Bob+

Bob+ provide a unified digital experience for discovering, adopting, and implementing reusable IBM capabilities across the AI Control Plane (Agents, Govern, Engineering), Data, and Automation (Operate, Secure, Optimize).

Powered by IBM Bob, technical teams receive AI-assisted guidance across the entire development lifecycle—from solution design and coding to modernization, deployment, and optimization—accelerating time-to-value while ensuring enterprise-grade security, governance, and consistency.

Digital Experience with Bob+

Bob+ combines Generative AI with IBM technology expertise to serve as an intelligent engineering companion across the software lifecycle. Instead of navigating fragmented documentation and APIs, teams interact with a single assistant that recommends the right Building Blocks, abstracts implementation complexity, and accelerates building, modernizing, and operating applications.

Capability Areas

AI Control Plane

• Agents Enterprise-ready building blocks for creating, orchestrating, and deploying autonomous AI agents that integrate with enterprise systems and business workflows.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Agent Builder	Create and deploy LLM-backed, tool-calling agents — from local development to production
  Multi-Agent Orchestration	Coordinate agents and route LLM calls across providers via open standards (A2A, MCP, AI Gateway)

• Govern Evaluate, observe, govern, and enforce policy across every AI agent and model in production — making AI safe and compliant at enterprise scale.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Agent Ops	Evaluate and observe agents — benchmarking, red-teaming, failure analysis, traces and latency
  Guardrails	Enforce runtime policy on agents, tools, and models — PII filters, content safety, secrets detection, rate limits, model fallback, and Pass/Flag/Block checks for any framework
  Cost Management	Track what watsonx Orchestrate agents cost — tokens per agent and conversation in the platform, and cost in dollars per trace, session, and evaluation scenario with Langfuse
  Compliance	Map AI use cases to regulations, manage risk assessments, and report compliance posture

• Engineering Accelerates every phase of software delivery — building new systems with AI assistance and systematically modernizing legacy applications.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Agentic SDLC	IDE-native AI agent spanning planning, coding, testing, documentation, modernization, and CI/CD
  Code Modernization	Transform legacy Java, mainframe, IBM Z, and IBM i applications into modern cloud-native systems
  Integration as Code	Connect SaaS apps, on-premise systems, APIs, and event streams through a low-code iPaaS model
  Headless Bob	Run Bob autonomously in CI/CD pipelines, scheduled jobs, and event-driven automations

Intelligent Data Core Capabilities

• Pipelines Prepares, transforms, moves, and indexes structured and unstructured data into AI-ready representations — covering RAG, document parsing, Text2SQL, visual batch ETL, and high-speed WAN synchronization.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  RAG	Ground applications and agents with governed enterprise documents and hybrid retrieval
  UDI	Ingest, parse, cleanse, chunk, and structure complex unstructured documents for RAG and AI
  Text2SQL	Convert natural-language questions into SQL using enriched metadata context
  ETL	Build governed visual batch integration flows across enterprise sources and lakehouse targets
  Data Sync	Synchronize large file sets, media, and AI repositories securely across WAN at wire speed

• Streamhouse Captures, transports, transforms, governs, and serves the continuously current state of enterprise business events to production applications, analytics, and AI agents at sub-second latency.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Stream	Capture and transport enterprise event streams and CDC from databases, SaaS, and IoT
  Transform	Real-time stream processing, event enrichment, filtering, and windowed aggregations in motion
  Govern	Enforce schema contracts, trace stream lineage, evaluate data quality rules, and catalog data products
  Serve	Deliver low-latency live state to AI agents (MCP/REST) and open Iceberg tables for lakehouse analytics

• Lakehouse Unified lakehouse analytics, multi-engine compute, metadata governance, data observability, and serverless vector retrieval without data duplication.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Meta Data Enrichment and Quality	Add business terms, descriptions, profiling, quality rules, and lineage to lakehouse assets
  Data Observability	Detect pipeline failures, data drift, volume anomalies, and SLA breaches before users notice
  Zero-Copy Lakehouse	Query and process distributed data in place without copying using open Apache Iceberg tables
  Serverless Vector	Elastic serverless vector storage for semantic search, RAG, and AI agent memory

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Automation Core Capabilities

• Operate Automates infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and workload scheduling to deliver consistent, repeatable pipelines across hybrid cloud environments — reducing manual toil and enabling teams to focus on higher-value work.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Infrastructure as Code	Declarative, version-controlled provisioning across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
  Configure & Automate	Agentless, idempotent configuration management and IT automation at enterprise scale
  Workload Orchestration & Scheduling	Unified scheduling of containers, VMs, batch jobs, and binaries under a single control plane

• Secure Protects enterprise applications, data, and infrastructure through comprehensive identity management, continuous compliance monitoring, and quantum-safe cryptographic capabilities.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Non-human Identity & Secret Management	Centralized identity governance and dynamic secrets management across hybrid environments
  Application Risk & Continuous Compliance	Unified application risk visibility, CVE monitoring, and automated compliance posture management
  Cryptographic & Quantum-Safe Readiness	Discover, govern, and migrate cryptographic assets to quantum-safe algorithms

• Optimize Continuously improves observability, application performance, cost efficiency, and network health through intelligent automation and analytics across hybrid cloud environments.

  Building Block	What It Enables
  Full-Stack Application Observability	Automated, real-time visibility across every tier of hybrid applications
  Application Performance	Demand-driven resource optimization balancing performance and cost continuously
  Technology Financial Management & FinOps	Granular cloud spend visibility, cost allocation, and forecasting
  Network Performance Management	High-frequency network monitoring, capacity planning, and AI-powered anomaly detection

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Get started — install the Bob+ extension

The Bob+ extension brings the Building Blocks Marketplace directly into IBM Bob, letting you browse and install Skills and Modes without leaving your IDE. → Extension Installation Guide