New IBM Kenexa talent suite taps Big Data to energize today's workforce

IBM today announced the software-as-service (SaaS)-based IBM Kenexa Talent Suite that allows Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) and C-Suite executives to gain actionable insights into the deluge of data shared every day by their workforce. As a result, organizations can now streamline, modernize and add precision to hiring practices, increase workforce productivity and connect employees in ways that impact business results.

Organizations around the world today are on a mission to identify and hire top talent. By hiring precisely the right employees and then arming them with powerful social tools, businesses can more effectively manage and develop their workforce and put them into the position to succeed.

With the IBM Kenexa Talent Suite, HR professionals can look at large volumes of employee data – such as work experience, social engagement, skills development and individual interests – to identify the qualities that make top performers successful. Organizations and teams can then use those models to pursue candidates through additional targeted social marketing on social recruiting sites, where job seekers matching the profile are automatically connected with opportunities matching their skills. 

Customers can accelerate the onboarding and the integration of new hires through IBM Connections capabilities. This helps employees share information and find the right experts to accelerate learning and increase productivity and engagement, while at the same time providing a way for leaders to more effectively manage their teams. Through analytics and reporting, line of business leaders can better understand emerging employee trends and more effectively manage each individual's career path in areas like skill attainment, performance appraisals, compensation, succession planning and more.

"We know people are the lifeblood of an organization, and business success on today's stage requires not just talent but social capabilities that can energize, empower and nurture each team member so they can reach their full potential," said Craig Hayman, General Manager, Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM. "By combining social, behavioral science and analytics in the cloud, we give businesses a clear path to empower their most valued asset – employees." 

Interested customers can complement the Suite with Watson Foundations, a comprehensive, integrated set of Big Data and Analytics capabilities that enable clients to find and capitalize on actionable insights. Watson Foundations provides the tools and capabilities to tap into relevant data – regardless of source or type – and apply a full range of analytics to gain fresh insights in real-time, securely across an enterprise. 

Using Watson Foundations customers will be able to conduct a deeper level of analysis on key workforce-related data, identify trends within the workforce, predict future trends and proactively take action. Executives can also look at the profiles and work performance of their top employees and determine the appropriate type of rewards needed to keep them engaged. 

According to an upcoming IBM C-Suite study that surveyed 342 CHROs representing 18 industries, many businesses are not taking full advantage of the insights delivered by workforce big data and analytics. The study found that just over half of organizations are using workforce analytics, with far fewer applying predictive analytics to optimize decision making and outcomes in areas such as sourcing and recruiting (7 percent), employee engagement and commitment (9 percent) and talent development (10 percent), retention (13 percent). 

The CHRO study also found that human resources executives are in the early stages of applying social approaches within the organization. Currently, 66 percent are regularly using social for their recruiting efforts, but only 41 percent are using it for learning 31 percent for knowledge sharing.

Today leading businesses such as AMC are benefiting from IBM talent management software. AMC, one of the world's premier entertainment companies, uses recruitment technologies from IBM to gain a deep understanding through data analytics of what it takes to succeed at the organization. AMC then uses that knowledge to attract candidates who are more likely to succeed once they're hired.   

"Harnessing the power of data gives us a better picture of what top talent looks like in our industry. IBM's talent management solutions allow us to use data in new ways so we can make better informed decisions that have a greater impact on our business," said Heather Jacox, Director, Diversity, Recruitment & Development at AMC.

The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite includes the following:

• Talent Acquisition: Includes recruitment, skill and behavioral science-based assessments and onboarding. These integrated functions are designed to provide a deep understanding of what the best talent looks like and then how to attract, hire and engage them.
• Talent Optimization: Includes performance management, succession planning and compensation planning to empower and get the most out of employees.
• Social Networking: Increases productivity with expertise identification and knowledge discovery – connecting employees and accelerating the time to productivity.

By: PR Newswire
Link: http://cloudcomputing.ulitzer.com/node/2942997

IBM announces revolutionary System x generation with modular design, 12 TB flash on memory bus

IBM today announced a complete redesign of its System x x86 server family, featuring up to 12.8 Tbytes of NAND flash directly on the memory bus of the server and a modular design that allows users to upgrade the server by simply replacing plug-in “Compute Books”. This sixth generation of System x has six core reference architectures including one for SAP HANA and is designed to facilitate the virtualization of ERP and other large, core enterprise-level applications for delivery through private and hybrid clouds. The scalable design can also reduce acquisition costs up to 28 percent in comparison to competitive Xeon x86 systems, IBM says.

The announcement includes a new System x3850 M4 BD storage server, a two-socket rack server supporting up to 14 flash and/or disk drives delivering up to 56 Tbytes of high-density storage. This server, which combines compute with storage, is specifically designed for large build-out architectures such as Hadoop big data installations, says Stuart McRae, IBM System x high-end business line manager.

It also includes the new IBM FlashSystem 840, providing double the bandwidth and performance – 1.1M IOPS – of its predecessor, the FlashSystem 820. It supports up to 48 Tbytes of usable capacity in a 2U unit with IBM Microlatency technology that cuts data access times to microseconds. Designed to support big data, it provides actionable insights from real-time data analytics faster than its predecessors. It also features a new management GUI and datacenter-optimized features such as hot-swap components and concurrent code load, enabling fast installation and easier management.

Virtualize your ERP for the cloud

“The System x6 is the first server family that’s been effectively designed from the ground up to incorporate flash storage,” McRae said. “Until now, flash storage has been kind of an add-on – you add on a PCI card to the server. This is integrating flash storage on the memory bus, the highest speed bus in the system, and making that available as a block storage device, that looks like any other block storage device to the application.”

By putting the flash on the memory bus, it becomes the fastest flash storage on the market. And these new systems can support a lot of it.

“It looks exactly like a DDR3 DIMM,” he said. “These systems are going to have 92 DIMM sockets in a four-way, so it can support up to 6 terabytes of system memory on a four-way, or 12 terabytes in an eight-way. That’s three times as much memory as is available in a standard eight-way server today.”

This has major implications both for big data analytics and for virtualization of very large enterprise applications such as ERP. “If you wanted to cache a five terabyte database in the server for analytics applications, you can configure that as a cache.” So for instance, in the SAP HANA appliance, a large amount of that space is used for RAM, allowing users to have a very large data set in HANA while still providing large amounts of flash for staging data. And by spreading a HANA or similar installation across several servers, it can support very large databases on the memory bus while providing resilience and redundancy in case of a hardware or power failure in any one server.

