Archivo de la categoría: IBM

Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, News & Analysis

Are decision makers thinking too short-term for cloud benefits?

Career ChoicesWhile cloud adoption maybe hitting the mainstream, the majority of projects are focused primarily around increasing productivity of employees through automation as opposed to the greater benefits of cloud computing.

Speaking at Cloud World Expo, Rashik Parmar, IBM’s Lead Cloud Advisor, highlighted that the benefits of cloud maybe currently underplayed by some organizations, as projects are initially too focused on productivity advantages. While automation could build an effective business case for cloud implementation, benefits such as performance and business predictability are often overlooked until projects are more mature.

“With performance we talk about speed. It’s the timing in which it takes to change, drive innovation in the market place and accelerate the way you deliver value to you customers,” said Parmar. “Predictability is one we often don’t think about. With the cloud you start to be able to understand the kind of outcomes you can achieve well before you put them out there. It’s that ability to be able to predict those outcomes and be confident that this particular journey is going to deliver value that gives people the inspiration and the ability to invest in cloud projects.”

Parmar highlighted that cloud is more than simply a tool for automation of software, but also the access to data, which has been healthily increased by the wider adoption of IoT technologies. Advances in cognitive computing are now enabling businesses to drive decision making through automation, taking time consuming tasks away from employees to ensure they can concentrate on core tasks.

“What we’re now starting to get into is a stage of machine learning, a stage of cognitive computing which allows us to see some of the broader patterns and automate further,” said Parmar. “Tasks which were being handed to humans are being replaced by automation. Radiography is a good example. A radiographer looks at an x-ray and decides whether there is a crack or a hairline fracture, and these are quite hard to automate without human skills. With the new cognitive capabilities and picture recognition analytics, we can use machine learning to pick out these anomalies and automate these tasks.”

While the initial benefits of cloud will always be automation and therefore and increase in productivity, as organizations mature through their cloud journey’s the long-term potential of cloud becomes more apparent.

IBM’s position would appear to be on the advanced side of cloud computing, seemingly wanted to accelerate customers through the adoption process and through to the performance and predictability benefits sooner rather than later. Though this does leave the question of how many organizations would be in a position digitally to capitalize on such concepts currently. Can organizations be fast-tracked to the advanced stages of cloud computing or does there have to be an internal learning curve? Could this be a case of IBM trying to encourage customers to walk before they can crawl?

cloud security, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Security targets incident response marketplace with Resilient acquisition

security monitoring roomIBM Security has completed the acquisition of Resilient, as part of the company’s expansion in the incident response marketplace. Financial terms of the agreement have not been released.

The company had announced its plans to acquire Resilient in February, alongside the launch of its X-Force Incident Response Services. Resilient’s incident response system allows customers to automate and orchestrate the many processes needed when dealing with cyber incidents. The new services include a remote incident response capability to help clients map how a breach occurred and take action to shut it down.

“The combination of Resilient’s people – top thought leaders in the incident response marketplace – and their technology is a differentiating addition to our security business,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager at IBM Security. “Our investments in threat detection and prevention have helped us move into a leadership position in the security market. With Resilient, we’re expanding the capabilities we bring to customers, helping them manage the complexities in resolving security incidents, including the coordination of teams, best practices, and reporting.”

The company have claimed by combining Resilient Systems’ Incident Response Platform with IBM’s QRadar Security Intelligence Incident Forensics, BigFix, X-Force Exchange and other Incident Response Services, it will be able to offer increased speed in dealing with threats.

IBM has been quietly building its security business over recent years through various acquisitions and company hires. In the last three years, the company has bought a number of security specific vendors including CrossIdeas, Lighthouse Security Group and Trusteer, the latter was rumoured to be around the $1 billion mark. The company now claims to be the largest cloud and cyber security vendor in the market, exceeding $2 billion in revenue and hiring more than 1000 security professionals in 2015, as well as holding than 3,000 security patents.

“The Resilient team is delighted to be joining IBM Security,” said John Bruce, Resilient’s CEO, “Together, we will be a powerful force helping organizations to manage the evolving security challenges that they face. With the scale of IBM research, development and investment behind us, we’re excited about the possibilities for innovation and to engage with new clients around the world.”

Customer experience, Digital Marketing, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM acquires Salesforce consulting partner

IBMIBM has announced plans to acquire Salesforce specialist consulting business Bluewolf, which will bolster the Global Business Services Interactive Experience (iX) department.

