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IBM’s Watson Goes IoT
IBM has announced a major expansion in Europe with the establishment of a new HQ for Watson Internet of Things (IoT).
The Munich site establishes a global headquarters for the Watson IoT program which is dedicated to launching “offerings, capabilities and ecosystem partners” designed to bring the cognitive powers of the company’s game show winning supercomputer to billions of tiny devices and sensors.
Some 1,000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers will join the Munich facility, which the company describes as an “innovation super center”. It is the biggest IBM investment in Europe for over 20 years.
IBM Cloud will power a series of APIs that will allow IoT developers to harness Watson within their devices.
“The IoT will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted on,” said Harriet Green, general manager for Watson IoT and Education.
“With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike.”
The APIs were first revealed in September and new ones for the IoT were announced today.
These include the Natural Language Processing API, which contextualizes language from context and is able to respond in the same simple way; Machine Learning Watson API, which can establish patterns in order to perform a repeated task better each time or change the method to suit; Video and Image Analytics API, which can infer information from video feeds; and Text Analytics Watson API, which can glean information from unstructured text data such as Twitter feeds.
The company will also open eight regional centres across four continents to give customers in those territories the opportunity to access information and experiences.
Courtesy-TheInq
IBM Buys Blue Box
IBM HAS ACQUIRED Blue Box in an attempt to make its cloud offering even bluer. The Seattle-based company specialises in simple service-as-a-platform clouds based on OpenStack.
This, of course, fits in with IBM’s new direction of a Power PC, OpenStack cloud-based world, as demonstrated by its collaboration with MariaDB on TurboLAMP.
IBM’s move to the cloud is starting to pay off, seeing revenue of $7.7bn in the 12 months to March 2015 and growing more than 16 percent in the first quarter of this year.
The company plans to use the new acquisition to create rapid, integrating cloud-based applications and on-premise systems within the OpenStack managed cloud.
Blue Box also brings a remotely managed OpenStack to provide customers with a local cloud, better visibility control and tighter security.
“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meets their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort.
“The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy, making it easier for our clients to move data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”
Blue Box will offer customers a more cohesive, consistent and simplified experience, while at the same time integrating with existing IBM packages like the Bluemix digital innovation platform. The firm also offers a single unified control panel for customer operations.
“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM. Blue Box is building a similarly respected brand in OpenStack,” said Blue Box founder and CTO Jesse Proudman.
“Together, we will deliver the technology and products businesses need to give their application developers an agile, responsive infrastructure across public and private clouds.
“This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they’ve seen thus far in the market.”
IBM has confirmed that it plans to help Blue Box customers to grow their technology portfolio, while taking advantage of the broader IBM product set.