all keep an inventory of parameters of how to optimize where the workload happens, and if we keep the ability to keep that software abstraction, that software-defined capability for AI networking, I think that’s where you’re going to see a huge explosion in the next couple of years,” Shagoury said.

Mainframe modernization options

AI will also shape Kyndryl’s mainframe modernization offerings. Kyndryl’s mainframe modernization approach covers all the bases—customers can keep data on the big iron, or migrate it off, or create a hybrid of both.

Kyndryl also partners with several cloud vendors for its mainframe modernization services. For example, in November the company partnered with Amazon Web Services on services aimed at helping enterprises integrate with or move mainframe applications and data to the AWS cloud.

Under their expanded partnership, Kyndryl is integrating its products with the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, which offers tools, infrastructure, and software to manage the migration of mainframe applications to the cloud. The AWS service includes a managed runtime environment to provide compute, memory, and storage to run refactored and/or replatformed mainframe applications and helps automate the details of capacity provisioning, security, load balancing, scaling, and application-health monitoring.

“Kyndryl’s next-generation of mainframe managed service delivery capabilities will be built on AI technologies to accelerate Kyndryl Bridge-orchestrated mainframe delivery operations,” the company stated. “The new technologies combined with Kyndryl’s mainframe expertise, and the operational insights provided by Kyndryl Bridge, will help enterprises modernize their mainframe workloads, integrate them with cloud, or move them off the platform to a hybrid cloud.”

“For mainframe customers, we will look at how you distribute software and how you’re managing your workloads so they can be integrated seamlessly into your broader business,” Shagoury said. “Here, too, there’s been a tremendous growth in AI tools across many of the mainframe partners, including our own parent [IBM], on how to improve code optimizations and how to improve code migrations and how to build that portability to make it more cloud-capable, or cloud-native.”

Security alliances and more

In the security realm, Kyndryl said it will continue to partner with key players to offer a variety of security services. Current partners include Cisco, Fortinet, Microsoft, and Nokia. 

Most recently, Kyndryl inked a deal to integrate Palo Alto’s security products and services into its own managed security services, which include security monitoring, incident response, and threat intelligence. Palo Alto brings a wide range of security offerings, including a family of next-generation firewalls, the Prisma Cloud security platform for cloud-based applications and workloads, endpoint security, and operational automation support.

In the coming months, Kyndryl Bridge will integrate and visualize data from IT system operations and perform analysis to track the supply chain of customers’ hardware, software, and other third-party suppliers and subcontractors to meet local regulatory requirements, according to the company. “Additional capabilities will be available in the coming quarters to help organizations respond to regulatory changes,” the vendor stated.

Other alliances are also expanding Kyndryl’s reach.   

“During the quarter, Kyndryl announced new or expanded alliances with Google Cloud on generative AI (GenAI), Hewlett Packard Enterprise on private 5G networking, Veeam on cyber-resiliency and data protection, and Cloudflare on cloud connectivity and network security,” IDC’s Bremner noted. “The alliances augment Kyndryl’s capabilities in its applications, data & AI, security & resiliency, networking & edge, and cloud service practices.”