To help provide partners with further opportunities in the field of AI, IBM is launching Agent Connect, a new partner program, and Agent Catalog, a marketplace for AI agents in Orchestrate.
Agent Connect and Agent Catalog will be available within IBM watsonx Orchestrate, the organization’s solution for managing, building, and deploying AI agents and assistants.
These solutions are designed to simplify the development, discovery, and orchestration of intelligent agents across an enterprise’s IT stack.
A marketplace within IBM wastonx Orchestrate
The new Agent Catalog will be a central marketplace within watsonx Orchestrate, allowing users to find innovative agents from IBM or by ecosystem partners using any external framework.
The agents within the hub are built natively to unlock faster time-to-value for developers and end-users.
Agent Connect enables partners to showcase agents specializing in specific areas and provide pre-built integrations to enhance productivity and streamline processes. It also ensures clients utilizing watsonx Orchestrate can easily access and purchase solutions to drive mutual growth and innovation.
“The Agent Connect program has made it incredibly easy to bring our enterprise AI agents to life,” said Steven Astorino, CEO of simplistic.ai. “Building on IBM watsonx Orchestrate allowed us to focus on delivering value to end users without reinventing core infrastructure.”
Among the key benefits of this new hub are:
- Driving faster time-to-value for clients by allowing users to discover and use a broader selection of agents built by our partners, speeding time-to-value and simplifying access to partner agents.
- Enabling multi-agent orchestration by connecting agents with watsonx Orchestrate so they can sync together and collaborate with other partner agents.
- Simplifying development agents by reducing integration complexity with standardized protocols and specifications to build and connect agents.
- Accessing an extended go-to-market channel through leveraging IBM’s sales team and distribution channels to boost partner agent sales with enterprise clients and to utilize IBM Consulting to drive enterprise AI productivity use cases.
IBM Agent Connect Framework
The Agent Connect Framework is the technical underpinning of the IBM Agent Connect partner program. It is a foundational integration architecture that enables seamless connectivity between external agents and watsonx Orchestrate.
The architecture is framework-agnostic and enables the integration of agents built with any framework, including LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Copilot Studio, and custom frameworks. It provides standardized communication with familiar chat completion-style APIs. It includes support for standards like MCP for interoperability, reducing integration complexity while enabling multi-agent collaboration, allowing agents to work together with other specialized agents.
Enterprise features for security, governance, and scalability from watsonx Orchestrate underpins the integration architecture.
IBM has been making moves in the AI ecosystem, recently developing a Microsoft team to bring together IBM’s industry expertise with Microsoft’s AI tools. Read more about the investment to simplify digital transformation.