Before the x6 generation, users were memory-constrained in what they could virtualize. “If you had a four-way server only supporting one or two Tbytes of memory, it’s hard to virtualize a terabyte application,” McRae said. “Now they can do that on these new platforms.” This opens the way for virtualization of ERP systems, even Oracle Red Stacks, that today run on bare metal, allowing customers to realize the advantages of server virtualization and deliver services based on their ERP and other core systems to users via their private clouds.

“I want to move my large databases to a cloud model. I want to move my SAP HANA to a cloud model. I want to move my big ERP applications. I don’t want to have to re-architect it to a new architecture, I want to move it now, and this provides the infrastructure to do that,” MacRae said.

“Booking” your memory, flash, CPUs

The other part of the x6 revolution is the new parallel modular design that IBM calls “Compute Books”. Each server is made up of these plug-and-play modules, each with its own processor and memory. These plug into a backplane that provides power and IO.

This means that upgrading a server or replacing a failing unit is simply a matter of unplugging one or more modules and plugging in replacements. Then a simple restart implements the new hardware without requiring a forklift replacement and all the management that goes along with that. MacRae says IBM estimates that the core server will support at least the next three generations of processor and memory/flash technology.

“Once you’ve architected the server and put your big applications on it, two years from now, when you say ‘Scotty, I need more power,’ you just pull the Compute Books out and plug the latest, greatest ones in. It’s all transparent to the back-end IO.” That provides a great deal of investment protection across generations.

And while it does require a reboot of the upgraded server, “because it’s a virtualized environment, and now we’ve virtualized these large applications, you have no application downtime.”

Six reference architectures

As part of the announcement, IBM also announced six pre-architected versions that come with software installed: an SQL data Warehouse, a Hyper-V appliance running on Windows Server, an SAP HANA version, an SAP Business Suite version, a VMware vCloud, and finally a version running DB2 with BLU acceleration on Linux. The servers come with either SUSI or Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Server. While IBM does not have a reference architecture for it, Oracle has System x on its compatibility list, so users can also run an Oracle Red Stack on the new System x. And because of the higher end processors and the large amounts of memory and flash storage that the new generation supports, they can decrease the number of licenses they need, saving significant cost, particularly with Oracle. And System x also runs IBM Watson for users who want that in-house rather than using it from IBM’s cloud.

By: Bert Latamore

Link: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/01/16/ibm-announces-revolutionary-system-x-generation-with-modular-design-12-tb-flash-on-memory-bus/

IBM Introduces X6 Architecture, Optimizes x86-Based Servers for Cloud, Analytics

Industry-first integrated flash storage for high performance, modular design for long life cycles to help reduce costs, improves resiliency for increased uptime
New IBM FlashSystem 840 doubles performance, ideal for virtualization and cloud.

 

IBM today announced the sixth generation of its enterprise X-Architecture for System x and PureSystems servers, providing industry-leading improvements in the performance and economics of x86-based systems for analytics and cloud.

"Our enterprise X-Architecture for x86-based servers and solutions delivers high performance and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, making us number one in high-end x86 systems," said Adalio Sanchez, general manager for IBM x-86 and PureSystems Solutions. "We continue to innovate and deliver leadership performance, reliability and investment protection for mission-critical workloads with X6."

Clients are rapidly adopting analytics for greater business insight and moving critical workloads like ERP, analytics and database to the cloud for increased efficiency and lower costs, and x86-based systems are the first choice for many. The X6 architecture represents IBM's continuing R&D investment and industry leadership in x86-based systems, and is specifically designed to provide new levels of performance and resiliency for enterprise applications. For memory-hungry applications, X6 delivers three times the scalable memory of current competitors' and IBM x86-based systems to support cloud and analytics. [1]

The X6 architecture is:

• Fast, with integrated eXFlash memory-channel storage -- an industry first, this DIMM-based storage provides up to 12.8 terabytes of ultrafast flash storage close to the processor, increasing application performance by providing the lowest system write latency available, essential for analytics applications. X6 can provide significantly lower latency for database operations, which can lower licensing costs and reduce storage costs by reducing or eliminating the need for external SAN/NAS storage units; [2]

• Agile, with a modular, scalable design that supports multiple generations of CPUs
  -- another industry first -- and can reduce acquisition costs, up to 28 percent in comparison to one competitive offering. [3] X6 provides stability and flexibility through forthcoming technology developments, allowing users to scale up now and upgrade efficiently in the future. Fast set-up and configuration patterns simplify deployment and life-cycle management;

• Resilient, with features that can help extend cloud delivery models to mission-critical applications. Memory and storage increase virtual machine capacity to allow SaaS delivery of applications. Autonomous self-healing CPU and memory systems maximize application uptime by proactively identifying potential failures and taking action to correct them. In addition, Upward Integration Modules can help reduce the cost and complexity of system administration by allowing operators to perform management tasks through virtualization tools. 

• Server models supported by this new architecture currently include the System x3850 X6 four-socket system, System x3950 X6 eight-socket system, and the IBM Flex System x880 scalable compute nodes. IBM also is introducing the System x3650 M4 BD storage server, a two-socket rack server supporting up to 14 drives delivering up to 56 terabytes of high-density storage -- the largest available in the industry. It provides 46 percent greater performance than previous comparable IBM System x servers and is ideally suited for distributed scale-out of big data workloads. [4] 

New Solutions for X6

Clients moving enterprise applications to cloud models and adopting analytics for quick business insights require integrated solutions for fast deployment, efficiency and performance. To help clients achieve these results, IBM is announcing new solutions for its X6 architecture for analytics, database and cloud deployment, including IBM System x Solution for DB2 with BLU Acceleration on X6 for accelerating analytics, IBM System x Solution for SAP HANA on X6 for analytics, and System x Solution for VMware vCloud Suite on X6 for infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities.

New Storage for cloud, analytics

IBM has announced the general availability of the new IBM FlashSystem 840. The new system provides nearly double the bandwidth and double the performance -- 1.1M IOPS -- of its predecessor, the FlashSystem 820 -- making it ideally suited for analytical databases, virtualization infrastructures, and public and private clouds. [5] Supporting up to 48 terabytes of usable capacity in a 2U unit, the all-Flash array also features IBM MicroLatency technology that significantly speeds data access times from milliseconds to microseconds (less than 135 microseconds) giving organizations faster actionable insights from real-time data analytics. In addition, a new management GUI - as well as datacenter-optimized features such as hot-swap components and concurrent code load - enable fast installation and easy management.

