Research Notes

IBM & Red Hat: Project Lightwell, Protecting Open Source Software

Steve McDowell May 29, 2026

IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5 billion initiative to establish a trusted enterprise clearinghouse for open-source software security. The project deploys more than 20,000 engineers, augmented by AI, to identify, triage, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities across open-source supply chains at a scale that exceeds what most enterprises can achieve independently.

IBM: Anderon Quantum Foundry and the Industrialization of Quantum Hardware

Steve McDowell May 27, 2026

IBM and the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a Letter of Intent to establish Anderon, a standalone company that will operate the United States’ first pure-play quantum chip foundry.

The initiative has a combined commitment of $2 billion, including $1 billion in proposed CHIPS Act R&D incentives from the Department of Commerce and $1 billion in cash from IBM, supplemented by IBM’s intellectual property, fabrication assets, and an existing skilled workforce.

Dell Technologies: AI Data Platform and Storage Portfolio for the Agentic Enterprise

Steve McDowell May 26, 2026

At the recent Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell announced a broad expansion of its AI Data Platform and storage portfolio, centered on the general availability of the Lightning File System (formerly Project Lightning), the introduction of Exascale Storage as a unified 4-in-1 rack architecture, the refreshed ObjectScale X7700 appliance, and enhancements to the Dell AI Data Platform’s orchestration, analytics, and search layers.

SailPoint Agentic Fabric Extends Identity Governance to AI Agents & Non-Human Identities

Steve McDowell May 13, 2026

SailPoint recently announced SailPoint Agentic Fabric, a new product layer that extends the identity governance and administration (IGA) model the company has built for human users to AI agents, machine identities, and other non-human identities (NHIs).

Atlassian Team ’26: Context as Infrastructure

Steve McDowell May 12, 2026

At Atlassian’s recent Team’26 conference, the company released a broad set of announcements organized around the thesis that organizational context is the primary source of AI differentiation. The announcements clearly show that Atlassian intends to serve as the infrastructure layer that makes that context actionable

Think 2026: IBM’s AI Operating Model Takes Shape

Steve McDowell May 10, 2026

At its annual Think conference in Boston earlier this month, IBM delivered the most comprehensive expansion to date of its enterprise AI and hybrid cloud portfolio. The announcements center on what IBM calls an AI Operating Model, a four-pillar architecture built around agents, data, automation, and hybrid infrastructure.