Archivo de la categoría: IBM

Big Data, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Shaun Gregory, Watson

Woodside to deploy IBM Watson to improve oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Australian oil and gas firm Woodside will deploy IBM’s Watson-as-a-Service in order to improve operations and employee training, the companies announced this week.

The energy firm plans to use the cloud-based cognitive compute service to help train engineers and operations specialists on fabricating and managing oil and gas infrastructure and facilities.

The company said the cognitive advisory service it plans to use, ‘Lessons Learned’, will help improve operational processes and outcomes and include over thirty years of collective knowledge and experience operating oil and gas assets.

Woodside Senior vice president strategy, science and technology Shaun Gregory said the move is a part of a broader strategy to use data more intelligently at the firm.

“We are bringing a new toolkit to the company in the form of evidence based predictive data science that will bring down costs and increase efficiencies across our organization,” Gregory said.

“Data science, underpinned by an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and the rapidly decreasing cost of computing, is likely to be a major disruptive technology in our industry over the next decade. Our plan is to turn all of this data into a predictive tool where every part of our organisation will be able to make decisions based on informed and accurate insights.”

Kerry Purcell, managing director, IBM Australia and New Zealand said: “Here in Australia IBM Watson is transforming how banks, universities, government and now oil and gas companies capitalise on data, helping them discover completely new insights and deliver new value.”

Big Data, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

IBM opens IoT, cloud, big data studio in Shanghai

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio in Shanghai to target IoT, cloud and big data development

IBM has opened another studio aimed at attracting design and digital experts to work with clients on digital solutions using the company’s mobile, big data and cloud technologies, this time in Shanghai.

Based at IBM’s Yangpu and Zhangjiang offices, the hub will host local IBM Design and Interactive Experience teams as well as digital service designers and developers.

“People’s expectations of enterprise technology has changed because of great design they see in devices and apps they use at work and at play,” said Phil Gilbert, general manager, IBM Design. “Our studios around the world bring design into everything we do and change the way we work to transform how enterprise technology is created, with client experience at the centre.”

The company said the studio will be a space for clients in industries such as healthcare, financial services and retail that are keen to develop new digital services in collaboration with IBM; it has about 20 of these studios located around the world.

Earlier this year the company opened a studio at its Southbank location in London which hosts employees specialising in big data, cloud and mobile products and services – including Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service.

Funding, IBM, News & Analysis, Sellpoints, Stephen Gold, Watson, WayBlazer

IBM backs WayBlazer, Sellpoints to show its commitment to Watson

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM announced this week it has invested in two companies, WayBlazer and Sellpoints, which are using cognitive computing to enhance their travel planning and shopping applications. The move seems intended to show IBM’s commitment to Watson-as-a-service, the company’s cloud-based cognitive computing service which launched last year.

WayBlazer, a travel planning and shopping service, uses IBM’s Watson cloud service to help personalise holidays and create personalised travel recommendations for each customer from a slew of social and financial data.

Sellpoint uses Watson to do much the same thing, but for large retail and manufacturing firms looking to bolster their ecommerce sites without having to invest loads by way of internal development resource.

IBM said the investments in WayBlazer and Sellpoint were part of a $5m series A and $7.5m series C funding round, respectively, but the company declined to disclose the financial terms of its involvement.

“IBM is committed to helping our partners accelerate the development and delivery of Watson enabled apps into market where we see endless opportunities for cognitive computing to transform entire industries,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson.  “WayBlazer and Sellpoints are terrific examples of how cognitive computing technology can be used to help organizations redefine customer engagement and drive much deeper, meaningful and relevant consumer experiences.”

Brian O’Keefe, chief executive officer of Sellpoints said: “With the natural language and cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, we’re able to deliver a more personalized, relevant and enjoyable experience, and drive a much deeper level of engagement with customers.”

IBM said the investments were part of the $100m it committed to Watson last year. But it hasn’t always made it clear that it was pursuing direct investments into companies willing to use its technology, which could be an expensive proposition in the long run. The company continues to be relatively quiet on the financial performance of the Watson unit.

Alistair Rennie, Deloitte, IBM, News & Analysis, Tom Scampion

IBM, Deloitte to jointly develop risk management, compliance solutions

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to use big data for compliance in financial services

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to use big data for compliance in financial services

IBM and Deloitte are partnering to develop risk management and compliance solutions for the financial services sector, the companies said this week.

The partnership will see Deloitte offer up its financial services and risk management consulting expertise to help IBM develop a range of cloud-based risk management services that combine the technology firm’s big data analytics and Watson-as-a-Service cognitive computing platform.

Deloitte will also work with joint customers to help integrate the solutions into their organisation’s technology landscape.

“The global enterprise risk management domain is undergoing significant transformation, and emerging technologies like big data and predictive analytics can be used to address complex regulatory requirements,” said Tom Scampion, global risk analytics leader at Deloitte UK. “We are excited to be working with IBM to apply their market leading technologies and platforms to enable faster, more insightful business decisions. This alliance aims to completely re-frame and re-shape the risk space.”