IBM also is introducing the FlashSystem Enterprise Performance Solution, which bundles the FlashSystem 840 and IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) technology. The solution includes a suite of advanced data management features ranging from Real-time Compression, snapshots, thin provisioning, VAAI, and application aware copies, to FlashCopy, and storage virtualization with IBM Easy Tier.

New SDE capabilities for cloud

IBM is strengthening its software defined environment (SDE) portfolio with the introduction of IBM Platform Resource Scheduler for private and hybrid IBM SmartCloud clients who want to accelerate time-to-results, improve infrastructure flexibility and reduce operating costs. IBM Platform Resource Scheduler provides a fully virtualized, open and programmable architecture that ensures enterprises are taking advantage of all available IT resources -- from application software licenses to available network bandwidth.

Integrated with OpenStack, this dynamic resource management tool provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that automatically allocate the right resources to the right job, balances workload demand with infrastructure supply and ensures adherence to service level agreements, improving overall application performance and efficiency. The open and extensible architecture also allows enterprises to easily reconfigure and add customized policies to meet their specific sharing and scheduling needs.

Financing for cloud and analytics

IBM Global Financing has announced new financing offerings today to help clients quickly adopt new cloud and analytics solutions by helping reduce upfront costs and speed return on investment. Credit-qualified clients can obtain Fair Market Value leasing when acquiring X6 architecture solutions. Other offerings announced include 0-percent financing and deferred payments for 90 days when they acquire IBM PureSystems, SDE and Storage technology.

Also, IBM's new mobile financing application can help IBM Business Partners close more business with their clients, allowing credit-qualified clients to acquire financing to deploy solutions for analytics, mobile computing, social business and Smarter Planet technologies quickly.

IBM Systems and Technology Group offers a full range of offerings supporting public, private and hybrid cloud implementations that integrate with IBM's cloud software and services. This Systems portfolio includes IBM System x racks and BladeCenter, NeXtScale, PureFlex, Power Systems and System z servers, and IBM Storage solutions.



[1] Triple the memory capacity (Up to 6TB in 4S system; up to 12TB in 8S system) and support up to 24 DDR3 DIMMs per socket and up to 64GB LRDIMM density, based on published Intel specifications, compared with x86 competitors with offerings based on Intel's current processors. 

[2] 5-10 microseconds write latency for eXFlash DIMMs in preliminary testing vs. 15-19 microseconds latency for PCIe-based flash storage from Fusion IO, Micron, and Virident, and 65 microseconds latency for Intel S3500 and S3700 SSDs. (Pending final IBM performance testing.) 
Using internal eXFlash storage reduces or eliminates the need for external SAN/NAS storage. Less SAN hardware means fewer software licenses. 

[3] 28 percent acquisition cost savings based on pricing of x3850 X6 at announcement on 2/18 vs. current pricing of a comparable x86 based system that includes 2 x Intel Xeon E7-4820 (v1) processors, 1TB of memory (16GB RDIMMs) 3.6TB of HDD storage, and Dual Port 10GBe SFP+ controller. x3850 X6 includes 2 Compute Books, 2 x Intel Xeon E7 processors, 1TB of memory (16GB RDIMMs), 3.6TB of HDD storage, and Dual Port 10GBe SFP+ controller. 

[4] Compared to HP two-socket servers supporting a maximum of 48 TB storage with 12 x 3.5" drives, and Dell two-socket servers supporting a maximum of 51.2 TB storage with 12 x 3.5" and 2 x 2.5" drives. 
46-percent figure based on Intel Internal Test Report #1310, using SPECjbb*2013 benchmark, July 2013. 

[5] The performance data discussed herein is presented as derived under specific operating conditions by IBM. Actual results may vary.




By: IBM News Releases
Link: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42796.wss

The 2014 Australian Open Tennis Championship: Powered by IBM Cloud

Every January, Tennis Australia welcomes hundreds of thousands of tennis fans to Melbourne Olympic Park for the Australian Open Grand Slam. Millions more around the world arrive by australiaopen.com to catch the latest scores, match statistics, player insights and breaking news. All of this is powered by IBM data technologies.

Once again, IBM has partnered with Tennis Australia to deliver innovative IT solutions and a seamless online experience using its cutting edge technologies like cloud computing, mobility, social media sentiment and big data analytics. The partnership between IBM and Tennis Australia has been around for 21 consecutive years.

This year, the event will be held Jan. 13-26. In these two weeks, demand for information from Australian Open fans will be at its highest. During the tournament, Tennis Australia’s IT infrastructure must expand drastically to meet audience demand and deliver a unique and satisfying experience. How does Tennis Australia scale its IT infrastructure to accommodate the flood of data demand that comes from millions of fans at once?

Tennis Australia needed a highly scalable IT solution that would allow them to quickly and easily allocate a huge amount of additional resources. They needed a plan to cater to a short but extreme high-traffic period, in a timely and cost-effective way.

The solution was for IBM to set up a private cloud that could be shared by other like-minded organizations with similar demand spikes at different times of the year. Those organizations include the US Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the US Open Golf tournament, the Masters and the Tony Awards. But such a solution doesn’t just apply to sports and entertainment. Any large companies considering sharing IT resources between internal divisions, departments or projects would benefit from such an arrangement.

Some of the technology solutions that IBM will provide to the tournament are: the official Australian Open tournament website, IBM ReturnServe, IBM SlamTracker, integrated end-to-end scoring system, Speed Serve System, Australian Open intranet, closed-circuit television (CCTV) feeds and the match information display located in Garden Square and Grand Slam oval.

The outcomes have been extremely positive. Tennis Australia:

• Can easily and affordably adjust their IT resources according to fluctuations in traffic and user demand, year-round.

• Is able to now free up operational budget for new investment thanks to leveraging virtualization, energy efficiency, standardization and automation.

• Can rely on an improved disaster recovery solution that locates back-up systems in separate facilities.

• Has grown its users by 45 percent since 2008, while cost per user has decreased by 35 percent.

• Has increased page views by 42 percent, while cost per page view has decreased by 34 percent.

• Has increase accuracy of demand predictions for the hosting infrastructure through additional input, including unstructured data from Twitter commentary.



By: Carlos Felipe Franca da Fonseca
Link: http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2014/01/video-how-ibm-cloud-is-powering-the-2014-australian-open-tennis-championship/

IBM rallies tennis fans with innovative technology at the Australian Open 2014

Tennis Australia and IBM use new mobile apps, enhanced data analytics and cloud computing to deliver the most engaging event yet for fans.

 

IBM is bringing tennis fans even closer to the Australian Open 2014, with new ways to access and interact with the latest tournament news and courtside action from the Grand Slam as it happens. 

