Reinventing IBM | DevSecOps, AI, Quantum Computing w/ IBM Fellow Rosalind Radcliffe

No company is immune to transformation, not even one with as storied a history as IBM. 

This week on Dev Interrupted, Rosalind Radcliffe, the CIO DevSecOps CTO at IBM, joins us to chat about how one of tech's greatest legacy companies is positioning itself for the future. 

Rosalind shares what it means to be named an IBM Fellow, her work to bring DevOps and open source to the z/OS environment, and what the future looks like at IBM. [Hint: it involves quantum computing and AI!]

Episode Highlights:

• (2:01) What does it mean to be an IBM Fellow?
• (3:45) DevOps transformation at IBM
• (8:38) z/OS
• (12:40) IBM's founding in 1924
• (16:38) Moving to a zero-trust environment
• (23:36) Fit for purpose
• (30:00) Scaling apprenticeship programs
• (35:11) Quantum computing and AI

Episode Excerpt

Conor: Are there things that you can share about what's happening at IBM around Quantum?

Rosalind: So, quantum is fun. IBM announced very recently the largest refrigerator built in order to build a very large quantum system; we made a large announcement about making the possibility of actually building quantum computers large enough to be able to do it, and I'm, I'm gonna get the name wrong, qiskit, I think that's what it is, the programming environment for quantum is available. So, you can get started and play with quantum now. Now, it's very different. But more people need to start playing with it and start looking at what it's going to be good for. It's not traditional programming. So, it's not the same kind of thing that it's going to be used for. Monte Carlo simulations, looking at material science to understand what materials go better to build ships. There are all sorts of uses for Quantum. But we've only started to think about that. 

Conor: Yeah. 

Rosalind: So, getting into quantum, go out and play with quantum one, it's on the internet, play with it, learn about it, understand what it can do, learn about AI and what the possibilities of AI are. But also think about how IBM got out of the face facial recognition business for a reason. IBM also wants us to think about what's the ethical use of — so we want to think about the ethical use of what we're doing. So, as you're getting into these things with AI and whatever, let's think about what we're actually going to do with it. Let's think about whether we are making society better or are we not. And so we also want to think from that perspective.

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