Two years ago, Kyndryl was established as an independent company after separating from IBM. The reason for the separation from Big Blue was that, as part of IBM, the division did not align with CEO Arvind Krishna's vision of hybrid and artificial intelligence focus. Since then, the company has embarked on its own path, committed to being the preferred technology services employer.

Today, Kyndryl helps companies achieve modernization by designing and managing IT infrastructure systems involving large amounts of data. To understand how this American IT infrastructure provider is working on automation and technology, especially in India, AIM spoke with Naveen Kamat, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Data and AI Services at their Bangalore office.

"Most organizations have multiple data storage and data pipelines, which over time lead to duplications for various reasons. The same data is replicated, resulting in multiple copies, which is unnecessary," he explained. One of their approaches is to reduce all these duplications and redundancies. Another aspect is the 'technical debt' caused by legacy code, leading to more data incidents and downtime, which in turn leads to data leaks.

"In this context, data becomes more of a burden," Kamat said. "Having the right data foundation can reduce the cycle time to enter data engineering and then be used across business lines," mentioned the IT leader with over twenty years of experience spanning multiple roles.

Without disclosing Kyndryl's client information, one of them being a large healthcare enterprise, Kamat explained the need for a data foundation in pharmacy applications. He recalled major incidents that caused application downtime. "These situations are particularly critical in ICU patients, for example. Therefore, we are committed to building the right data foundation to ensure that various log metrics from different parts of the stack are integrated into this data lake," he said. Kamat also mentioned that the number of major disruptions has decreased by nearly 80% in various vertical industries, including healthcare.

Diverse Customer Base

Today, the company proudly boasts a fairly large cross-industry customer base. "In addition to our skills, experience, and resources, we are also investing in our partner ecosystem, which includes Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and data platforms like Cloudera and Databricks. When we collaborate with our customers through our intellectual property, assets, and accelerators, we bring additional differentiation," mentioned Kamat. The company also announced its services for Google Cloud's banking and financial industry customers to strengthen its existing partnership with the cloud service provider.

When it comes to how Kyndryl collaborates with customers at different levels, Kamat said, "From a data foundation perspective, we engage based on the maturity of the customer. We provide tailored choices for our customers, whether it's solutions or architectures. Based on their budget and business goals, we adjust the most relevant data strategy and data foundation. Many times, large enterprises invest in technology and tools, and we protect those investments, enabling modernization and helping them move to the next generation."

Generative Artificial Intelligence

In discussions surrounding technology, generative artificial intelligence cannot be left out. When commenting on this phenomenon, Kamat mentioned that data is a key element. "With this wave of generative AI, we have seen rapid innovation. The ecosystem has become more agile. A task that previously took months to complete can now be shortened to weeks. The turnaround time is rapid," he added.

The company is currently focusing on several aspects of generative AI. It works by helping customers identify use cases that can be considered from a quick win perspective. "The good thing is that now a lot of hype has subsided, and people have a better understanding of the available options for large language models," said Kamat.

"You can use different language models to achieve the same results with higher or lower accuracy, but with much less carbon footprint and resource consumption. From the perspective of sustainability and optimality of prototypes, this is not only sustainable and optimal, but also from a long-term deployment perspective," he added.

With great power comes great responsibility. As Kyndryl helps various clients deploy generative AI, from pharmaceutical companies to international airports, it ensures that digitization is done in the right way. "Throughout the organization, we ensure that not only appropriate policies are established, but also that they are followed as part of standard data management. Data security and privacy need to be organizational procedures," Kamat said.

That's why Kamat recommends conducting data literacy programs within enterprises to have a broader understanding of how data is being used or misused. "You can't have just one strategy; it has to be an ongoing operation, whether it's data security, privacy, or observability," he said.