IBM announces new Bluemix services for greater cloud migration and data insights

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IBM has announced a series of new cloud data services on Bluemix, its developer-friendly platform as a service (PaaS) offering, aiming to help businesses accelerate their migration and glean better insights from their data.

There are three services in total. The snappily-titled IBM Decision Optimisation on Cloud, which is in beta, helps organisations digest a large amount of data, including predictions, business goals and transactional figures, and spit them out as decision points. IBM gives the example of a retailer in need of restocking a clothing supply; by using the new feature, the retail planner can instantly get a recommendation based on all suppliers, warehouses, and other costs.

While this feature sounds like it could be inspired by Watson, IBM Bluemix Lift, a data migration tool for the Watson Data Platform, is more concerned with protection as opposed to the data itself. It can encrypt data being transferred, at a rate of up to 225GB per hour, and can continue transferring in the event of an outage or connectivity loss. IBM dashDB for Transactions, on the other hand, is a fully managed SQL database on Bluemix.

“Cloud is the platform that enables cognitive intelligence,” said John Murphy, vice president of IBM Watson Data Platform in a statement. “We’re continuing to grow our catalogue of cloud data services on Bluemix so that we can help developers and data scientists better manage and more quickly interpret data for business innovation.”

The last major IBM product news was back in October, when the Armonk giant launched what was claimed to be the industry’s first object storage service for hybrid clouds. The product was based around the technology of Cleversafe, a company which was bought by IBM last year. Among the new customers of IBM are Bitly, for the object storage, and UK construction retailer Travis Perkins for business process management.