This is our final installment in our multi-part interview with Freddy Lee, CTO of IBM Malaysia. We asked him for his thoughts about digital asset custody, blockchain and cryptocurrency-related processes. Furthermore, we also got him to comment on the future of things as he peers into his crystal ball.

Asia Blockchain Review (ABR) : In terms of digital asset custody, blockchain, and cryptocurrency-related processes, how does the IBM Z series enterprise solutions address this?

Freddy Lee (FL): Digital asset custody is certainly a growing area of interest for us in AP. We’re working with several clients like DACS and Hex Trust, who are building new custody solutions using IBM Hyper Protect Digital Assets Platform, designed to provide a secured basis for financial institutions and enterprises to deploy their commercial or custom solutions for managing digital assets.

Powered by IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, the platform is available on premises with IBM LinuxONE or Linux on IBM Z. The platform is also available in the public cloud with IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services. IBM Hyper Protect services bring the security characteristics of IBM Z to the Hyper Protect Digital Assets Platform including the unique differentiators of Keep Your Own Key (not even IBM has the keys), build on top of FIPS-2 Level 4, the only cloud HSM in the public cloud market built on an HSM designed to meet FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification requirements.

ABR: Finally, what is the bigger picture with IBM Z series enterprise solutions? What’s the ultimate goal with this line of products for IBM? What’s the end game?

FL: Our commitment at IBM to the Z platform is simple, straightforward and direct. IBM will continue to invest heavily in IBM Z to ensure that it is the most essential compute node in a multi cloud network for our customer’s most critical business processes.

Since its inception, the design philosophy of the IBM mainframe has been to protect the customer’s application investment, deliver the highest level of data integrity and to leverage the flexible architecture to integrate new and emerging technologies.

Today our clients are embarking on the journey to Cloud. To be successful in cloud today requires building an integrated end-to-end strategy across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. IBM is uniquely positioned with an expansive ecosystem of cloud capabilities on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Whether you build a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid, it is only as good as the underlying technology. Compute Infrastructure does matter now and into the future.

IBM is making long term investments in IBM Z to ensure that our customers have a strong reason to run their most critical businesses on the mainframe, to modernize applications and to develop new workloads on the platform in a manner that they have transparent and predictable consumption-based pricing that is aligned with today’s cloud environment.

The reason that the mainframe has thrived for well over a half century is because IBM has reinvented it time and again to support the evolving needs and business requirements of its enterprise customers. That ability to evolve in order to support the evolution of others is clear, and more evolution is coming.

This concludes the mult-part series of our interview with Freddy Lee, CTO of IBM Malaysia. From all of us at Asia Blockchain Review, we would like to thank Freddy for his enthusiasm in this endeavor of ours.

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About the author

Anil Prabha

Editor In Chief

Anil started his career in journalism all the way back in 2003. After traversing the sphere of editorial, corporate communications and advertising, he has now come full circle and is back in the world of journalism. He believes in the power of the written word, and its ability to enthrall, delight and inform the reader.