PAIring Up…

Greg Lee summarises an exciting year in the world of AI.

​Reflecting on the last 12 – 18 months it’s been one of the more hectic and most exciting periods of my career. During this time, I’ve witnessed a new level of flourishing partnership between Meridian IT and IBM around AI, one of the strategic pillars for the Meridian UK business.
 
From Day 1 I had the utmost confidence in the IBM platform and software stack to deliver differentiation, performance and value in the AI arena. What I didn’t know at the time was that beyond the brilliant product offerings we would also have access to some of the best people a partner organisation could wish for.
 
Having been introduced to what we would soon be calling “The AI Team” it was the turn of Meridian to stand up and be counted. Our commitment to building a business around AI had several key elements:
 

• Delivering easy access to IBM platforms for AI workloads
• Building an ecosystem to support customers on their AI journey
• Having a focal point for all these resources

 
The delivery of the platform was perhaps the easiest part, after all, Meridian do have an entire managed service business to help support the initiative! The IBM GPU accelerated POWER servers with PowerAI and AI Vision (we’ll talk more about each of these in future blogs) were extremely simple to set up (granted, with a bit of help from the IBM team), expediting the time to value for us and our clients.
 
We also did not have much of a problem identifying key partners able to deliver Data Science and industry specific software development skills. Not many organisations that we had spoken to, then or since, have all these skills in house so to be able to plug the right people in, at the right time, for the right project has proven vital in successful project delivery.
 
The glue to all of this became the AI Centre of Competence, our focal point for the strategy. Out of the centre we have run a host of education and enablement sessions as well as client workshops. More about the workshop approach and successes will follow in future articles
 
As soon as we had launched we had interest and PoCs running. Some of that early interest has grown into full customer engagements that are still using the platform for development to this day.
 
Pairing up with IBM has always been a business imperative for Meridian. With the developing AI landscape and opportunity that we are seeing this pAIring up is once again proving to be a wise move.
 
 
Greg Lee – Greg has over 25 years of experience across the IT Industry. Through consulting roles in the end user, channel partner and distribution spaces Greg has helped to design and deliver solutions across all sectors. An IBM POWER System focus was exchanged for Storage Solution business development, driving new markets and revenues at a global IBM distribution partner. Greg is now breaking new ground back in the IBM POWER sphere at Meridian IT Ltd, focussing on AI Workloads, solution delivery, partnering, tooling and education.