IBM iX, marketed as a next-generation hybrid consultancy and digital agency, has been bolstering its ranks in recent months, as the Bluewolf deal is set to be the fourth since the turn of the year. In January the business bought US ad agency Resource/Ammirati, February saw the purchase of Berlin-based digital agency Aperto and earlier this month the acquisition of ecx.io, another digital marketing agency, was announced. While previous deals have taken IBM iX down the route of digital marketing and advertising, the Bluewolf deal takes the department back down more traditional IBM routes.

While it has not been announced when the deal will be completed, IBM hopes the deal will provide an edge in the market for medium-sized businesses and enterprise scale organizations. Bluewolf, which specializes in helping companies integrate Salesforce’s CRM services into their IT systems, is believed to be one of Salesforce’s oldest consulting partners, claiming to have delivered more than 9,500 successful worldwide.

“I’m so proud of Eric (Eric Berridge, Bluewolf CEO), who built Bluewolf from a start-up into a leader in Salesforce services,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “The powerful combination of our strategic partners, IBM and Bluewolf, will help clients transform and demonstrate the growing client demand for our Customer Success Platform.”

IBM said the acquisition of Bluewolf would give the Global Business Services division deeper consulting capabilities, as it continues efforts to differentiate the brand in a crowded market place. “There is no question that the consumer-grade experience has emerged as a fundamental element in modern business strategy,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP at IBM Global Business Services. “Meeting that expectation defines next-generation differentiation and competitive position, and with Bluewolf, we add expertise to scale that capability to the cloud-based capabilities of Salesforce.”

The series of acquisitions seemingly build on the trends more demanding customers and evolving consumer expectations on the digital landscape. An IBM survey stated 81% of C-suite leaders anticipate more digital and virtual engagement by 2020 and 66% anticipate a stronger focus on customers as individuals. It would appear IBM is attempting to get a jump-start on competitors through strategic acquisition, as opposed to organic growth and transformation.

AI, Artificial intelligence, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM launches brain-inspired supercomputer with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

artificial intelligence, communication and futuristicIBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have launched a new project to build a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning inference.

The project will be built on IBM’s TrueNorth chip, which the company claims will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer. The neural network design of IBM’s Neuromorphic System aims to be able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing in a much more economical manner than current chips.

“The delivery of this advanced computing platform represents a major milestone as we enter the next era of cognitive computing,” said Dharmendra Modha, Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computing at IBM Research.   “We value our relationships with the national labs. In fact, prior to design and fabrication, we simulated the IBM TrueNorth processor using LLNL’s Sequoia supercomputer. This collaboration will push the boundaries of brain-inspired computing to enable future systems that deliver unprecedented capability and throughput, while helping to minimize the capital, operating and programming costs – keeping our nation at the leading edge of science and technology.”

The technology itself will be utilized in a number of different manners within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including the organizations Stockpile Stewardship Program, a program of reliability testing and maintenance of its nuclear weapons without the use of nuclear testing.

“Neuromorphic computing opens very exciting new possibilities and is consistent with what we see as the future of the high performance computing and simulation at the heart of our national security missions,” said Jim Brase, Livermore National Laboratory’s Deputy Associate Director for Data Science. “The potential capabilities neuromorphic computing represents and the machine intelligence that these will enable will change how we do science.”

While Artificial Intelligence has been one of the more prominent trends in the cloud computing world, the success of the technology and PR stunts launched has been varied.

AlphaGo is an example of the success of AI, as Google Deepmind’s AI program beat world Go champion Lee Se-dol in a five match series. As traditional machine learning techniques could not be applied in this instance, the team combined an advanced tree search with deep neural network allowing the program to readjust its behaviour through reinforcement learning. The win came as a surprise to commentators, as the game Go relies on intuition and feel.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft has had to release an apology after its twitter inspired AI stunt backfired. The program tweeted controversial comments as it was unable to grasp the politically incorrect nature of the messages it received from users, as reported by the Independent.

AWS, Cisco, Enterprise IT, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

HPE holds off Cisco for cloud infrastructure top spot

HPE street logoFindings from Synergy Research Group have HPE as the number one provider in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, narrowly outperforming Cisco over the course of 2015.

