ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The IBM (NYSE: IBM) board of directors has elected Ramon L. Laguarta to the board, effective March 1, 2026.

IBM Corporation logo.

Ramon L. Laguarta, 62, is the chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo. With a strong commitment to performance and leadership, Mr. Laguarta has led PepsiCo, a global food and beverage leader, since 2018. He has played a pivotal role in PepsiCo’s portfolio and cultural transformation.

Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: “We are pleased to have Ramon Laguarta join the IBM board of directors. Ramon’s background, expertise and proven track record of leveraging technology to transform large organizations make him an ideal director to help steward IBM and deliver significant value to our shareholders.”

Under Mr. Laguarta’s leadership, PepsiCo has evolved into a growth-driven, best-in-class organization. He has led a strategic, end-to-end transformation agenda, scaling technology across the enterprise, driving long-term value for the company.

Prior to becoming CEO, Mr. Laguarta was president of PepsiCo, responsible for driving the company’s corporate strategy. Throughout his career, he has held several executive positions and served as president of developing markets in Europe and CEO of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a board member of the Business Roundtable.

Born and raised in Barcelona, Mr. Laguarta holds an MBA from ESADE Business School in Spain and a Master of Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Contact:
Tim Davidson
914-844-7847
tfdavids@us.ibm.com

ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The IBM (NYSE: IBM) board of directors has elected Ramon L. Laguarta to the board, effective March 1, 2026.

IBM Corporation logo.

Ramon L. Laguarta, 62, is the chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo. With a strong commitment to performance and leadership, Mr. Laguarta has led PepsiCo, a global food and beverage leader, since 2018. He has played a pivotal role in PepsiCo’s portfolio and cultural transformation.

Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: “We are pleased to have Ramon Laguarta join the IBM board of directors. Ramon’s background, expertise and proven track record of leveraging technology to transform large organizations make him an ideal director to help steward IBM and deliver significant value to our shareholders.”

Under Mr. Laguarta’s leadership, PepsiCo has evolved into a growth-driven, best-in-class organization. He has led a strategic, end-to-end transformation agenda, scaling technology across the enterprise, driving long-term value for the company.

Prior to becoming CEO, Mr. Laguarta was president of PepsiCo, responsible for driving the company’s corporate strategy. Throughout his career, he has held several executive positions and served as president of developing markets in Europe and CEO of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a board member of the Business Roundtable.

Born and raised in Barcelona, Mr. Laguarta holds an MBA from ESADE Business School in Spain and a Master of Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Contact:
Tim Davidson
914-844-7847
tfdavids@us.ibm.com

TOKYO, Jan. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — NTT DOCOMO, INC. and Aduna announced today that they concluded a partnership agreement (the “Agreement”) on January 29, 2026. This partnership enables DOCOMO’s network Application Programming Interfaces (network APIs), developed for the international markets, to be made available through Aduna’s platform. Together, the companies aim to accelerate the expansion of the global network API ecosystem in response to evolving industry demand.

Providing mobile network capabilities through APIs has been gaining traction globally as an effective way for enterprises to address critical issues such as fraud prevention and secure digital authentication. Supported by the CAMARA¹ framework, Mobile Network Operators are developing and exposing standardized API solutions that address critical security needs. Aduna—acting as the global aggregator² for these standardized APIs—provides a single, centralized access point to multiple operators worldwide, helping to accelerate ecosystem adoption and simplify enterprise integration at scale.

As part of its efforts to generate new revenue streams, DOCOMO has participated in the GSMA Open Gateway³ initiative and, since June 2025, has been collaborating with Aduna to expand network API–based services through aggregation model.

Through the Agreement, DOCOMO’s advanced network APIs are expected to become accessible to enterprises and developers worldwide via Aduna’s global platform. This collaboration aims to support fraud prevention strategies via APIs such as Number Verification and SIM Swap detection, thus enabling enterprises to protect customers from account takeovers, identity theft, and mobile fraud. The partnership also opens up additional routes for DOCOMO to reach new customer segments through global distribution.

Leveraging DOCOMO’s innovation and Aduna’s global aggregation and distribution model, the companies intend to support broader adoption of network APIs and enable enterprises and developers to create new, value–driven services.

Nobuko Hiraguchi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Network Design Department at NTT DOCOMO, commented: “We are delighted to enter into this partnership agreement with Aduna. By making NTT DOCOMO’s network APIs—developed in alignment with global standards—available through Aduna’s global platform, we are confident that this collaboration will help create new value that enhances the safety and comfort of each customer’s daily life. NTT DOCOMO will continue to advance technical development, including network APIs, to deliver even greater value to society and our customers.”

Anthony Bartolo, CEO of Aduna, commented: “Aduna was founded to help telecom operators such as DOCOMO transform standardization into real commercial value. By linking DOCOMO’s advanced network APIs to a global distribution platform, we enable enterprises worldwide to innovate more quickly, securely, and at scale. This partnership strengthens Aduna’s presence across the Asia region and reflects our shared commitment to accelerating the growth of the global Network API economy.”

¹ The CAMARA Project is an open–source project under the Linux Foundation that develops common specifications for operator network APIs.

² An aggregator is an entity that enables enterprises and developers to access standardized network APIs—offered by multiple mobile network operators—through a single unified platform.

³ GSMA Open Gateway is a global industry initiative launched by the GSMA to promote the commercialization of common network APIs across mobile operators.

