IBM Concert Platform: Redefining IT Operations for the Agentic Enterprise

Enterprise IT operations built around siloed observability tools simply can’t absorb the volume, velocity, or complexity of today's application environments. AI-generated code, expanding agent deployments, and hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure are producing signals that fragmented teams and disconnected tooling were never designed to correlate, prioritize, or act on. The IBM Concert Platform addresses that directly, unifying observability, optimization, protection, resilience, and operations into a single, agentic-first architecture that gives SREs and IT teams coordinated intelligence rather than finger-pointing across dashboards.

At IBM Think 2026 in Boston, Jason Andersen sat down with Jennifer Fitzgerald, Director of Product Management for IBM Observability, to explore the transformative impact of the Concert Platform on IT operations, highlighting how its modular design adapts to various organizational needs. The conversation emphasized the necessity of an integrated strategy for health, performance, cost, and risk to ensure modern business continuity.

The conversation covers how IBM assembled deep domain intelligence from years of acquisitions into a coherent platform with a shared data layer and agentic framework underneath, how Concert's five capability modules map directly to operational roles, and how the platform handles both the management of AI agents running inside enterprise applications and the deployment of domain agents that compress multi-hour incident investigations into minutes.

Key Takeaways:

🔹 Siloed observability tools cannot scale to modern IT environments. Organizations average ten observability tools across their estate. IBM Concert Platform consolidates domain intelligence into a unified data layer and agentic framework, replacing the tool sprawl and team fragmentation that slows incident response.

🔹 Concert Platform's five modules map to operational roles, not just functions. Concert Observe covers full-stack observability from application to network. Concert Optimize targets performance and cost efficiency. Concert Protect handles application vulnerability and risk. Concert Resilience shifts resilience measurement from reactive to proactive. Concert Operate brings workflow automation and third-party tool integration together at the core. 

🔹 Agent-to-agent workflows compress incident resolution from hours to minutes. Domain agents work together to surface the root cause of performance issues, whether code, node, or network, with full transparency and human-in-the-loop controls. Organizations define how much autonomy to delegate based on risk tolerance, with a clear path toward fuller automation over time.

🔹 AI-generated code and agent proliferation are accelerating the security exposure surface. Concert Protect addresses vulnerability volume at scale through business-aware context and automated remediation, shifting security left into the development process rather than treating it as a downstream, siloed step.

🔹 The platform is modular and does not require rip-and-replace. Organizations start with the pain points most relevant to their environment and expand over time. Third-party observability tools already in use integrate into the platform rather than being displaced by it.

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Jennifer Fitzgerald:
Ultimately, we're all just after business continuity. And business continuity comes from the optimal health, performance, resilience, cost, and risk mitigation for your organization. And it needs to be thought about as a unified approach.

Jason Andersen: 

Hi, and welcome to Six Five on the Road. We're here at IBM Think 2026 here in Boston. I'm Jason Anderson, and I'm joined today by Jenny Fitzgerald, and we're going to be talking about how we're starting to look at IT ops moving forward in the age of AI, right? So I think one of the big challenges we're seeing with I.T. ops especially as people are deploying more A.I. and more agents is this need to kind of move from a we'll call it kind of reactive or monitoring approach to observability to something a lot more proactive. And you have a lot of experience with that. So maybe we could just chat about that a little bit.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah, it's a real challenge in today's IT operations models, right? Organizations genuinely need to rethink IT operations. And we're at a point where we have the tools to do that, and we're bringing the tools together. The traditional silos of tools. Observability tools and teams is just not going to cut it with the volume of today's new applications, new code, etc. There's too much pressure on performance cost risk and so thinking about these as siloed approaches is just not going to cut it anymore. That's actually really what's driving the strategy behind us bringing IBM Concert Platform to market and really rethinking how IT operations can run in an agentic first way.

Jason Andersen: 

You've used some interesting words. You've just said rethink. You've talked about a new world, things like that. And one thing that the IBM customer knows a lot about is modernization over time, right? So as we think about modernization and we think about how that applies in this scenario and how we keep current reduced technical debt, those types of things, what are the types of things that we can expect from IBM and from Concert for that matter?

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

So first of all, it's really bringing the core domain intelligence and capabilities together. So tools like that are looking and actually, I'll use a real example for this because I think that helps when there's an issue in an organization, right? Something slow. Something's happening. What's the question? Is it the code? Is it the node? Is it the network, right? And usually it's siloed teams. You looking at their own tools pointing fingers, right? Right we're actually bringing that together and so bringing all that domain intelligence bring that don't deep domain context into that single pane of glass and that single experience. So that we can see is it the code node network a lot faster leveraging agenda capabilities to surface that to the end user faster and genuinely driving that business continuity. And so underpinning this is core platform services that we've invested in, having a unified data layer, having that core knowledge base, having a new agentic framework and domain agents that can work together and work with an SRE to keep things moving and performing better. So this is really exciting and I think core to this, aside from bringing our best in class capabilities and core platform services, is maintaining our focus as IBM on that whole open hybrid ecosystem and environment that is core to the IBM brand ethos, right? Making sure we're supporting clients with the tools they own from IBM, but also the third party tools as well.