Total revenues for the cloud infrastructure equipment segment reached over $60 billion in 2015, with HPE accounting for just over 12%, and Cisco just under. Dell, Microsoft and IBM complete the top five, each controlling about 7% market share.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Synergy’s research showed between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015 total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Spend on private cloud accounted for more than 50% of these revenues, though public cloud is growing at a faster pace. HPE currently leads the private cloud space, with Cisco in second, however the roles are reversed for the public cloud segment.

While HPE and Cisco remain dominant in the server and networking segments, both companies have been releasing a number of new products in recent months to diversify their offering. Last week, HPE launched its ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure, which combines 60 API’s to provide machine learning capabilities. While HPE is seemingly capitalizing on the growing ‘as-a-service’ trend, Cisco is focused on its cloud-based collaboration service, Cisco Spark, which was launched with Verizon recently.

Market share graphMicrosoft features in the list due to its position in the server OS and virtualization applications market, where as Dell and IBM have demonstrated strong offerings in a broad number of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market.

While hardware and software to build cloud services revenues exceeded $60 billion, other areas of the industry demonstrated stronger growth. Public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51%, followed by private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud.”

CRM, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector

IBM acquires Optevia to strengthen position in public sector CRM market

cloud_IBM claims the acquisition of Optevia will improve its position as a SaaS and digital consultant in the lucrative market. Optevia has a track record of working with UK Emergency Services, Central Government, Local Government and Social Enterprises, including the Ministry of Justice’s National Taxing Team’s rollout of Dynamics CRM.

“By acquiring Optevia, IBM will be able to provide Public Sector clients and prospects with a range of unique, industry focused Microsoft Dynamics CRM based solutions,” said Joanna Davinson, IBM’s European Public Sector Leader. “This strategic acquisition will help strengthen IBM as a SaaS provider and Global Software Integrator.”

In Gartner’s CRM Forecast Overview, published last summer, the global CRM market was valued in the region of $23 billion, with around 50% of the market accounted for by the top 5 services providers. SaaS continued to demonstrate strong demand, with almost 47% of the revenue attributed to the service. According to Gartner,Salesforce.com is the market leader, with IBM claiming 4% of the CRM segment.

While IBM already has an established position in the public sector market, the company has 98 current offerings on G-Cloud, the acquisition of Optevia signals its intentions of increasing its share of the public sector CRM segment.

Alongside IBM, other players have been bolstering their position in the wider CRM market. Last year, Accenture acquired Tquila and Cloud Sherpas, both of which are Salesforce partners on G-Cloud. The acquisitions more than doubled the number of Accenture’s Salesforce consultants in the UK.

“We have seen significant growth in SaaS as more companies adopt the cloud and digital strategies to collaborate better, drive greater operational efficiencies and accelerate the development of new products and services,” said Emma McGuigan, UK and Ireland MD at Accenture Technology. “One key factor for our continued success in delivering Salesforce solutions depends on having the right skilled professionals to meet the growing demand. With Tquila on board we have the critical mass to more proactively target big opportunities both in the UK and Europe, which will extend our position in the region.”

Despite Salesforce.com’s current market-leading position there have been a number of calls-to-arms by competitors looking to challenge the CRM giant. Alongside IBM’s announcement, Oracle has hinted at its intention to take on Salesforce.com. On Oracle’s earnings call this week, CTO Larry Ellison highlighted the company’s positioning “should make it easy for Oracle to pass Salesforce.com and become the largest SaaS and PaaS cloud company in the world.”

Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM partners with Aberdeen University to bring Watson to medical research

IBM2The University of Aberdeen has recently announced a partnership with IBM, which will allow students and staff to utilise Watson Engagement Advisor.

IBM scientists are collaborating with researchers at the university on the EU Marie Curie K-Drive project, an initiative which explores a number of different use cases for big data and knowledge graphs, including the treatment of cancer. The results of the project will also form the foundation of any proposals put forward by the university for the EU Horizon 2020 Programme.

“Cognitive represents an entirely new model of computing that includes a range of technology innovations in analytics, natural language processing and machine learning,” said Paul Fryer, Academic Initiative Leader at IBM. “The collaboration between IBM and the University of Aberdeen, which builds on a long-standing relationship, aims to help nurture the next generation of innovators; and is the first initiative of this type in Scotland.”

The university is now one of four in the UK to have access to the Watson Engagement Advisor, which will be used by students and staff to forward their cognitive computing research.

