April 2 (SeeNews) - The Covid-19 pandemic prompted companies in Southeast Europe (SEE) to step up their cloud adoption plans as they seek greater flexibility and agility to respond to the new challenges across sectors, Igor Pravica, the newly-appointed general manager for Southeast Europe and Eastern Territory at global tech giant IBM, told SeeNews.
"We see hybrid cloud is swiftly becoming the dominant force driving change in the industry," Pravica told SeeNews in a recent interview.
"In the telecommunication sector, banking and public sector we saw extreme automation and digitisation because of this drive towards enhanced flexibility," he added.
As an example, Pravica pointed to Bulgaria's DSK Bank, which migrated its core banking applications to IBM Cloud infrastructure to transform its banking platform and develop new services. ECONT, one of the leading logistics services providers in Bulgaria with presence in Romania and Greece, implemented a new centralised video management system to the IBM public cloud to improve the customer experience for the cargo, postal and courier services it is delivering to its e-commerce and individual customers and optimise its back-office processes.
In his view, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will remain the top technologies that will deliver benefits for the business in the next few years.
Businesses in banking, telco, retail to education, public sector, oil and gas to supply chains are reconsidering their capabilities and turning to AI-powered automation to help them address the new challenges, Pravica went on to say.
"When you infuse AI into automation, you are in the best possible position to drive innovation, save costs and increase efficiency by incorporating machine learning (ML) and natural language processing into decision making," Pravica stressed.
Organisations in SEE also turned to Watson Assistant, the IBM’s AI-powered virtual agent for business, to field COVID-related questions from customers, employees and the general public. Croatian provider of financial and electronic services FINA created an AI bot powered by IBM Watson Assistant to enable faster and more responsive customer services, while Ablera, a Bulgarian company specialised in developing AI/ML-powered digital services for businesses, chose IBM Garage to co-create “Beth” – an intelligent multilingual and multichannel virtual assistant for insurers.
With the outbreak of the pandemic companies needed to quickly establish business continuity and resilience that enables more reliable and secure delivery in a virtual environment, and consequently interest towards digital solutions has risen strongly, the IBM official said.
"As we see, to prepare a company for a future that can’t be predicted a single, open IT architecture is needed that extends from the heart of the data centre to the farthest edges of the network, an architecture that allows companies to build applications once and run them anywhere, and a source innovation from any part of the ecosystem," he commented.
"IBM has supported businesses and communities through many global crises over its 109-year history. We are doing the same during this pandemic," Pravica stressed. “In Red Hat OpenShift we have the leading open source hybrid cloud platform. In 2020, we closed seven strategic acquisitions. We are investing $1 billion (849 million euro) in our ecosystem so that our partners can play a much bigger role in fulfilling the many needs of our clients," he said. "For example, Our Cloud for Financial Services added key partners in 2020. Supported by a Cloud Engagement Fund, IBM is helping to accelerate the adoption of our platform for these new partners by addressing financial and technical obstacles. The fund gives IBM the ability to create financial frameworks for partners, layering in cloud credits and technical resources to help launch impactful business relationships.“
In Croatia, oil and gas group INA and IBM work together in the implementation of Business Process Automation using RPA technology. The latest fourth round of RPA project helped INA to achieve better efficiency, improved process security, data quality and a decrease in fraud.
In Bulgaria, UniCredit Bulbank turned to IBM Security in order to improve its experience in the area of data and information protection, user authentication, access management and data privacy.
In Slovenia, payment service provider Bankart chose IBM to build an open banking platform for Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2). By doing so, Bankart will offer a unified PSD2 platform to 11 Slovenian banks in order to assure compliance with this EU directive and allow banks to digitise while adopting an open banking approach.
The shift to remote work has opened new loopholes for cybercriminals to exploit since many workers and organisations lack the secure equipment or protocols to optimise digital safety, Pravica noted.
To help companies deal with security threats, IBM has created a consolidated X-Force Exchange Collection of known threat actors and how they are exploiting Covid-19. The main benefit includes all client data being stored and handled within Europe at IBM's Command Centre in Poland.
"This allows us to offer solutions to clients with requirements that go above and beyond those of GDPR for response and disclosure, provide EU-located personnel only service and maintain EU data residency," Pravica said.
(1 euro = 1.17792 U.S. dollars)