For further information, please contact:

NTT DOCOMO

Mr. Tomita or Mr. Narita
Brand Communication Department
Tel: +81 (0)3 5156 1366
Fax: +81 (0)3 5501 3408
www.docomo.ne.jp/english/

About NTT DOCOMO
NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s leading mobile operator with over 91 million subscribers, is one of the global leaders in 3G, 4G and 5G mobile network technologies. Under the slogan “Bridging Worlds for Wonder & Happiness,” DOCOMO is actively collaborating with global partners to expand its business scope from mobile services to comprehensive solutions, aiming to deliver unsurpassed value and drive innovation in technology and communications, ultimately to support positive change and advancement in global society.

https://www.docomo.ne.jp/english/ 

About Aduna
Aduna is a landmark venture between some of the world’s leading telecom operators and Ericsson, dedicated to enabling developers worldwide to accelerate innovation by leveraging networks to their full potential via common network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Its venture partners include AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone. Aduna’s developer partner platforms include Google Cloud, Infobip, Sinch, and Vonage. By combining network APIs from multiple operators globally under a unified platform based on the CAMARA open-source project, driven by the GSMA and the Linux Foundation, Aduna provides a standardized platform to foster collaboration, enhance user experiences, and drive industry growth. To find out more about network APIs and Aduna, visit adunaglobal.com. 

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Jan. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Zilliz, the company behind the leading open-source vector database Milvus, today announced the open-source release of its Bilingual Semantic Highlighting Model, an industry-first AI model designed to dramatically reduce token usage and improve answer quality in production RAG-powered AI applications.

This highlighting model introduces sentence-level relevance filtering, enabling AI developers to remove low-signal context before sending prompts to large language models. This approach directly addresses rising inference costs and accuracy issues caused by oversized context windows in enterprise RAG and RAG-powered AI deployments.

“As RAG systems move into production, teams are running into very real cost and quality limits,” said James Luan, VP of Engineering at Zilliz. “This model gives developers a practical way to reduce prompt size and improve answer accuracy without reworking their existing pipelines.”

Key Innovations and Technical Breakthroughs

• Bilingual relevance by design: Optimized for both English and Chinese, the model addresses cross-lingual relevance challenges common in global RAG deployments. It is built on the MiniCPM-2B architecture, enabling low-latency, production-ready performance.
• Sentence-level context filtering: Rather than scoring entire document chunks, the model evaluates relevance at the sentence level and retains only content that directly supports a user query before sending it to the LLM.
• Lower token usage, higher answer quality: Zilliz reports that sentence-level filtering significantly compresses prompt size while improving downstream response quality, helping teams reduce inference costs and improve generation speed in production environments.

Availability

The Bilingual Semantic Highlighting Model is available today as an open-source release. To learn more about the training methodology and performance benchmarks, visit the Zilliz Technical Blog.

Download: : zilliz/semantic-highlight-bilingual-v1

About Zilliz

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the world’s most widely adopted open-source vector database. Zilliz Cloud brings that performance to production with a fully managed, cloud-native platform built for scalable, low-latency vector search and hybrid retrieval. It supports billion-scale workloads with sub-10ms latency, auto-scaling, and optimized indexes for GenAI use cases like semantic search and RAG.

Zilliz is built to make AI not just possible—but practical. With a focus on performance and cost-efficiency, it helps engineering teams move from prototype to production without overprovisioning or complex infrastructure. Over 10,000 organizations worldwide rely on Zilliz to build intelligent applications at scale.

Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Zilliz is backed by leading investors, including Aramco’s Prosperity 7 Ventures, Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, Yunqi Partners, Trustbridge Partners, and others. Learn more at  Zilliz.com.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Jan. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Zilliz, the company behind the leading open-source vector database Milvus, today announced the open-source release of its Bilingual Semantic Highlighting Model, an industry-first AI model designed to dramatically reduce token usage and improve answer quality in production RAG-powered AI applications.

This highlighting model introduces sentence-level relevance filtering, enabling AI developers to remove low-signal context before sending prompts to large language models. This approach directly addresses rising inference costs and accuracy issues caused by oversized context windows in enterprise RAG and RAG-powered AI deployments.

“As RAG systems move into production, teams are running into very real cost and quality limits,” said James Luan, VP of Engineering at Zilliz. “This model gives developers a practical way to reduce prompt size and improve answer accuracy without reworking their existing pipelines.”

Key Innovations and Technical Breakthroughs

• Bilingual relevance by design: Optimized for both English and Chinese, the model addresses cross-lingual relevance challenges common in global RAG deployments. It is built on the MiniCPM-2B architecture, enabling low-latency, production-ready performance.
• Sentence-level context filtering: Rather than scoring entire document chunks, the model evaluates relevance at the sentence level and retains only content that directly supports a user query before sending it to the LLM.
• Lower token usage, higher answer quality: Zilliz reports that sentence-level filtering significantly compresses prompt size while improving downstream response quality, helping teams reduce inference costs and improve generation speed in production environments.

Availability

The Bilingual Semantic Highlighting Model is available today as an open-source release. To learn more about the training methodology and performance benchmarks, visit the Zilliz Technical Blog.

Download: : zilliz/semantic-highlight-bilingual-v1

About Zilliz

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the world’s most widely adopted open-source vector database. Zilliz Cloud brings that performance to production with a fully managed, cloud-native platform built for scalable, low-latency vector search and hybrid retrieval. It supports billion-scale workloads with sub-10ms latency, auto-scaling, and optimized indexes for GenAI use cases like semantic search and RAG.

Zilliz is built to make AI not just possible—but practical. With a focus on performance and cost-efficiency, it helps engineering teams move from prototype to production without overprovisioning or complex infrastructure. Over 10,000 organizations worldwide rely on Zilliz to build intelligent applications at scale.

Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Zilliz is backed by leading investors, including Aramco’s Prosperity 7 Ventures, Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, Yunqi Partners, Trustbridge Partners, and others. Learn more at  Zilliz.com.