“The partnership with IBM is an exciting opportunity to advance our research in this area,” said Dr Jeff Z. Pan, coordinator of the K-Drive project at the university. “Cognitive computing is empowering human decision-making processes by understanding and exploiting data which is structured and unstructured, and our research is focused on how to make the best use of both types of data.”

Watson’s marketing messaging has primarily focused around the commercialization of artificial intelligence and big data. The partnership with the University of Aberdeen and the K-Drive project builds on IBM’s efforts to demonstrate the real-world viability. Over recent weeks, IBM has announced a number of collaborations to utilize the Watson proposition, including with Mastercard and the Honda Formula One team.

IBM and Honda announced that Watson technology would be incorporated into the McLaren Honda Formula One cars and pits to improve performance and racing decisions in real-time. The sensors will collect data from a number of different sources including driver timing, fuel flow rates and engine performance. The partnership is in reaction to new regulations that required all Formula One cars to use hybrid engines and limited fuel consumption during races.

“With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things, by 2025, every car will be connected in some way exuding vast amounts of streaming data ranging from traffic updates to health of the vehicle, operations and more,” said Harriet Green, GM for Watson IoT at IBM. “We are excited to team with Honda to provide sophisticated cognitive IoT capabilities and analytics to combine data directly from the F1 racing vehicles with other sources, allowing Honda to not only enhance its vehicles that are built for speed, but to also be more friendly to our environment.”

cloud datacentre, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Smartphone

IBM announces $200 million Indosat Ooredoo cloud deal

Money cloudIBM has announced a five-year $200 million contract with Indosat Ooredoo to develop and deliver solutions on IBM’s cloud platform, Bluemix.

As part of the deal, IBM and Indosat Ooredoo will build an integrated command centre to serve local clients, of both organizations. The move forms part of IBM’s expansion plans for the cloud business, which coincides with the company’s recent win in South Africa, where it will open its first cloud data centre in the country.

“This collaboration shows how IBM’s expertise, technology and services can help Indosat Ooredoo and Lintasarta lead market change in Indonesia while also transforming their existing operations,” said Martin Jetter, SVP, IBM Global Technology Services.

Indonesia’s telco and technology market has been growing rapidly over recent years. Smartphone growth has been healthy in the world’s fourth most populous country, as penetration of total mobile phones is expected to reach 53% in 2017, up from an estimated 24% in 2013. This demonstrates huge potential for growth, as smartphone penetration in China during 2013 was estimated at around 71%.

Outside of Indonesia, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to be a significant growth area for the cloud industry. Market research firm IDC, estimates that by 2018, more than 70% of enterprise organizations in the region will access public cloud IaaS and SaaS capabilities via aggregation hubs.

Jakarta has regularly been quoted as the city which produces the largest number of tweets per day, though this is not solely down to consumers. Businesses regularly use social media, most notably twitter, to communicate with its customers, more so than in western markets.

“Use of smart mobile devices is becoming pervasive, opening up enormous opportunities for local businesses – so we are excited to be working with Indosat Ooredoo and Lintasarta to help clients tap into the power and flexibility of cloud-based solutions and digitally transform their businesses,” Jetter said.

Indosat Ooredoo’s subsidiary, Lintasarta, will jointly develop and deliver cloud-based solutions with IBM, accelerating collaboration and automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes. Customers of the telco will also have access to IBM’s cloud-based enterprise mobility management platform.

“We will be able to bring a greater range of higher value services to market more rapidly, with the confidence of knowing that we are collaborating with one of the world’s largest and most innovative technology companies,” said Alexander Rusli, President and CEO of Indosat Ooredoo. “This landmark alliance will reshape the local market and help Indonesian customers and organizations tap into the most advanced technology available anywhere in the world.”

Alongside the deal, IBM has also announced that it will open its first cloud data centre in South Africa. Working in collaboration with Gijima and Vodacom, the move aims to support cloud adoption and customer demand across the African continent.

“Our new Cloud Data Center gives customers a local onramp to IBM Cloud services including moving mission critical SAP workloads to the cloud with ease,” said Hamilton Ratshefola, IBM Country GM in South Africa. “It also gives customers the added flexibility of keeping data within country which is a key differentiator for IBM.”

The announcement adds to IBM’s growth on the continent, where it currently has a presence in at least 24 countries. IBM has highlighted that Africa is a substantial market for future international growth of its cloud business.

Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, redundancies, Survey

Fresh redundancies illustrate IBM’s continuing cloud challenge

IBMWithin the last twelve months, the company has inducted more than 70,000 IBMers and spent more on acquisitions than in any other 12-month period in its history. Focusing on data analytics, security, machine learning and mobile, the business is attracting a new breed of employee to its ranks. All would seem well until you consult social media.

The Facebook group, Watching IBM, has increased its following by more than 66% over the last week. The group has taken responsibility for bringing light to the 70,000 job losses experienced by the firm in the past few months. Comments such as “At the beginning of 2015 our department had 25 people in it. At the beginning of 2016 our department has 13 in it,” highlight the decline.

For all the positive news of expansion, new product offerings, and 70,000 new employees, the headcount over the course of the twelve month period has shrunk around 1% to 377,757 from 379,592.

With company revenues declining for fifteen consecutive quarters, this should not come as a great surprise for most; IBM’s struggles to re-invent itself as a cloud business have been well documented over recent years.

Back in January, Clive Longbottom, Service Director at Quocirca commented that IBM could risk being left behind, should the transition take too long. With AWS, Microsoft and Google continuing to surge forward, that risk is continuing to grow, though the consultancy skills nurtured in IBM will remain in demand “I still believe that IBM will remain a major force in the IT world, it just has to make sure it positions and messages itself effectively to its existing customers and to its prospects”

Last week IBM released a report which highlighted that two- thirds of organizations implementing hybrid cloud are gaining competitive advantage from their hybrid environments are nearly three times as likely to use it to assemble data assets or monetize data.

Surveying more than 500 hybrid cloud implementers, in 26 countries worldwide, the report highlighted that 85 percent of respondent commented that a hybrid approach to cloud is accelerating the digital transformation in their organization. During 2015 Q4, total cloud revenues (public, private and hybrid) for the vendor increased 43% to $10.2 billion, though revenues throughout the business were down 9% to $22.1 billion in the same period for 2014.

Despite some negative press, and a surge in social media activity being directed towards the tech giant, it seems the workforce transition is far from complete. “We’ve been shifting resources aggressively,” CFO Martin Schroeter commented last week “and we’d like to shift them more aggressively.”

Apple, health, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis

IBM, Apple combine IoT forces for sleep health study

electronic medical health recordIBM’s Watson Cloud is to be the foundation for research by the American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) into how human sleeping habits affect our health. IBM and ASAA have also jointly created a new SleepHealth app to encourage patients to contribute to the cloud based SleepHealth Mobile Study.

The SleepHealth study uses Apple’s Internet of Things technology and open source ResearchKit, which simplifies tasks and survey compilation and feeds its data into the SleepHealth app. SleepHealth is the first ResearchKit study to run on the Watson Health Cloud.

Though sleep is critical for physical and metal health it remains one of the most overlooked of the basic human needs and one in four Americans experience sleep problems. Chronic insomnia affects 10% of Americans and 25 million suffer from types of obstructive sleep apnoea such as disrupted sleep, snoring and uneven breathing, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This in turn can create heart disease, hypertension, obesity, cancer, depression and fatal accidents.

Researchers and physicians will use Watson to host its surveys and study exercises and interrogate the data to uncover patterns. The Watson Cloud makes crowd-sourcing data possible and creates a system of patient-led research and data-driven discovery, according ASAAs chief science officer Carl Stepnowsky. The SleepHealth app could build the world’s largest longitudinal study to collect data on both healthy and unhealthy sleepers, said Stepnowsky.

The Watson Health Cloud has opened up a diversity of data sources such as medical literature, treatment guidelines, claims data and clinical data, according to Kyu Rhee, chief health officer for Watson Health. Researchers can also opt to apply Watson Analytics for deeper insights from the data. “One of our goals at IBM Watson Health is to eliminate silos that hinder collaboration between researchers, patients and clinicians,” said Rhee.

The study also makes use of IoT technology. The SleepHealth app makes use of multiple Apple Watch sensors, such as the accelerometer, which detects movements, and the gyroscope, which determines orientation in space, to measure and record movements such as shifting positions during sleep. It also uses Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor to detect sleep. Some of the app’s features, such as the Personal Sleep Concierge and the Nap Tracker, were designed specifically to the Apple Watch as a way to improve sleep habits. SleepHealth will be the first ResearchKit app to use Apple’s new Night Shift feature that reduces light exposure before sleep.