Jason Andersen: 

You brought up an interesting point that we've been talking for a while now, but this is an interesting point because IBM built this portfolio up through acquisitions, but in a lot of ways what you've done with this new set of it, you've innovated now kind of below and on top, right? So below you have the shared data platform, Infograph. On top we have basically Concert now is kind of that top layer, right? It was up here for a while, now it's kind of been elevated. So when you think about that as a more platform-centric approach, let's kind of shift gears and talk about the market a little bit. Because you mentioned fragmentation, you mentioned silos, those types of words. Talk about how this is representative of something different in the market.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah, so we are taking a different approach in the market because we have acquired and invested in these core capabilities over time. We're able to bring them together in a different way, to your point, in terms of how do we bring these together, continue to invest in the deep domain intelligence and experience, because that's core, right? You need that deep domain intelligence, but how can you bring it together in new ways? That's the fun part of my job, is getting to work with our incredible IBM research team, our developers, our engineers, user research, the whole product, or to think about how can we bring this together, how do clients want to experience it, and how do we help lead the way to redefine IT operations for the modern enterprise.

Jason Andersen: 

And then what's also nice is that the kind of idea of since it did start from a set of disparate products, there's not like, this doesn't come with like a rip and replace type of promise from you. It's a, you got a lot of starting points. People can start from where they need it, right? So that's a pretty interesting angle in addition to, you know, your kind of hybrid value proposition, which also I think is something that, is a bit of a challenge in the market, right? I mean, there's a lot of tools out there, but they're built by a hyperscaler, or they're built by a vendor of some sort just for their stack. So that kind of entry point and hybrid, can we touch on that a little?

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Those are great 2 points to touch on so I'll start with the hybrid approach first because again this is core to IBM's brand ethos right open trusted hybrid that's how we're building the platform so we have core platform services unified data layer and agentic framework that is bringing our first party domain intelligence together in a unified way. But we know organizations have many tools, right? Think about observability as an example. Many organizations have 10 observability tools. And so being able to support clients in providing core capabilities, but also integrating with the third party tools that they have is absolutely core to how we're approaching building this platform from an architecture and an open perspective. Two is organizations managing hybrid multi-cloud environments. That's absolutely core to what we're able to offer with this platform. And then the other core piece you touched on earlier is how we brought all of the products that we've invested in over many years into a single platform. So let me take a minute just to talk you through that. So IBM Concert Platform It's really exciting, and it's quite frankly many years in the making for us to make this happen and really think about investing in the core technical architecture to make this happen in a seamless, unified platform experience. But we've been able to build this so someone doesn't have to buy the entire platform. You don't have to start with everything. That's not what organizations are ready for, so we've built it in a modular and flexible approach. So you can think about what are the key pain points you want to start with, start there, and continue to grow over time based on the needs for your business. So we have Concert Observe, which is core full-stack observability capabilities, right, from the application all the way through to the network. Then we have Concert Optimize, which is the core performance and resource optimization. Really a big focus today in terms of rising costs, but with the need of thinking about how do we do it in a performance-assured way. And the third piece is concert protect. This is really relevant to what's happening in the market in terms of the vulnerabilities and risks to an application and organization. So those are three key capabilities. Across is resilience. So concert resilience. How do you measure resilience? How do you improve resilience over time and take something that was a reactive thing into a proactive strategic approach? And at the core, we have Concert Operate, which is really bringing in workflows, automation, and the core unified operations approach into the platform. And that's a really big piece to ensure we continue to work with those third-party tools.

Jason Andersen: 

That's even a bit of a theme. I mean, the way you just described your packaging scheme is that It aligns pretty well to roles that are out there. Yeah, and you kind of see that whole role based approach even in other IBM solutions like Bob has the different rule that seems to be kind of a nice pervasive theme about the think show this year. So that's that's pretty cool. Another big theme at think show is agents.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah.

Jason Andersen: 

Talk a lot about agents. As you know, I talk a lot about agents. So when you have an ITOM type of solution, there's really kind of two ways to look at agents. There's agents as the facilitator of delivering good service, right, to your users. And then there's agents as different types of things that can be managed within your estate. Can we talk a little bit about those?

