IBM, IISc Bengaluru launch innovation lab for hybrid cloud research

Pune: US-based International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru (IISc) have announced the launch of the IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab to advance research in hybrid cloud technologies in India.

This is the American company’s second such partnership after the one with University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign.

The IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab will be co-chaired by Yogesh Simmhan, associate professor, Department of Computational and Data Sciences at IISc Bengaluru, and Dr. Amith Singhee, senior manager and senior technical staff member at IBM Research India.


Hybrid cloud, potentially a trillion-dollar market, is an important area for IBM. Even as the industry has started moving to the cloud, the mission critical applications are still going through the journey, said Mukesh Khare, vice-president (hybrid cloud) at IBM Research.

“They need to be able to make sure that the cost is acceptable, their application can be modernised into a cloud-native environment. And so more than 80% of the enterprise workload is still in the process of figuring out how to transition to cloud,” he said.

This is where the company is focusing its hybrid cloud and AI strategy, to help enterprises transition from on-premise to the hybrid cloud.

The IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab is located on the university’s campus in Bengaluru. Students and faculty across departments will work alongside IBM Research scientists on specific areas. This includes

• building autonomous self-healing computing systems that use AI to predict issues,
• diagnosing and healing faults, adopting microservices and optimising cloud-native apps,
• creating AI-based information management, and
• developing AI systems to analyse human and machine languages.

“We are excited about making the joint research findings open source and accessible to a wide community which will significantly accelerate innovation in the emerging areas of AI and Hybrid Cloud,” said Navakanta Bhat, dean (interdisciplinary sciences), IISc Bengaluru. “Such industry-academia partnerships are key to boosting the impact of research…”