When IBM Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty declared in her keynote address at last week’s Think conference that “there can’t be AI without IA,” she was making a crucial point regarding her company’s strategy. Before becoming distracted by the allure of artificial intelligence and the innovation it can bring, IBM intends to focus on the underlying information architecture and address its complexity.

That increasingly complex structure, captured by various cloud platforms, data movement, and a convoluted process to manage it all, is the opportunity that IBM sees for itself as the company surveys the current technology landscape.

“We are bringing things together to address complexity, to make complexity simple for our clients,” said Bala Rajaraman (pictured), IBM fellow and vice president, IBM Cloud, at IBM. “Even though it might seem like different technologies, I think bringing them together to solve this problem is perhaps one of the most exciting things that we can provide to the market.”

Rajaraman spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed the role of open-source tools in management consistency and AI-powered debate technology recently unveiled by IBM. (* Disclosure below.)

Open source to the rescue

The challenge in addressing this complexity has been to find technologies that provide consistency in managing disparate elements. One of the technologies that has contributed significantly toward this dynamic has been open source, specifically containers and orchestration tools, such as the Kubernetes container orchestration system.

“If it’s open, you create an ecosystem. You really address enterprise concerns from how to build stuff in a consistent way and leverage skills in the market to managing it to production and security goals,” Rajaraman said. “Giving you a foundation with consistency you can take advantage of has been a fundamental revolution over the last two years.”

AI still has an important role to play in the evolution of enterprise computing. During the Think conference last week, IBM staged a demonstration of Debater, an AI-based debate system developed by the company’s Research Lab.

Debater squared off against a professional advocate for 15 minutes, and although it was deemed the loser by a crowd of 700 attendees, the machine showed considerable intelligence chops.

“One of the exciting things about Debater is you can process incredible amounts of information not only to provide insight, but to provide rationalizable insights,” Rajaraman said. “It is a tremendous innovation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE