In opening its Watson platform to partners and the developer community, IBM Corp. is releasing the blue genie out of the bottle, sharing the power of cognitive technology to enable new combined Software as a Service solutions toward increasing productivity in the enterprise. Strengthening ties with other tech leaders, including Cisco Systems Inc. and DocuSign Inc., Watson’s smarts are in fact simplifying software integration among IBM partners, all in an effort to reimagine the workplace.

Inhi Cho Suh, GM of collaboration solutions at IBM, visited theCUBE*, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, twice during IBM World of Watson 2016 held in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the end of October. Both times she spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, about her role as a collaborator of solutions at IBM. (*Disclosure below)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Inhi Cho Suh in our Women in Tech feature.

Riding the wave of collaboration

Back in June, IBM and Cisco announced a partnership that brought together the Cisco suite of cloud-based workplace tools and applications such as Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms, which the company integrated with IBM Watson. Cisco partner, Jens Meggers, SVP and GM of cloud collaboration at Cisco Systems, joined Suh on theCUBE to discuss the goal of the partnership to integrate technologies to develop tools for the next-generation workplace.

When thinking about the way people work, Suh believes they generally work in teams and share content to fulfil a business objective. Her aim with partnering with Cisco was to develop communications for people to interact in real time.

“When I looked at the landscape of potential partners and leadership vendors … Cisco provides unified communications across next-generation telepresence, across audio/video/voice. Thinking through the elements of WebEx and web conferencing, how do we integrate that with everyday workplace applications such as email, email calendaring document creation and editing, and on top of that infuse it with Watson?” she reasoned.

Highlighted in the recent Forrester Wave Enterprise Collaboration report, the IBM-Cisco integration was already happening before any official partnership. Suh revealed that the collaborators were already integrating existing applications in established client environments, and are looking for ways to innovate upon that to take it to the next level. Additionally, they are in the process of going to market with two clients by designing an end-to-end experience.

Further encouraging the efforts of those crafting their own integration suites, IBM is also opening up Watson for developers. Suh suggested that developers look to IBM Blue Mix and the Watson Developer Cloud, because that is where the company is exposing a variety of Watson APIs, such as AlchemyLanguage, Visual Recognition and Natural Language Classifier. Of note is the Watson Work Services API, which is a summarization action service. “That’s an API you can put on all kinds of third-party applications; it doesn’t have to be one that we are using at IBM,” Suh commented.

During the interview, Meggers also spoke about Cisco’s analytic offering for developers, called Cisco Spark, which is available at developers.ciscospark.com.

Stitching it all together

The second time Suh sat down with Furrier and Vellante on theCUBE, she was with Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign. The two companies recently formed a partnership to make DocuSign API’s available through IBM Bluemix, allowing customers and developers the chance to develop and embed eSignature and Digital Transaction Management functionality within IBM’s Cloud platform.

“This will stitch together services for workflow in natural ways and create an incredible end-user experience when it comes to moment of truth in digital transactions,” Suh said.

The collaboration for both companies means that digitized personal micro-productivity flows in new exciting ways. Incorporating DocuSign into the workspace is an opening for the company to design APIs together in an open way.

“This is a natural partnership because we’ve emerged as the global standard; this is a new area, digital transaction management. Core to our strategies is to thrive in a heterogeneous environment, so we have to be Switzerland by definition, and IBM is as well,” asserted Krach.

Suh explained that all of the collaboration means IBM is creating a brand-new category around Watson Work. “A family of IBM applications and partner applications where we are going to infuse Watson into understanding you personally and contextually,” Suh said.

Suh explained that all of the collaboration means IBM is creating a brand-new category around Watson Work, which includes “a family of IBM applications and partner applications where we are going to infuse Watson into understanding you personally and contextually,” Suh said.

She considers this an opportunity to save time and energy while providing focus on the business functions and offering more meaningful conversations in the work environment.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM World of Watson 2016. (*Disclosure: IBM and other companies sponsor some IBM World of Watson segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE