CIOs and business leaders everywhere are striving to upgrade legacy technology to meet burgeoning demand for cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI).
But many are stymied by aging IT infrastructure and technical debt. CIOs spend an average of 70% of their IT budgets maintaining legacy systems, according to IBM research, leaving them little room to invest in the innovative solutions they need.
To ease the transition, IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are together helping governments and industry IT leaders modernize infrastructure, applications, and business processes with AI-powered transformation. “IBM’s proprietary agentic AI framework for application migration and modernization embeds agentic AI into the way that IBM drives large-scale migrations to reduce risk and improve efficiency,” says Dan Kusel, global managing partner & general manager responsible for IBM Consulting’s Global AWS Practice.
“IBM works with AWS to leverage their agentic AI tools, bringing the best capabilities to our clients,” says Kusel. “The partnership brings the fastest path to impactful ROI for our clients. This combination is delivering results, including lower costs, faster time-to-market, and happier customers.”
This article illustrates a few examples of how together IBM and AWS are transforming organizations across a range of industries.
Sports & entertainment: Elevating fan experience
IBM has been working with some of the world’s most iconic sports organizations. Scuderia Ferrari HP, the renowned Formula 1 racing team, has a fan base of nearly 400 million people who receive news and updates through an app. But new tech-savvy fans wanted more interactivity and personalization.
Ferrari HP partnered with IBM Consulting to redesign the app’s architecture and interface. After studying users’ habits and engagement patterns, IBM created an intuitive platform that delivers fans just the right mix of racing insights, interactive features, and personalized content.
Results were immediate and impressive. Within a few short months of the new app’s launch, active daily users doubled, and average time spent on the app rose by 35%. The hybrid-cloud infrastructure IBM built on AWS also enabled Ferrari HP to launch AI automations that have already sped up development cycles and improved uptime and reliability. A built-in IBM watsonx.data® data store ensures the app can expand to reach an even larger fan base as its popularity continues to grow.
Energy & resources: Delivering scale, security, and savings
In addition to extending their geographic reach, IBM and AWS are jointly pursuing ventures in new industries. “Working with AWS, we have seen a starburst of growth in an array of industries: energy and utilities, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, financial services, travel and transportation, and manufacturing,” says Kusel.
Southwest Gas — a natural gas distributor for over 2 million customers in Arizona, Nevada, and California — also needed the cloud to realize its potential. Like many of its industry peers, the company used data-heavy SAP applications to manage enterprise resources on premises. Technology leaders wanted to improve the performance, resilience, and scalability of these core applications.
Working with IBM Consulting experts, the company migrated the applications to RISE with SAP, an AWS service helping businesses transition to a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
The big move, completed in less than five months, lowered operating costs and improved SAP application performance by 35%. That means Southwest Gas can process 80 million SAP transactions in less than 10 milliseconds — an achievement that would have been unthinkable with its legacy systems. The company is now exploring agentic AI as a transformative opportunity to redefine the customer experience.
Travel & transportation: Achieving flexibility, speed, and resiliency
IBM and AWS have continued to transform the travel industry, especially airlines. From Japan Airlines to Finnair to Delta Air Lines, IBM Consulting has partnered with major airlines around the world.
To stay ahead in the hypercompetitive travel industry, Delta Air Lines sought to improve its customer experience. The airline needed to increase agility and responsiveness for 100,000 front-line employees. IBM experts worked closely with Delta’s IT leaders to plan and execute a combination of migration, containerization, and modernization of over 500 applications to AWS.
Moving to AWS allowed Delta to quickly launch free in-flight Wi-Fi on 1,000 planes and provide more personalized in-flight service. With its new hybrid cloud, Delta can deploy consistent, secure workloads from anywhere, paving the way for exceptional customer service at scale. Leaders also expect the project to continually improve metrics for cost, time-to-market, productivity, and employee engagement.
Automotive: Solving supply chain challenges
Together, IBM and AWS work with global automotive companies, such as Toyota Motors, Daimler, and other industry leaders.
While the industry has undergone continuous disruption and transformation, and has been seriously impacted by supply chain disruption, companies are leveraging technology to improve performance and customer experience.
IBM Consulting and Toyota Motors North America have partnered to transform Toyota’s supply chain processes. Working with IBM, Toyota has moved towards an agentic AI experience with an Agent AI Assist built with Amazon Bedrock. This is driving instant supply chain visibility and proactive delay detection, with humans in the loop for decision-making.
Government: Accelerating technology transformation
IBM and AWS have been working with government agencies around the world. Managing ventures of this magnitude requires not only internal resources but also expert third-party help with planning, execution, and scaling.
For example, demand for cloud and AI services are expanding at unprecedented rates across the Middle East. Both governments and industries are making significant investments in modernization and AI to jumpstart productivity and launch new business models.
IBM Consulting’s new collaboration agreement with AWS combines industry expertise in cloud migration and modernization with AWS AI technologies and virtually unlimited scalability. The two companies aim to accelerate technology transformation throughout the region, starting with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The two partners — who together previously built innovation hubs in India and Romania — are now creating a new innovation hub in Riyadh. The center allows government and enterprise customers to gain hands-on experience with the latest cloud technologies and explore proof-of-concept projects tailored to their needs.
The hub will also expand regional job opportunities. “It will be staffed domestically, focused on helping our clients deliver projects with local talent,” says Kusel.
IBM + AWS: Partnership defined by scale
IBM Consulting brings deep domain and industry expertise and a broad range of services and solutions that can help organizations accelerate digital transformation, creating a virtuous cycle of agility, innovation, and resilience.
For large enterprises and governments alike, modernizing business in the AI era can be complex. Together, IBM and AWS offer unparalleled expertise in planning, launching, and scaling tailored initiatives that will deliver bottom-line benefits and real business value for years to come.
Explore IBM and AWS success stories. Visit https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/153d3d3b2fcfae0b
Learn more about IBM Consulting services for AWS here: https://www.ibm.com/consulting/aws
