Successful businesses are embracing the power of AI to help streamline operations, generate insights, boost productivity and drive more value for clients. However, for many enterprises, the barrier to entry for integrating trustworthy, scalable and transparent AI remains high. In fact, 80% of enterprise AI projects never make it out of the lab.  

So how do businesses that want to incorporate AI move forward when there is such a high level of difficulty? Many have turned to IBM’s portfolio of AI offerings, which provides pre-trained AI models that can be integrated into existing applications to improve process efficiency, enabling organizations to direct their resources to more valuable tasks. 

Krista Software is an example of how IBM enables business partners to integrate IBM’s embeddable AI software portfolio in their offerings as a cost-effective and risk-averse way to help clients benefit from AI technology without needing to build the infrastructure from the ground up. 

The challenge of staying one step ahead in mobile security 

Dallas-based Zimperium provides a mobile-first security platform purpose-built for enterprise environments. With machine learning-based protection through a single platform, Zimperium offers customers mobile threat defense and in-app protection. To provide continuous and persistent security for customers, Zimperium relies upon timely software releases to remain one step ahead of emerging threats on corporate and user-owned mobile devices. However, until recently, their software deployment process was time-consuming, requiring a lot of human interaction.  

For example, Zimperium maintains hundreds of software environments on any given day, and their engineers must run multiple releases — which include patches, updates and hard fixes — through an entire deployment cycle for each of those environments. Every release undergoes a rigorous approval cycle that involves high-touch coordination between customer success and pre-sales teams. Once the software is approved, engineers deploy and apply each release to all environments. With thousands of deployments each year, many taking up to 3 weeks, Zimperium turned to Krista Software to help streamline its process. 

Krista Software helps Zimperium automate operations with IBM Watson 

Vamsi Kurukuri, VP of Site Reliability at Zimperium, developed a strategy to remove roadblocks and pain points in Zimperium’s deployment process. He then selected Krista’s AI-powered intelligent automation platform to optimize Zimperium’s project management suite, messaging solutions, development and operations (DevOps). Krista’s platform uses machine learning and IBM Watson NLP, allowing Zimperium engineers to “Ask Krista” for a business outcome, streamlining tasks such as creating IT tickets, sending notifications to eligible team members and sending reminders when approvals are needed, enabling Krista to own the outcome for each deployment cycle. 

The Krista platform follows each ticket throughout the development cycle, ensures every step is adhered to, and that the right software is ready to be deployed to the right servers at the right time. Once all parties approve the release, Krista then deploys it. With Krista, Zimperium automated its software deployment process, reducing a 4+ hour manual process to mere minutes, across hundreds of environments. This improvement led to over USD 200,000 in savings and empowered Zimperium’s engineers and developers to focus on what they do best: developing secure software for their clients. 

Powering change: IBM’s embeddable AI software portfolio 

With the support of Krista Software, Zimperium automated its entire scheduling and deployment process in less than two months, helping them release updates faster, address human error and regulatory requirements, improve efficiency and reduce risk with no data science and coding requirements. Zimperium saw significant cost savings and increased efficiency as it helped protect its clients against both known and unknown cybersecurity threats. 

Building on the success delivered in less than 60 days, Krista and Zimperium are entering the next phase of the relationship, in which Krista will use IBM Watson to help optimize Zimperium’s order-to-cash process and automate its international customer support. Krista also plans to continue to deepen its work with IBM, including exploring the upcoming IBM watsonx AI and data platform, to help clients like Zimperium unlock AI’s true potential.