Through the use of innovative and interactive technology, IBM will provide fans with a richer fan experience for the international tennis tournament. The official mobile apps for the Australian Open deliver easy functionality with real-time scores and schedules, comprehensive match and player analysis and Twitter feeds. New this year is the free iPad app, which is the ultimate digital destination, enabling fans to follow their favourite players, tweet messages of support from a player's profile and track player popularity online using IBM social media analytics.

“We are seeing increased demand from fans around the world for more access and real-time event content. Over the two weeks of the Australian Open last year, more than 15.5 million unique users connected with the tournament online, and almost half of the website views were from mobile devices.  Each year we aim to enhance the event experience and this year we have worked with our technology partner, IBM, to develop a new iPad app, improve the website and smartphone apps, as well as advance the technology infrastructure behind the scenes,” said Samir Mahir, CIO, Tennis Australia. 

Today’s tennis fans also seek a deeper experience that goes beyond live scores and updates. Insights and visualisations, provided by IBM SlamTracker on the Australian Open website, analyse more than eight years of Grand Slam data to identify patterns in player style. New features to SlamTracker for 2014 include streamlined analysis of more fan friendly key turning points in a match, such as aces and winning shots, and a social media sentiment feed that measures the percentage of positive tweets. 

“During the Australian Open each year we transform almost overnight from a medium size business to a global enterprise that must service millions of fans, players, media and officials from around the globe,” continued Samir Mahir. “Using IBM predictive analytics and cloud computing technologies ensures we can meet this demand uninterrupted.”

IBM predictive cloud provisioning analyses multiple data sources in real-time, such as tournament schedule, player popularity, historical data and social media conversations, to predict and automatically allocate the computing power required by the Australian Open website.

New this year, tennis fans can also now experience what it is like to face a serve from one of the world’s top players with the new IBM ReturnServe. To create this experience for fans IBM, in partnership with Tennis Australia, analyses real-time data from every point of the game at the Rod Laver Arena during the tournament. Displayed in a graphically animated environment and hosted on IBM SoftLayer, this live serve data lets fans attempt to return each serve at home using their computer or at select onsite locations using a virtual reality headset.

“Our 21-year history with the Australian Open has been about making the event and the sport of tennis more engaging and enjoyable.  This latest focus on the omni-channel experience is no exception. With new digital technologies like the iPad app and virtual reality IBM ReturnServe, this event is a leading example of how cloud computing, data analytics, social and mobile technologies can help organisations better connect with audiences,” said Glen Thomas, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, IBM Australia and New Zealand.

Australian Open 2014

IBM and Tennis Australia

Since IBM became Tennis Australia’s technology partner in 1993, the partnership has delivered innovative technology solutions, enhancing the Australian Open experience for players, coaches and fans around the world. Key IBM solutions at the 2014 tournament include:

• IBM SlamTracker - statistics and visualisation platform using predictive analytics and historical data to identify and broadcast key performance indicators, providing comparisons of players’ careers and live performances. This analysis includes key performance indicators — what players need to do to succeed in a match — known as 'Keys to the Match'. During the match, each player's performance is measured against their keys and updated in real time on ausopen.com, providing fans with a deeper level of insight as the match unfolds.

• Ausopen.com website - IBM designs, develops and hosts the official website on an IBM private cloud. Fans can follow live scores from every court, review highlights of the day’s play, listen to live tournament radio and read blogs.

• New in 2014 – IBM ReturnServe - Tennis fans can now experience what it’s like to face the world’s top players with the ReturnServe website and the ReturnServe virtual reality experience at selected locations in Sydney and Melbourne. Based on live data analysed by IBM technology at Rod Laver Arena, fans can face each serve at home, using their computer or at the virtual reality locations using a headset. The aim of the game is to return serves at the same speed as the world’s best. IBM ReturnServe is hosted on IBM SoftLayer, a robust and scalable platform.

• IBM’s integrated end-to-end scoring system - IBM technology drives the live scores that are broadcast around the world, along with other real-time data such as match statistics and the radar speed of serves.

• Mobile - the official Australian Open iPhone app, Android app and mobile website are built and powered by IBM, providing live scores, radio, Twitter feeds, schedules and draws. The mobiles apps were downloaded more than 1 million times during the 2013 tournament.

• New in 2014 - iPad app - the app allows fans to follow their favourite players and show their support through social media – as well as track how popular they are, thanks to IBM’s Social Sentiment analytics solution.

• IBM predictive cloud provisioning - IBM technology automatically assigns the computing power required by the Australian Open website based on real-time analytics of the tournament schedule, player popularity, historical data and social media conversations.

• Australian Open Social Leaderboard- updated every few minutes, this website feature tracks the positive and negative sentiment for players on social media. Fans can help their favourite players move up the ranks by ‘liking’ or tweeting favourably about a player.

• Scoring system - Vital scoring information is displayed via IBM’s integrated end-to-end scoring system, which makes live scores available around Melbourne Park and the world as they happen.

• Speed serve and radar - Courtside radar captures exact serve speeds, which are immediately transmitted to the IBM scoring database and displayed courtside.

• Chair Umpire Solution (CHUMP) and match statistics - Each chair umpire uses a mobile device to directly capture each point, game and set from the court. Courtside statisticians record vital information and the information is then sent in real time to the IBM Scoring System.

By: IBM Press Releases
Link: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/au/en/pressrelease/42932.wss

 

 

IBM Breeds New Business Unit To Feed Watson

IBM is investing more than $1 billion in a new business unit. It's banking on a market for cognitive computing services that actually learn and reason.

 

A New York City press conference marked the official launch of an IBM unit based on Watson, the computer best known for defeating human Jeopardy champions in 2011. This unit is dedicated to selling Watson's natural language, machine learning-based services to enterprises.

At the event, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty invoked a word that biologists would typically reserve for organic life forms. Watson's latest incarnation is "a new species, if I can call it that," she said. "It is taught; it is not programmed. By design, it learns by experience, and it learns from interaction. And by design, it gets smarter over time and makes better judgments over time."

Since its landmark day in the history of trivia, IBM has built exclusive business relationships with partners to produce pioneering applications for its cognitive engine -- applications that involve decision-making advice. Given unfathomable mountains of input data gleaned from natural language publications, Watson can generate best-fit scenarios that resolve natural language queries with varying degrees of probable certainty.

Now the company is taking its first steps toward opening those services up to less exclusive markets. For example, it's reaching beyond a few select healthcare partners, such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Cleveland Clinic, and to the healthcare industry as a whole.

At the press conference, Cleveland Clinic chief innovation officer Dr. Tom Graham said his group's collaboration with IBM has produced an application capable of sifting through an enormous quantity of daily medical publications and interacting directly with students and refining its diagnosis capability through direct conversation. "Innovation happens at the intersection of knowledge domains," he said. "So if you have a partner that has these competencies, to discover and evidence all the passive information you may need and can understand you... I call this the virtuous cycle."

The announcement marks the beginning of IBM steering its Watson marketing message away from the story of a machine -- a mainframe-like entity, like HAL 9000, with its own speaking voice -- and toward the story of a service. IBM's online documents have already begun characterizing Watson's 2011 relationship with the company's Power 750 servers in the past tense, suggesting its "reasoning" center may have since moved to a newer base. Earlier, IBM revealed that Watson was hosted on a cluster of 90 Power 750 servers, each with four Power 7 processors with eight cores apiece.

IBM has since released its Power 7+ processor series with up to 20% more clock speed. The Power 750s that hosted the Jeopardy champion are now commercially available only in the 750 Express power-saving configuration. There's a good chance IBM has already upgraded Watson to a newer and more formidable host, though the company may not be ready to publicly disclose its configuration.

In its new guise as a service, Watson will continue to be cultivated through direct, personalized partnerships. IBM also announced the launch of a "public" applications ecosystem, Digital Life Labs, that will include third-party developers in the production of resalable cognitive applications -- "cogs," as IBM calls them. At press time, the company had not elaborated on the meaning of "public" and whether any would-be developer might have access.

There will be cloud-based, Watson-branded services, but IBM called them supplemental to direct, human partnerships. Watson Discovery Advisor will provide a common interface for clients needing to interact with the system. And Watson Analytics and Watson Explorer will enter beta testing to provide dashboard-style summaries of large data sets, putting Watson in competition with cloud-based BI providers such as Tableau and Roambi.

Mike Rhodin, IBM's senior vice president in charge of the new Watson group, cited big data services such as its Hadoop distribution and how they link to the emerging Watson service platform. "Everybody wants to work with Watson, but not everybody is ready for Watson. One of the key problems is how do you sort through all of your information, all of your data?"

Rhodin presented a list of services that would help big data become more "digestible" for Watson, helping to feed it more carefully and with discretion. Yet he also said Watson has attained at least one capability once held exclusively by humans. Watson Explorer "is another key, important product in what's becoming a system. It's not just a question-and-answer thing anymore... It reasons. It explores. It visualizes. It analyzes." In Watson, we are witnessing the evolution of "the cognitive computing platform of the future."

By: Scott M. Fulton
Link: http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/pc-and-servers/ibm-breeds-new-business-unit-to-feed-watson/d/d-id/1113386

IBM Makes A $1-Billion Bet To Make Watson A Business

For the past two years, since its Watson question-answer system went on the Jeopardy! game show and beat the two best humans at this game, an IBM team with a few hundred people centered in Austin, Texas, has been working on ways to commercialize Watson and put it to work. With the launch of the Watson Group inside of IBM today in New York, Watson is entering its third phase, where IBM is investing $1 billion over several years to extend the technologies underpinning Watson and get them into mainstream products and services.

IBM's Watson Group headquarters in New York

At the launch event in New York, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that the information technology industry was entering its third phase, and reminded everyone that Big Blue was instrumental in the two prior phases. The first phase was tabulation, which is where IBM has its heritage back in the late 19th century. This was merely counting things. The next phase, in the middle of the 20th century, was for programmable computers, which could run IF-THEN routines and perform useful calculations and manipulation of data. The third phase, Rometty said, is the cognitive era.

 "It was a new species, if I can call it that," Rometty said of the original Watson machine that won at Jeopardy! back in early 2011. "By design, it learns by experience and it learns from interaction, and by design, it gets smarter over time and gives better judgments over time. We took Watson on because it is built for a world of big data."

The Watson system was a cluster of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux with an in-memory database. This database was fed by an Apache Hadoop system and also employed another set of Apache code called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, that was created by IBM back in 2005 to help put unstructured data into relational databases. The UIMA code is not just a framework for storing data, but it is also where the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of the system reside. This is what allows Watson to take in textual questions and give back textual answers. Question analysis was done using Prolog, and the question parsing is one of the key things that makes Watson work (or not work, as was the case early on.) Some of Watson's algorithms were done by hand in C and C++ for performance reasons. Building the original Watson system took four years and 27 researchers--who, IBM openly admits, stood on the shoulders of countless researchers working over decades in artificial intelligence, semantics, and related fields.

To commercialize the Watson system will require it to have other capabilities, including the ability to hear and to see (processing both pictures and video). IBM has been working on these functions for the past several years, and it is not clear what state of development these senses are in. The Watson system will also need to be able to parse datasets and draw pictures, and IBM has been working on this as well. The goal is to expand outwards from initial dabblings in medicine, where IBM has had several partnerships, into other fields such as finance, retail, and travel. No matter what field, the basic idea is the same: There is too much information scattered around for people to make informed decisions for their work or their life, and a system like Watson can offer up suggestions like a human expert would.

Expertise in specific industries is the key to success with such cognitive systems, and that is one of the reasons why IBM has chosen Michael Rhodin, who was formerly the senior vice president of IBM's Software Solutions Group, to head up the new Watson business unit. The group will be located at 51 Astor Place, in a brand new building that is at the heart of Silicon Alley in the Big Apple, and it will have several hundred employees to start with, and over 2,000 are expected to be in the group by the end of the year. The Watson Group has been given a budget of more than $1 billion over the next few years. (IBM was not more specific about the term of the investment.) That budget includes $100 million in venture capital to invest in startups who want to leverage Watson technologies to create applications for specific industries.

Last November, IBM did a soft launch of a cloudy implementation of Watson, giving software developers access to Watson's APIs so they could pump their data into the system and have it do question-answer processing. That Watson cloud has drawn over 890 companies and individual developers so far. IBM had already launched an application called Watson Engagement Advisor, which puts the system into call centers to help the humans in customer service answer questions better. It is not hard to imagine voice processing extensions that would allow such a program to replace the telephone messaging systems and a lot of the people in call centers, much as companies try to do with web-based tech support these days.

Three new Watson-based applications were announced today. They include Watson Analytics, which was developed under the codename "Neo" and which will go into beta next week. This analytics module uses natural language to help users find datasets and, based on input, can prep the data, find the most important relationships, and present it visually, according to Rhodin. Another new module in development is called Watson Explorer, which is a data discovery, search, and navigation service. Watson Discovery Advisor is the third new one that was developed in conjunction with publishers and pharmaceutical companies to sift through the large amount of material that gets published. (In the medical field alone, there are over 5,000 articles published each month, IBM says, and no one can keep up.)