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah, absolutely. We cover both and that's how we think about it as well. First is organizations have new AI applications or applications that have agents running in them, so they need to be able to monitor and understand the performance of agents in terms of their overall application health and performance. Slow is the new down, wrong is the new slow, right? OK think about it that way so that's that's core capability for our end users and then agents within the platform experience is a huge piece that we've invested a lot in and have that core agentic framework where we're bringing new platform agents domain agents or working together to ensure. That we can help those end users see things faster so instead of taking you know incidents from this reactive approach we have agent to agent workflows that actually help those end users step through hey I'm going to look at this check this hey I'm going to look at this check this to take something that would have been quite frankly. Hours of work against multiple tools and multiple teams into something that can take minutes fully engaged and transparent and with a key focus of human in the loop along the way. Yeah, because I know agents is really exciting, but also when you're thinking about managing applications that run your business. There is a level of control and guardrails that you want to make sure is a key piece of how you're running your organization. So we're moving the needle on how we can use agents, but we're also doing it in a way that ensures that end user has the transparency, builds that trust over time.

Jason Andersen: 

One, it's funny because in my research, I've made this distinction. There's a lot of people who jumped very quickly to the idea of autonomous agents. And I kind of say, well, that's a little too far in many use cases, right? Even in developer use cases, right? So the idea of kind of what I call more directed, right? Where you say, well, I'm going to give you the parameters. I want you to go do this. And it's really a delegation thing. It's how much do you want to delegate to that agent? And I also think it's important because The institutional knowledge, right? The agent might know the right way to do it, but not everybody does everything the right way all the time.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Right. I think we've talked about semi-autonomy.

Jason Andersen: 

Yes. Yep. There you go.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

And quite frankly, organizations are going to be at different levels of comfort or risk Some will be more risk adverse, some will be ready to push the need on things. And so that's also how we're approaching building the platform in a way that's helping organizations on this path. Some might be ready to run some pieces of it in a fully autonomous way. but there's a path to get there. And so having those guardrails, having the control along the way, but also continuing to think about how we're investing in deep domain agents, so they're best at what they do, and then they work together, is a key piece, and that's quite frankly a key piece of how IT operations needs to work, right? It's a team sport after all, and so we're helping bring that together.

Jason Andersen: 

You know, it's interesting, too, because on the other side of the equation is the agents and the build-out itself, right? It's exploding, right? There's people who are not thinking of themselves as developers, are making apps, and they're doing things. So in terms of that being kind of exciting and kind of energizing for a business, right? On the IT ops side, that can also be pretty scary, which brings us to kind of maybe our last topic here. Let's talk a little bit about security and security also under the broader umbrella of even resilience, if you want to talk about that a little bit.

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah, absolutely. And that one's, you know, an area that's getting a lot of noise these days, not just new AI developed code or new agents, but also new advances in the market with things like Mythos, where all of a sudden, finding vulnerabilities isn't the issue and the volume of vulnerabilities that are going to be found is exploding beyond belief right in front of our eyes and things are moving really quickly. That's a key piece actually of Concert Protect, which is not just finding things, but it's ultimately having that business aware context and fixing things faster. So bringing security or risk management for applications, shifting that left. Right? How can we find the risks earlier, like even as you're developing that code and fix it before you get into production, but also how do we help organizations deal with the scale and deal with the scale and that business aware approach so that we can automate patching, so we can automate the fixes and really bringing that business context and the ability to automate in a way that helps you approach the scale challenge. And that's really what we're excited to bring with the concert protect area and something that we in IBM have been using to manage this as well. And I know many organizations are looking to think about how we can do this. But again, risk can't be looked at or security can't be looked at as a last step and siloed approach. It has to be done. How can we shift left to do this earlier? But also, how can we do this in a holistic approach? Because ultimately, we're all just after business continuity, right? And business continuity comes from the optimal health, performance, resilience, and cost and risk mitigation for your organization. And it needs to be thought about as a unified approach.

Jason Andersen: 

Yeah, and there's also this kind of notion where people are using AI still tactically, right? So they might be getting a really good result for maybe one part of an overall business process. You know, you see that in the development world where these coding agents are now getting code out so much faster, but then the guys who do performance testing or the folks who are responsible for just even deployment, that the rest of the tool chain can't keep up, right? And I think that's another great part with concert, because it is holistic, right? You can look at the whole thing and identify where the kind of breakdowns are moving or where they're headed to, right? As you kind of go through the journey, you will find bottlenecks along the way, right?

Jennifer Fitzgerald: 

Yeah, and that's a great example of what we're talking about with redefining IT operations, right? You can't actually, you need to rethink how you're approaching it. scale is happening, new bottlenecks are popping up, and so rethinking about this in a unified, agentic first way across your organization is going to become really critical for organizations as we move forward.

Jason Andersen: 

Thanks for tuning in to Six Five On The Road here at IBM Think 2026. Tune in to our channel all the time, like and subscribe, and thank you for joining us today.

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