IBM TechXchange 2026 is a wrap, and what a week it was in Atlanta.
A big thank you to everyone who joined Bryan Buckland from IBM and me at Tech Talk 03 for TLK-1411: Cloud Migration, Engineered, and to everyone who stayed afterwards with questions. Those conversations were the highlight of my week, and they shaped everything in this post.
Here's what we heard, what we showed, and where we go from here.
The questions we kept hearing
All week, in the hallways and at the booth, the same three questions came up again and again:
- Why did this break, and how fast can we know?
- Which workloads are ready to migrate?
- Are we compliant right now?
None of them are about missing data. Most teams have more dashboards and alerts than they can use. What they're missing is a fast, trustworthy answer, and that's exactly what our session was about.
The big idea: what if your infrastructure could answer directly?
We opened with a simple question: what if your infrastructure could answer questions directly? No extra layers, and no war rooms.
That's the idea behind WANDA, our agentic AI for IT and cloud operations. Instead of digging through tools, teams ask in plain English, and WANDA handles the work across five areas: automated root cause analysis, predicting issues, securing, optimizing and modernizing.
On stage, we used prompts like these:
- "Report any looming infra issues every morning."
- "Why are our transactions failing?"
- "Can you help me build a DR strategy?"
Each one would normally mean hours across several tools and teams. With WANDA, it's one conversation.
One conversation across your whole stack
A question we got a lot after the talk: "Does it work with what we already have?" Yes. WANDA connects to the tools teams already run, with no agents where possible and no lock-in:
| Area | Examples |
|---|---|
| On-prem & virtualization | VMware, bare metal servers |
| Clouds & containers | IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes |
| Monitoring & observability | Splunk and other monitoring and logging tools |
| ITSM & ticketing | ServiceNow, BMC Helix, Jira Service Management |
| Network & security | Firewalls, network devices, SIEM |
Anything else can connect through MCP, so WANDA becomes a single conversational layer over the whole environment.
Cloud migration, engineered
The heart of our session was migration. Too many migrations still run on spreadsheets, late nights and crossed fingers. We showed a different approach: a guided journey that WANDA runs, and that you control.
- Connect: link the source environment.
- Assess: WANDA discovers every server and marks it ready or fix first.
- Design & plan: it drafts the target design and the migration plan, including network, security rules and sizing.
- Migrate in waves: each server goes through pre-flight checks, backup, restore and verification.
- After migration: health checks, a security review, cost optimization, and a clean rollback window.
The most important part: nothing runs until you approve it. In our migration demo, WANDA moved 10 of 10 servers with 45 minutes of total downtime, and kept the source available for 14 days in case a rollback was needed.
The outcomes we shared
We closed the talk with what this means for the business. Teams using WANDA typically see:
- 50%+ reduction in operating costs
- 3X team productivity
- 85% faster incident resolution
Typical customer results reported by Wanclouds; results vary by environment.
The best part: the conversations after
The talk lasted 20 minutes. The conversations afterwards went on much longer, and they were the most valuable part of the week. Thank you to everyone who stopped by, shared what you're working on, and asked the hard questions.
A special thank you to Bryan Buckland for sharing the stage, and to the IBM TechXchange team for a fantastic event.
Missed it, or want to keep the conversation going?
We'd love to help you get your own answers. IBM Cloud teams can get a complimentary IT assessment and 6M free WANDA credits: request yours here.
See you at the next one,
Faiz