“Financial services firms are under tremendous pressure, which has forced them to spend the majority of their IT budgets addressing regulatory requirements.  There is an opportunity to transform the approach organizations are taking and leverage the same investments to go beyond compliance and deliver real business value,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager of analytics solutions, IBM. “Combining [Deloitte’s] knowledge with our technology will provide our clients with breakthrough capabilities and deliver risk and regulatory intelligence in ways previously not possible.”

Deloitte’s no stranger to partnering with large incumbents to bolster its appeal to financial services clients. Last year the company partnered with SAP to help develop custom ERP platforms based on HANA for the financial services sector, and partnered with NetSuite to help it target industry verticals more effectively.

Brendan Hannigan, IBM, managed security service, News & Analysis, Software as a service

IBM claims strong traction with cybersecurity cloud network

IBM says its recently announced cybersecurity cloud service is gaining traction

IBM says its recently announced cybersecurity cloud service is gaining traction

IBM said over 1,000 organisations have now joined its recently announced cloud-based cybersecurity service, dubbed X-Force Exchange.

The service includes hundreds of terabytes of raw aggregated threat intelligence data and those that sign up to the service can upload their own data, so the more people join the more robust the service gets.

The initial data dump is based on over 25 billion web pages and images collected from a network of over 270 million endpoints, and includes data from over 15 billion monitored security events daily. But the company said participants have created more than 300 new collections of threat data since its launch.

“Cybercrime has become the equivalent of a pandemic — no company or country can battle it alone,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager, IBM Security.

“We have to take a collective and collaborative approach across the public and private sectors to defend against cybercrime. Sharing and innovating around threat data is central to battling highly organized cybercriminals; the industry can no longer afford to keep this critical resource locked up in proprietary databases. With X-Force Exchange, IBM has opened access to our extensive threat data to advance collaboration and help public and private enterprises safeguard themselves,” Hannigan said.

Security isn’t a new area for IBM but offering real-time cyberthreat detection is, a move that has also put it in direct competition with a wide range of managed security service providers that have been playing in this space for years. Nevertheless, the company has a lot of clients so there’s a huge opportunity for the firm to harvest all of that data – particularly as it creates new partnerships with networking incumbents (like Cisco with VersaStack).

Andrew Buchanan, Enterprise IT, Graeme Osborne, IBM, IBM Cloud, New Zealand, News & Analysis

NZ Ministry of Health taps IBM gov cloud

NZ's Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

NZ’s Ministry of Health is moving some of its core services onto IBM cloud

New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has enlisted IBM to help the department set up a cloud-based system to support the country’s national healthcare IT infrastructure.

The Ministry manages a set of technical services that support both internal IT systems and national health systems including the National Health Payment System, which processes transactions for pharmacies and healthcare providers, and a National Health Index, which supports planning and coordination in health service delivery.

The deal will see the Ministry deploy all of its internal systems on IBM’s managed cloud infrastructure (hosted in-country) for a minimum of five years.

“The agreement is a key element in improving the Ministry of Health’s ability to deliver shared services for the sector, which enables secure access to personal health records for patients and their health care providers,” said Graeme Osborne, Director of the National Health IT Board. “Our aim is to improve productivity and patient safety, and enable new models of care through strategic technology investments.”

The move follows an pledge made by Health Benefits Limited, the crown company set up in 2010 to support health service provision, to consolidate the infrastructure of all twenty District Health Boards onto IBM’s cloud platform.

“We continue to invest in advanced technology infrastructure vital for New Zealand’s long-term economic growth. IBM’s cloud services offer customers like the Ministry of Health the most comprehensive enterprise-grade cloud environment in New Zealand and will support new, enhanced services for the public, suppliers and staff,” says Andrew Buchanan, cloud business leader, IBM New Zealand.

“This agreement further demonstrates our leadership and commitment to health care innovation,” Buchanan added.

BlueMix, IBM, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service

IBM bolsters Bluemix with added services, Cloud Foundry Dojos

IBM is bolstering its Bluemix and Cloud Foundry initiatives

IBM is bolstering its Bluemix and Cloud Foundry initiatives

IBM has signed up a number of partners for its Bluemix platform that will see the company bolster the platform-as-a-service with and its Cloud Foundry efforts by establishing developer meeting spaces.

The company announced a public beta of a .NET runtime, which will enable Cloud Foundry developers to use Microsoft’s development technologies and develop .NET apps.

ThinkData Works’ data catalogue Namara.io, application KPI service Cupenya Insights, event processing service flowthings.io and push service Reappt were also added to Bluemix catalogue, as well as some new internally developed mobile and API management capabilities.

IBM also said it is supporting the expansion of Cloud Foundry Dojos, physical developer spaces designed to host developers looking to leverage the open source platform-as-a-service. The company said it will establish its first of a number of independent Cloud Foundry Dojos in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a bid to boost the number of – and mentor –Bluemix developers.

