‘We wouldn’t be successful in adopting, selling, or selling any of these things without our ecosystem of partners,“Service partners, MSPs, almost the entire constituency,” says Bargaon Balakrishnan, IBM vice president of product management for Power.

IBM will incorporate its Spire accelerator into future Power products – including the Power 11 system to be released next year – and report programs used with its i operating system as part of a series of Progress solution providers. Planning a code helper for the Generator (RPG) language. To the customers.
Bargaon Balakrishnan, IBM vice president of product management for Power, told CRN in an interview that service partners will play a key role in getting customers upgraded from Power10 and other 2025 releases to market.
“We wouldn’t be successful in selling, adopting any of these things without the ecosystem-service partners, the MSPs, almost the entire constituency of our partners,” he said. “Our partners have more tools to have this conversation – either around fit-for-purpose AI, if you like, where customers can move faster, just with the platform they trust and Know. And can now even start with a modernization discussion where the entry point is simple, ‘Hey, let me help you understand and manage your code.’ But it can certainly expand more value creation and value capture opportunities for the channel.
[RELATED: Red Hat Updates Present ‘Huge’ Partner Opportunities in OpenShift, Edge]

IBM Power11 in 2025

According to Armonk, NY-based IBM, the Spire Accelerator brings scalable capabilities to complex AI models and generative AI use cases. It has 32 individual accelerator cores and a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card on board. The chip sends data from one compute engine to another and uses lower-precision numerical formats to make better use of energy and memory.
Code Assistant for RPGs will leverage GenAI to help software developers understand existing code, create new RPG functions with descriptions in plain English, and automatically generate test cases.
According to the vendor, Code Assistant should save IBM customers the expense, performance degradation, and risk of re-creating RPG-based applications in Java and other languages.
“The goal of this for our customers, for us, is not just to increase the productivity of existing RPG developers, but equally, if not more important, to enable the next generation of talent and developers who have very little skill , move forward at a faster pace and become productive much faster,” Balakrishnan said. “It’s around things like code explanations – explain my vast decades of code – help me generate new freeform RPG code. Help me prepare test scripts so I can make the test functions enterprise-ready, as well as modernize my old fixed-format RPG code to freeform, creating more modern versions of the RPG code base.”
For the next version of Power Processor, Balakrishnan encouraged partners to capture more wallet share from the existing install base.
Balakrishnan said Power remains the leading platform for SAP HANA and other ERP deployments, core banking deployments, Oracle and other commercial database deployments and other mission-critical use cases. Adoption as a service for clients and using OpenShift from IBM subsidiary Red Hat for modernization are some of the growing areas of new business with users.
The shift in IT spending to AI-driven projects makes the technology “the entry point for many infrastructure decisions these days,” he said. “Engaging and participating in that conversation doesn’t mean selling some AI, but rather showing a future-proof platform that can do something today and protect your investment tomorrow for certain use cases and workloads. ”
It’s also not too early to talk to customers about IBM’s quantum-safe approach with Power. In fact, on Wednesday, during its inaugural Quantum Developer Conference in Yorktown Heights, New York, IBM revealed that its researchers have delivered a quantum computer that runs quantum circuits with 5,000 two-qubit gate operations, powered by IBM’s second iteration. Is capable of. Quantum heron.
,[It’s] It is important for service providers to play a bigger role in helping customers in that journey,” he said.
Other compelling AI use cases with Power include fraud detection, anomaly detection, and supply chain optimization. But partners can bring generative AI to traditional AI use cases, such as adding summary generation to summarizing log data for anomaly detection.
Citing the example of hybrid cloud and AI coming together to solve a customer’s problem — as well as IBM developing chips that don’t necessarily create competition with other vendors — he said Nvidia, a large hospital in Asia, Works to detect cancer in patients using the products. Power for training and for inference and deployment.
“It is about incorporating AI everywhere. It’s not about one and only one use case,” he said. “We are seeing an increase in demand more and more [for hybrid solutions] Only due to data sovereignty, supply side considerations. And I think the world is quickly realizing that it is fit for purpose. It is hybrid in nature. This trend is here to stay.”