As part of the announcement today, IBM is promising to port Watson over to its SoftLayer public cloud, and that either means moving Watson off Power Systems iron – which was chosen originally because of its high memory and I/O bandwidth compared to X86 alternatives – or putting Power machines inside the SoftLayer cloud. The original Watson system, by the way, had 90 quad-socket server nodes with 16 TB of main memory. IBM says it can now get the same capability into three servers and deliver a factor of 24X improvement in performance.

By: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Link: http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2014-01-09/ibm_makes_a_$1-billion_bet_to_make_watson_a_business.html

IBM to invest $1B to create new business unit for Watson

IBM said it will invest more than $1 billion to establish a new business unit for Watson, as the tech giant hopes to get more revenue from the supercomputer system that beat humans on the television quiz show "Jeopardy".

The world's largest technology service provider said the IBM Watson Group will be headed by Michael Rhodin, who was previously senior vice president of IBM's software solutions group.

IBM said the investment includes a $100 million equity fund to boost innovation at its Watson Developers Cloud, which it opened up to external application developers last year.

The unit will have about 2,000 employees and will be based in New York City.

Watson, which beat expert "Jeopardy" quiz show contestants in 2011, is an artificial intelligence super computer system named after legendary International Business Machines President Thomas Watson.

Using natural language capabilities and analytics, Watson processes information akin to how people think, allowing it to quickly analyze and interpret large amounts of data.

IBM said it has shrunk Watson to the size of three stacked pizza boxes from its original size of a master bedroom.

Under the Watson Group, IBM will offer the technology, which is delivered over the cloud and can power new consumer and enterprise apps, to businesses and industries as well as to consumers.

IBM said it decided to establish the unit because of strong demand for cognitive computing.

"We have reached the inflection point where the interest is overwhelming and we recognized we need to move faster," said Stephen Gold, vice president of Watson Business.

Watson will be deployed on Softlayer, the cloud computing infrastructure business IBM bought last year.

Jamie Popkin, managing vice president at research firm Gartner, said IBM's technology significantly improved how information can be used and managed.

"I think they've developed something that takes us to the next step where information management needs to go," said Popkin.

According to Gartner, by next year there will likely be a large and growing market for Watson-derived smart advisors and it said that Crédit Agricole predicted that these systems will account for more than 12 percent of IBM's total revenue in 2018.

IBM's full year revenue in 2012 was $104.5 billion.

By: Reuters
Link: http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/tech-biz/01/10/14/ibm-invest-1b-create-new-business-unit-watson

International Business Machines Corp. : Five innovations that will define new technology era

Each year IBM unveils a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and interact during the next five years.

This year's "IBM 5 in 5" explores the idea that everything will learn – driven by a new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and engage with us in a more natural and personalised way. 

"We know more now than any other generation at any time has known. And yet, we struggle to keep up with this flood of increasingly complex information, let alone make sense of the meaning that is inherent in the massive amounts of data we are acquiring at ever faster rates," said Dr. Dario Gil, Director, Cognitive Experience Lab, IBM. 

"By creating technology that is explicitly designed to learn and enhance our cognition we will usher in a new era of progress for both individuals and for society at large."

Here are the five predictions that will define the future and impact us at a personal level:

The classroom will learn you

The number of individuals who don't have a sufficient education is a major global challenge. Estimates show that, on a global basis, nearly two out of every three adults have not achieved the equivalent of a high school education. 

What if a student could go through their entire stages of education and master the skills critical to meeting their personal goals in life. 

The classroom of the future will give educators the tools to learn about every student, providing them with a tailored curriculum from kindergarten to high school and on to employment.

In the next five years the classroom will learn about each student using longitudinal data such as test scores, attendance and student's behaviour on e-learning platforms, not just aptitude tests. 

Sophisticated analytics delivered over the cloud will provide decision support to teachers so they can predict students who are most at risk, their roadblocks, and then suggest measures to help students conquer their challenges.

Buying local will beat online

Shopping online is a national past time. Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide for the first time last year, and are growing faster than in-store sales.

Online stores have an advantage in their ability to learn from the choices we make on the web. Today, most physical stores are limited to the insights they can gain at the point of sale — and the trend of show rooming is making it harder to compete with online retailers who compete solely on price.

In five years, new innovations will make buying local du jour once again. Savvy retailers will use the immediacy of the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that cannot be replicated by online-only retail.

They will magnify the digital experience by bringing the web right to where the shopper can physically touch it.

In five years, retailers could rely on Watson-like technologies to equip sales associates to be expert about every product in the store.

With technologies such as augmented reality and recently announced plan to open Watson as an app development platform, IBM is providing shoppers' with better in-store browsing and buying experiences.

As mobile devices supported by cloud computing enable individuals to share what makes them tick, their health or nutritional needs, virtual closets and social networks, retailers will soon be able to anticipate with incredible accuracy the products a shopper most wants and needs.

A digital guardian will protect you online

Today we have multiple IDs and devices than ever before, yet security is highly fragmented, leaving us vulnerable. In 2012 there were more than 12 million victims of identity fraud in the US. Traditional approaches to security — passwords, anti-virus or a firewall — are not comprehensive. These rules-based approaches fall short in several ways — they are designed to recognise only known viruses or known fraudulent activity and typically only look at a single source of data.In five years, each of us could be protected with our own digital guardian that will become trained to focus on the people and items it is entrusted with, offering a new level of identity theft protection.

Doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well

Cancer is a complicated disease and despite tremendous advances in research and treatment, the incidence of cancer has risen more than 10 per cent since 2008, striking more than 14 million patients and claiming the lives of 8.1 million every year around the world.

Imagine if treatment could be more specific and precise — where computers could help doctors understand how a tumor affects a patient down to their DNA and present a collective set of medications shown to best attack the cancer.

In five years, advances in big data analytics and emerging cloud-based cognitive systems coupled with breakthroughs in genomic research and testing could help doctors to accurately diagnose cancer and create personalised cancer treatment plans for millions of patients around the world.

Smart machines will take the output of full genome sequencing and scour vast repositories of medical records and publications to learn and quickly provide specific and actionable insights on treatment options for oncologists.

Cancer care, personalised right down to a genomic level, has been on the horizon since scientists first sequenced the human genome, but few clinicians have access to the tools and time to assess the insights available at this level.

