Kathy Gibson reports – IBM’s Power 11 launch is one of the company’s most significant in recent years: the new technology promises to improve customers’ productivity and reduce costs, while paving the road to full artificial intelligence (AI) value.
The last couple of years have seen massive changes in the IT market, says Sylvia Scheerova, vice-president: IBM Power sales EMEA, speaking at First Distribution’s Power 11 launch in Johannesburg today.
IBM aims to help organisations adapt to these changes and become more efficient, she says.
Among the challenges that companies are facing is the onslaught of up to 1-billion new applications that are expected to be in the market by 2028.
“This means applications will become more siloed,” Scheerova says. “The business unit will start to take decision for applications – away from the IT department.
“But they are not always aware of the challenges this brings; what data they need access to; how to set up security; or how to manage outages or cost optimisations,” Schreeova says.
And these challenges will only intensify enterprises strive to get more out of artificial intelligence (AI).
IBM has developed Power 11 to address these issues, and to enable autonomous IT built for the AI era.
Customer feedback featured heavily in the technology’s design, with the aim of making the businesses better.
Scheerova points out that IBM always aims to integrate the full stack in any new technology. “So there is integration all the way horizontally as well as vertically,” she says.
This means the full stack of hybrid cloud platfrom operating systems and firmware, computing hardware and silicon technology are tightly operated. And these are all built on a solid foundation of performance, availability and security.
Power11 is also the first IBM Power server to support the IBM Spyre Accelerator, IBM’s system-on-a-chip available Q4 2025 that is purpose-built for today’s AI-intensive inference workloads.
A key innovation in Power 11 is zero downtime, critically important for mission critical workloads, Scheerova explains.
Security is another major innovation, with Power 11 guaranteeing one-minute ransomware detection with automated response and recover within minutes.
Vastly improved performance drive a 5-times increase in business process rate, with AI integration into existing enterprise workflows.
Autonomy is key to operating in the AI era, so the Power 11 portfolio includes the following new innovations:
- A new energy efficient operating model that optimises power consumption without compromising the service level agreements (SLAs)
- New 2.5D integrated stacked capacitor and innovative thermal technologies to optimise power consumption
- Improved performance through workload isolation with Resource Groups
- Next-generation memory with 3-time DDR bandwidth delivering performance to larger, memory-intensive applications
- New off-chip acceleration based on IBM Spyre planned for the fourth quarter of 2025.
The Power 11 portfolio spans from the edge through the core to the cloud, and forms the basis for solid performance that starts with unprecedented business continuity; a massive 99,9999% availability translates to just seconds of downtime per year.
“We have now increased this with the planned downtime,” Scheerova says. “We need to enable customers to run their workloads without any downtime.”
So the Power 11 portfolio, in conjunction with IBM Concert, offers zero planned downtime, allowing customers to be faster and more efficient.
The technology is also secure by design, with quantum-enabled IT guarding against cyber incident, and giving he technology the ability guaranteed ransomware detection within one minute, and automated response and recover within minutes.
IBM Power Cyber Vault – already available to all customers – uses three stages of data validation to analyse data. If a threat is detected, data is isolated in the Vault. Once the threat is removed, the clean data is restored.
Scheerova cites a use case from a banking client that has already implemented Power 11.
Infosys Finacle aimed to ensure banking systems are always available, and was able to increase customer satisfaction and trust with no planned service disruptions.
It also wanted to enhance compliance and regulatory posture. The Power II implementation allowed it to install critical security fixes quickly and seamlessly with agile platform updates.
“We’re thrilled about the transformative value that IBM Power 11 with Zero Planned Downtime delivers to our core banking customers,” says Girish Kamath, associate vice-president: product line manager at Infosys Finalce.
Scheerova concludes that IBM Power 11 closes the operational efficiency gap to improve business processes for the customer.
“We don’t talk about speeds and feds – the performance s there. Power servers can run 80% performance guaranteed. We even have customers running with 90% utilisation constantly, with concurrent operating systems and enterprise applications.”
The true value of Power 11 lies in its extreme automation, reduced costs and optimised workloads, she says.
The extreme automation helps customer to minimise application downtime with zero planned downtime and end-to-end maintenance; and automating data collection for faster error resolution.
Costs are reduced thanks to enhanced energy efficient that offers 2-times better performance per watt versus with X86; and 28% better server efficiency with Energy-Efficient mode.
Optimised workloads help to further improve performance and total cost of ownership (TCO) with a 51% lower thee-year operating cost.
AI is top of mind for all enterprises today, and Scheerova points out that many customers are sill looking for he right business use case.
“So we need to help them transform their processes to unlock improved productivity.”
With Power 11, customer are able to scale AI across the enterprise, boost productivity with assistants and agents, and unlock enterprise data with data fabric and platforms.
Customers that have made the move have a 5-time increase in business processing rates with AI integration into existing workflows; an 18-times increase in developer productivity with AI-powered cost assistant; and 23% lower TCO while meeting GenAI performance requirements versus competitors.
IBM Power is one of the most open systems, Scheerova adds, so customers have a choice about what they want to implement.
IBM Power 11 also helps customers to unlock business-driven workload placement in the hybrid cloud.
Using IBM Cloud Services can drive a 15-time increase in testing and release system – delivering higher quality; and 50% faster recover with 80% less cost by adding IBM PowerVS as a disaster recovery site.
The service also guarantees a five-day onboarding, and a 25% faster migration to SAP RISE on IBM PowerVS versus other clouds.
“So you can choose what make sense to your own business in terms of offloading workloads from on-premise,” Scheerova says.
At the end of the day, she says, customers are looking to an improved bottom line, with IBM Power 11 allowing them to reduce costs and improve productivity.