Having poured billions of dollars into cloud and PaaS, it’s clear IBM has high hopes for Bluemix. The company is putting Bluemix at the core of its Internet of Things strategy – it recently announced plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone) and a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform.

IBM claims Bluemix is the largest deployment of Cloud Foundry in the market today, though it hasn’t really clarified what “largest” means in this context; it’s equally unclear how Bluemix deployments compare with Pivotal CF and HP Helion among other commercial Cloud Foundry distributions.

Blake Chandlee, Deepak Advani, Facebook, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM, Facebook ink data-sharing marketing partnership

IBM and Facebook are teaming up on marketing cloud services

IBM and Facebook are teaming up on marketing cloud services

IBM and Facebook have inked a deal that will see IBM marketing cloud customers gain access to Facebook advertising data and capabilities.

The deal will see IBM offer access to Facebook data as part of its marketing cloud analytics services and combine IBM’s marketing cloud data with anonymised user data from Facebook’s 1.44 billion users in a bid to enable IBM clients to gain a more accurate profile of their potential customers.

“Our partnership with IBM will help top brands achieve personalisation at scale by using IBM’s marketing cloud to find and engage their target audiences on Facebook, as well as solve their vexing challenges by consulting with IBM Commerce THINKLab, ” said Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships for Facebook.  “We will also be working closely with IBM Commerce THINKLab to help deliver people-based marketing that’s optimized to achieve each brand’s business goals.”

The two companies also announced that Facebook will be the first company to join the recently announced IBM Commerce THINKLab, a research and collaboration environment where companies can work directly with brands to customise the user experience of their services.

Neither company has commented on the financial terms of the deal, but the move could give both companies a serious boost in their respective strategic initiatives – Facebook’s bid to monetise its data, and IBM’s to offer marketers among others compelling reasons to use its cloud services over Oracle’s or other competitors combining analytics and access to social media-born data.

“Brands understand the increasing need to provide customers with powerful and personalized experiences to nurture loyalty,” said Deepak Advani, general manager, IBM Commerce. “Through this collaboration, consumer product companies and retailers will be able to quickly and easily gain deeper insight into what their customers expect and provide them with compelling experiences that bridge the physical and virtual divide.”

Healthcare, IBM, Japan Post, M&A, Mike Rhodin, mobile services, News & Analysis, Vendor, Watch Over

IBM closes Phytel acquisition as healthcare partnerships continue

IBM has closed its acquisition of Phytel

IBM has closed its acquisition of Phytel

IBM announced this week it has closed the acquisition of Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.

The company originally announced the acquisition back in April, when it also bought Explorys, a provider of cognitive cloud-based analytics that provides insights for care facilities derived from datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems.

“The acquisition of Phytel supports our goal to advance the quality and effectiveness of personal healthcare by enabling secure access to individualised insights and a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people’s health,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson.

At the time IBM said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.

To that end the company also created a special healthcare unit within its Watson business unit to develop solution specifically for the sector and based on the company’s cognitive compute platform.

Just last week the company redoubled its efforts to target health services, this time through social health and mobile platforms. It announced a deal with Japan Post and Apple that will see Japan Post deploy custom iOS apps built by IBM Global Business Services, which will provide services like medication reminders, exercise and diet tracking, community activity scheduling and grocery shopping as part of the post group’s Watch Over service for the elderly.

Apple, Enterprise IT, Ginni Rometty, IBM, Japan Post Group, News & Analysis, Taizo Nishimuro, Tim Cook

Japan Post, IBM and Apple ink cloud, iPad deal

Tim Cook, Apple CEO and Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, walking the walk and talking the talk

Tim Cook, Apple CEO and Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, walking the walk and talking the talk

Japan Post, IBM and Apple are partnering to deploy iPads with IBM-developed apps and cloud services to give local seniors access to healthcare and community services.

As part of its Watch Over service for the elderly, Japan Post will deploy custom iOS apps built by IBM Global Business Services, which will provide services like medication reminders, exercise and diet tracking, community activity scheduling and grocery shopping.

“What we’re starting today draws on IBM’s long heritage of innovation at the intersection of technology, business and society,” said Ginni Rometty, president, chairman and chief executive of IBM.

“The potential we see here – as broad as national economics and as specific as the quality of life of individuals and their families – is one example of the potential of mobile-led transformation anywhere in the world where issues of an aging population exist,” Rometty said.

The move will also see Japan Post deploy iPads and IBM cloud services – thinks like analytics, training services and collaboration services – for its own employees.

“We are joining with two of the world’s most respected leaders in technology to bring our elderly generation into the connected world, expand our businesses by deepening relationships, and discover new ways to strengthen the fabric of our society and economy,” said Taizo Nishimuro, chief executive of Japan Post Group.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook also commented on the deal: “This initiative has potential for global impact, as many countries face the challenge of supporting an aging population, and we are honoured to be involved in supporting Japan’s senior citizens and helping enrich their lives.”

Japan Post Group had been piloting iPads and custom apps and cloud services for the elderly since last year and the company hopes to reach between four and five million elderly customers by 2020.