Within five years, cloud-based cognitive systems could make such personalised medicine available at a scale and speed never before possible.

IBM is beginning to explore this opportunity, working with health care partners to develop systems that could deliver genomic insights and reduce the time it takes to find the right treatment for a patient from weeks and months to days and minutes.

These systems are destined to get even smarter over time by learning about people, their genomic information and response to drugs – opening up the possibility to provide DNA-specific personalized treatment options for conditions such as stroke and heart disease.

Through the cloud, smarter healthcare could scale to reach more people in more locations, while also giving a global community of healthcare providers access to vital information.

The city will help you live in it

By 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 80 per cent of urban humanity and by 2050, seven out of every 10 people will be a city dweller.

In five years smarter cities understand in real time how billions of events occur as computers learn to understand what people need, what they like, what they do, and how they move from place to place.

Soon it will be possible for cities and their leaders to understand and digest new information freely provided by citizens, knowing which city resources are needed, where and when, so the city can dynamically optimise around the needs of the citizens.

Mobile devices and social engagement will enable citizens to strike up a relationship with their city leaders.


Link: http://www.4-traders.com/INTERNATIONAL-BUSINESS-MA-4828/news/International-Business-Machines-Corp--Five-innovations-that-will-define-new-technology-era-17740585/

Watch out Accumulo: IBM wins patent for fully homomorphic encryption

Decision makers are breaking down information silos to gain a better view of their companies and customers, but successfully implementing analytics at an organizational level is much easier said than done. In a world of tight budgets, CIOs seeking to tap into data from multiple sources have to meet performance objectives and keep risks in check, all while keeping apace with a fast changing technological landscape. The cloud presents a cost-effective alternative to traditional on premise Hadoop clusters, but entrusting mission-critical information to a third party introduces a whole new set of challenges.

These are the use cases IBM is looking to simplify with fully homomorphic encryption, a newly patented technology that makes it possible to process encrypted data without decrypting it first. Aside from closing the door on hackers, the innovation could also lighten the compliance burden on enterprises – especially those operating in regulated industries – by ensuring that data scientists can’t access sensitive information.

Craig Gentry, an IBM researcher and the co-inventor of the patent, said in a statement that “our patented invention has the potential to pave the way for more secure cloud computing services – without having to decrypt or reveal original data. Fully homomorphic encryption will enable companies to confidently share data and more easily and quickly overcome challenges or take advantage of emerging opportunities.”

Fully homomorphic encryption holds the same premise as is complimentary to the approach popularized by Accumulo, an open source NoSQL database that leverages cell-level security to provide granular control over user access to Big Data. Sqrrl, the Massachusetts-based NSA spinoff that distributes the platform, recently raised $5.2 million in Series A financing from Atlas Venture and Matrix Partners to hire more engineers and address growing demand from enterprise clients.

Update 12/30/13:

In an email exchange, SiliconANGLE communicated with Sqrrl co-founder Ely Kahn who explained the differences between what IBM has announced and Accumulo’s approach. Specifically, Kahn told us Sqrrl is actually excited about homomorphic encryption because not only does it shine more light on the issue of security but it’s a powerful technique. According to Kahn, homomorphic encryption allows computations to be done over encrypted text– in other words,  analytics (for example) can be performed on the encrypted data without decrypting first (decrypting adds overhead and increases security threats). Kahn explained that with homomorphic encryption, only the result needs to be decrypted, providing greater levels of protection and efficiency.

Regarding the IBM announcement, Kahn told SiliconANGLE that IBM is a close partner of Sqrrl and Sqrrl Enterprise has a pluggable encryption architecture where it can support a variety of different encryption algorithms.  “Perhaps one day customers will be using IBM’s homomorphic encryption on data stored in Sqrrl Enteprise,” said Kahn.

Kahn bristled at the suggestion that Homomorphic encryption threatens Accumulo saying “Sqrrl Enterprise’s cell-level security capabilities have nothing to do with encryption.  The cell-level security capabilities refer to our ability to apply fine-grained access controls to the data. Homomorphic encryption does not replace the need for strong authentication and authorization controls.”

According to Kahn, cell-level security is a technique that enables organizations to be selective in who sees which pieces of information. Homomorphic encryption enables computations to be done in an encrypted environment. Both promote better security and better information sharing, but for very different use cases and in different ways.

Earlier this year, one example of a high profile use case for cell-level security was reported by SiliconANGLE regarding NSA's PRISM database, which uses Accumulo to store and safeguard cell phone metadata. According to Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante, “In the past nine months, interest in Big Data security has exploded. Two years ago the Big Data digerati hardly talked about security. Now with real systems going into production, combined with the Snowden leaks, the Big Data community is realizing that security can’t be an afterthought; rather it needs to be designed in from the start.”

By: Maria Deutscher
Link: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/12/26/watch-out-accumulo-ibm-wins-patent-for-fully-homomorphic-encryption/

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to Take Over Aspera

International Business Machine Corp. is set to acquire CA-based Aspera, Inc, for an undisclosed amount. Aspera’s technology helps to speed up the movement of massive data files securely across the globe.

Aspera’s patented high-speed transfer technology helps companies transfer large files or data sets in minimal time. The system increases the efficiency of file transfer exponentially, reducing a 26 hour transfer of a 24 gigabyte file, forwarded halfway around the world, to just 30 seconds.

The fasp technology patented by Aspera helps to overcome inherent blocks in a broadband wide area network thereby increasing the speed of large file transfers. These files include video or scientific research files.

This acquisition would help IBM to introduce an innovative solution for its clients, which might help them to manage increasing volumes of structured as well as unstructured data created by everything from sensors to social media.

The company has taken the inorganic route to growth time and again, which helped it to gain access to new technology. This strategy has helped IBM to enhance its product portfolio, which ultimately helps in generating incremental revenues, strengthen its technology leadership and leads to a more favorable mix of business.

IBM will continue to benefit from its new initiatives like cloud computing, smarter planet, business analytics and optimization over the long term. However, stiff competition from Hewlett Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., and Oracle Corp. and sluggish IT spending are the major headwinds going forward.

By: Zacks
Link: http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/12/international-business-machines-corp-ibm-to-take-over-aspera/

How your company can benefit from social media analytics as SaaS

Recently I visited a customer who handles customer calls for many leading consumer packaged goods brands. They indicated to me that more and more people are providing feedback on products using social media. Previously, the primary source for getting customer feedback was allowing customers to call telephone operators in call centers. This trend is now changing very rapidly and social media is becoming the primary source for customer feedback. 

