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Bringing ideas to life: Lessons from Kyndryl’s Innovation Award winners

記事 2026/02/05 読み取り時間: 1 分

For Kyndryl’s Delivery teams — which design, build and maintain our customers’ technology infrastructure — turning breakthrough ideas into measurable impact is all in a day’s work. To celebrate their ingenuity, Kyndryl hosted its second annual Innovation Award competition in 2025, drawing submissions from around the world. Scalable across industries and geographies, this year’s standout innovations exemplify technical excellence, accelerate customer growth and spotlight the company’s transformation into a people-first, innovation-driven organization.

Kyndryl’s Innovation Award winners are:

Winner

Real‑time Power Monitoring (RtPM)

Concept: An approach for safely over‑subscribing power capacity.

Team: Harry Volcy, Steve Porter, Jeff Fuchs

Runner‑up

Intelligent Automated Security Compliance Platform

Concept: An AI‑driven platform for handling compliance deviations at scale.

Team: María José Zambrano Izcara, Antonino Roura I Cubi, Elia Candela Oliver, Cristina González Costa, Josep Ramon Monle Sorribas

Runner‑up

Data Engineering Platform for Scalable and Secure Neurodata Analysis

Concept: A containerized platform for high‑frequency neural data analysis.

Team: Enric Solsona, Carles Majo, Abdelmaoula Ahaidar

Although they span industries and tackle very different challenges, the winning ideas offer similar lessons for problem-solvers at every level.

Key themes across teams

“Our Delivery organization doesn’t provide technical solutions,” says Enric Solsona, head of architecture for Kyndryl’s CU Enterprise in Spain. “We create processes that solve problems using technology.” The contest results bear that out, as each winning entry includes new procedures along with tooling innovations.

Case in point: Real‑time Power Monitoring is modernizing power distribution conventions that date back to the 1980s. Because circuit breakers can fail at full capacity, the industry best practice is to install enough panels to handle the unlikely worst-case scenario — every hosted device operating at its maximum power rating. As a result, businesses are paying for capacity they never use. To address this, the RtPM tool continuously measures each panel’s actual load and alerts technicians to anomalies. That allows facilities to run more computing resources per breaker, unlocking additional value from existing investments. However, it also requires technicians to shift from a decades-old methodology of visual checks and manual calculations to new procedures for monitoring real-time sensor data.

The results have been worth the effort. Kyndryl’s Data Center Services can now accommodate three to four times as many devices with the same equipment. Applying this innovation in our Kyndryl Resiliency Datacenter helped Kyndryl sidestep infrastructure expenditures of $2 million. Applied at scale, datacenters can save anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to several million (depending on size).

“The RtPM tool and process go hand in hand,” says Harry Volcy, a project delivery manager for Kyndryl Resiliency Services and co-inventor of RtPM. “To achieve great outcomes, you need both.”

Even as innovations introduce new processes, Delivery teams reduce disruption with user-friendly, compatible solutions.

That focus shaped Kyndryl’s approach with a manufacturer of therapeutic brain implants. The customer’s scientists collect and analyze reams of information from the implanted devices, but their patchwork of tools and servers couldn’t support advanced scientific frameworks or keep pace with demand.

Solsana’s team developed a solution using containers — software packages that run consistently in any infrastructure — enabling their customer to scale its capabilities without modifying its technology stack. Rather than saddle the scientists with entirely new tools, Solsana’s team layered the new architecture under the interface the company was already using.

The modular architecture also allows the company to add new GPUs, storage, or nodes as needed.

The customer previously “spent a lot of time looking for the right infrastructure,” Solsana says. “Now they can concentrate on science, the work they do best.”

For Delivery teams, a close partnership with customers is essential to innovation. As solution architect María José Zambrano Izcara puts it, working “shoulder to shoulder” provides unique insight into customers’ day-to-day realities — routines, pain points, goals, constraints — so Delivery teams can tailor practical, fit-for-purpose solutions.

Zambrano Izcara and her colleagues teamed with one of Europe’s leading banks, using the customer’s existing intelligent, automated security compliance platform to co-develop a custom solution that automates the assessment of possible compliance breaches. The bank was manually evaluating more than 80,000 of these deviations every year, leading to delays, inconsistent decisions and a heavy workload. This solution was designed around the customer’s specific requirements to automate those compliance evaluations.

Zambrano Izcara’s team distilled the customer’s key priorities, including the flexibility to scale compliance solutions as regulations or infrastructure requirements change. The solution: using the existing platform of machine learning models that detect deviations to deliver context-aware recommendations and to continuously improve and adapt through an automated feedback loop.

The team helped the bank reduce manual workloads by more than 9,000 hours per year and improve consistency in compliance decision-making.

Collaborating with the customer “helped us understand what they really needed,” Zambrano Izcara says. “Their feedback was essential in shaping a solution they trust.”

Innovation is rooted in culture

As they find new ways to tackle challenges, Delivery teams have been galvanized by Kyndryl’s company-wide innovation mindset. Teams are given the resources, time and freedom to experiment, and a shared spirit of inquiry flows through the organization from top to bottom, as all the award-winners noted. Executives and managers encourage team leaders to explore new approaches, and team leaders instill the same attitude in their teammates and mentees.

“Everybody at Kyndryl is supportive of creativity,” says Steve Porter, director of delivery management for Kyndryl’s Resiliency Services. “If you see a problem and you can fix it, they say, ‘I trust you. Go do it.’”

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