IBM officially unveiled its POWER9 enterprise servers at a South African customer and partner roadshow presented in partnership with ITWeb in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
IBM's Power Systems, catering for the "most demanding, data-intensive computing on earth", are designed to take enterprises into a multi-cloud artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled future.
The new 'scale-up' POWER9 servers are designed with choice and flexibility in mind, says IBM, to support multi-cloud environments, and deliver unprecedented performance: two times more threads in POWER9 cores than x86 cores, and 1.8 times the memory bandwidth of x86 servers, with security spanning the entire stack.
With PowerVM, PowerVC and IBM Cloud Private, POWER9 enterprise servers are the "latest, greatest member of the IBM PowerSystems family".
Speaking at the executive forum, Petra Buehrer, offering manager of Power Systems Software and vice-chairman of the IBM Technical Expert Council, said: "Massive IT disruption is changing business around the world, and it's driven by data and the need to deliver instantly.
"In this new environment, AI will become the new normal. In fact, IBM research has found that by 2020, AI technology investment will be a top five priority for at least 30% of CIOs."
As AI and deep learning become a growing priority, and multi-cloud environments become more commonplace, IBM is focused on delivering compelling solutions and bundles capable of 'astronomical' performance, flexibility and reliability, Buehrer said.
Waleed Ezzat, IBM Power Systems sales manager, Middle East and Africa, said: "Data is changing the IT landscape; it is shifting from a process economy to an insight economy. Within the next three years, up to half of all businesses are at risk of losing their competitive advantage due to digital disruption, and 72% of business executives expect to be affected by digital disruption, yet only 14% say they will be ready to face digital disruption.
"Three key trends matter in this changing environment: exploiting AI for better business outcomes, reducing or removing the friction between technology and business, and reacting to digital transformation to deliver business growth and performance," he said.
Ezzat noted that enterprises would need the ability to harness AI for operational improvement and business growth, as well as high availability, security, scalability and flexibility.
"Enterprises must get ready to go through digital transformation with minimal disruption.
"They need reliable infrastructure running mission-critical applications at 100% availability, which is scalable and secure at all levels, and at the same time can run anywhere - seamlessly, with the same capabilities and performance."
IBM knew this change was coming, and is well positioned to deliver on enterprise needs, he noted.
Charbel Antonios, IBM software-defined storage solutions sales leader, said: "We are moving from monolithic environments to ones which are elastic and scalable. Now, IT has to leverage data for differentiation and architect for disruption if their businesses are to survive."
IBM noted that key technologies such as the Mars Rover, and Summit (the fastest supercomputer on earth) are powered by POWER9.
Share