IBM and Red Hat partnered with data process mining firm Celonis to integrate the Celonis Execution Management System into IBM’s consulting and business process solutions with the aim of easing and accelerating digital transformation projects.
While digital transformations have become increasingly popular with companies throughout a wide variety of industries, “businesses often execute below their full capacity because of system and technology complexity, broken or inefficient processes, and fragmented data that sits across various IT and cloud environments,” the companies said in a news release announcing the partnership.
The Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) typically sits on top of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in an enterprise, collects data from these systems in real time, and applies process intelligence to help identify and unlock execution capacity across a business. The partnership calls for a re-platforming of the Celonis software as a hybrid cloud solution on Red Hat OpenShift.
This move will give business clients more flexibility in how they deploy the software, and its re-platforming strategy that IBM itself embraced after it acquired Red Hat and migrated many of its own software tools to OpenShift.
IBM Global Business Services (GBS) also will include the Celonis EMS software as part of its consulting approach and its IBM Garage methodology, along with the application of IBM data and AI solutions, and will help customers build new solutions using the EMS.
"This strategic partnership accelerates IBM's billion-dollar partner ecosystem commitment and reflects our bold approach to expanding into high growth, emerging categories to help meet the evolving hybrid cloud and AI needs of our clients," said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services, in the news release. "The bottom line is our clients are looking to accelerate the transformation of their workflows and make them more intelligent. Through this powerful new global strategic partnership with Celonis, we're adding to IBM's suite of technology capabilities to unlock value and help propel our clients' growth and innovation."
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IBM said it will initially leverage Celonis’ capabilities in its consulting work for clients across service line areas like supply chain, finance, procurement, HR, and customer experience, including its application modernization work with leading independent software vendors. IBM’s 10,000 practitioners in industry-specific and domain practice areas will lead the charge in deploying the Celonis capabilities in these areas.
The EMS also is being embedded into IBM Garage to help deepen workflow analysis and accelerate intelligent workflows for critical processes like production, customer service, distribution, manufacturing and logistics, the companies said. IBM GBS also is adopting Celonis across many of its business process outsourcing engagements to increase their efficiency, and is building industry-specific applications and assets on Celonis EMS, with a particular focus on regulated industries, to help bring actionable data and more intelligent workflows to large enterprises, the companies said.