In a traditional customer feedback environment, it would be one-to-one communication and a company would be able to proactively resolve the issue.

With social media becoming the default feedback environment, you have one-to-many communication. Normally from that point on it will become many-to-many communication, and something could end up as a viral issue. A company might not find out about it until it has gone viral and then they must reactively solve the issue.

Take an example of an antenna issue in one of the leading brand’s cell phones a couple of years back. When the product was released, the company was not aware of the issue and not many people called the company about it. Instead, the consumers went to social media like Facebook and Twitter and started complaining. This started to gain traction in news media and blogs, and before the company could completely assess the situation and rectify the issue, it became a full-blown problem. Even the people who did not own the product were aware of the problem. Finally, the company rectified the issue by sending each user a fix through software and hardware changes in the product. This caused a loss of millions of dollars and a hit to the company’s reputation.

The big question is how to identify such an issue before it goes viral and prevent it from happening in the future.

This issue can be resolved by IBM Social Media Anlaytics Software as a Service. Once a model is created in the application, it will identify issues that are being discussed in social media related to a theme, like cell phone, and in the case of the example above, with antenna as one of the items trending in the Evolving Topics charts with negative sentiment. This will help the company identify issues at the onset.

With technologies like IBM Social Media Analytics SaaS, businesses can keep one step ahead of situations like these and resolve them before they make a major impact to the bottom line.

By: Mohsin Syed
Link: http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2013/12/how-your-company-benefit-from-social-media-analytics-as-saas/

Buying Local Will Beat Online Shopping in 5 Years, Says IBM

This year's IBM 5 in 5 explores the idea that everything will learn – driven by a new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and engage with us in a more natural and personalized way. These innovations are beginning to emerge enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics and learning technologies all coming together, with the appropriate privacy and security considerations, for consumers, citizens, students and patients.

Over time these computers will get smarter and more customized through interactions with data, devices and people, helping us take on what may have been seen as unsolvable problems by using all the information that surrounds us and bringing the right insight or suggestion to our fingertips right when it's most needed. A new era in computing will lead to breakthroughs that will amplify human abilities, assist us in making good choices, look out for us and help us navigate our world in powerful new ways.

"We know more now than any other generation at any time has known. And yet, we struggle to keep up with this flood of increasingly complex information, let alone make sense of the meaning that is inherent in the massive amounts of data we are acquiring at ever faster rates," said Dr. Dario Gil, Director, Cognitive Experience Lab, IBM. "By creating technology that is explicitly designed to learn and enhance our cognition we will usher in a new era of progress for both individuals and for society at large."

The IBM 5 in 5 is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM's Research labs around the world that can make these transformations possible.

Buying local will beat online

Shopping online is a national past time.  Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide for the first time last year, and are growing faster than in-store sales.

Online stores currently have an advantage in their ability to learn from the choices we make on the web. Today, most physical stores are limited to the insights they can gain at the point of sale – and the trend of showrooming is making it harder to compete with online retailers who compete solely on price.

In five years, new innovations will make buying local du jour once again.  Savvy retailers will use the immediacy of the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that cannot be replicated by online-only retail.  They will magnify the digital experience by bringing the web right to where the shopper can physically touch it.

In five years, retailers could rely on Watson-like technologies to equip sales associates to be expert about every product in the store. With technologies such as augmented reality and the recently announced plan to open Watson as an app development platform, IBM is providing shoppers with better in-store browsing and buying experiences.

As mobile devices supported by cloud computing enable individuals to share what makes them tick, their health or nutritional needs, virtual closets and social networks, retailers will soon be able to anticipate with incredible accuracy the products a shopper most wants and needs. As a result, stores will transform into immersive destinations with experiences customized for each individual.

And given their proximity and multiple footprints, stores will be able to offer shoppers a variety of fast pick-up or delivery options, wherever the customer is. Two-day shipping will feel like snail mail.

Link: http://apparel.edgl.com/news/Buying-Local-Will-Beat-Online-Shopping-in-5-Years,-Says-IBM90133

IBM adds a fancy scheduler to its OpenStack stack

IBM modifies its Platform Computing Scheduler to work with OpenStack

 

IBM has reached into its software portfolio to provide a more sophisticated scheduler for the OpenStack deployments it builds for its customers.

"You don't want a cloud user to feel like their application is not performing as advertised," said Jay Muelhoefer, IBM's strategy director for the new Platform Resource Scheduler.

The Platform Resource Scheduler was originally developed by Platform Computing, which IBM purchased in 2012.

Platform Computing's scheduler, originally called Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF), found a home in many financial analysis systems, high performance computing (HPC) environments and in a number of grid computing deployments.

Within an OpenStack deployment, the Platform Resource Scheduler can choose the most appropriate server in which to place a new virtual machine based on policies crafted by the administrator. Criteria can include how much of each machine is already being used in terms of its CPU utilization, memory utilization and other factors.

The software will now be included in IBM's SmartCloud Entry and SmartCloud Orchestrator, two service offerings to help organizations build their own private clouds. It will not be available as a separate stand-alone product, Muelhoefer said.

The scheduler works in conjunction with the OpenStack built-in scheduler, Nova. Nova's limitation is that "it makes decisions based on static information. It only schedules resources once when they are initially placed. It doesn't look how to continuously optimize the environment and revisit the placement decisions," Muelhoefer said.

The software also gives IBM OpenStack users a scheduler that can match the sophistication of VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), found in VMware cloud deployments.

Red Hat has also been busy improving OpenStack's scheduling capabilities. This week, the company released version 4 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a package that consists of the latest "Havana" OpenStack distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5, and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEV) . This version comes with the new Heat orchestration engine, and a new resource manager called Foreman.

By: Joab Jackson
Link: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/ibm-adds-fancy-scheduler-its-openstack-stack-233047

 

 

IBM to Acquire Aspera to help Companies Transfer Massive files in the Cloud

IBM’s move to acquire Aspera Technology would allow companies to transport massive files faster in the cloud. This acquisition would enhance the big data product portfolio of IBM Corporation.

 

To make a stronger product portfolio of big data and cloud computing based movement of data files, the big  blue announced the acquisition of California based software protocol development company Aspera Inc. This announcement was made public by the IT giant through a press release statement issued on Thursday, December 19, 2013.

 

The statement does not disclose the financial terms for completing this deal but it was announced that IBM would integrate the fast and secure software technology of Aspera in its big data products to make them faster to move into the cloud.

It was further explained the dynamics behind the acquisition that IBM was finding it very difficult to handle both the structured and unstructured data in the cloud computing based environment. The big bottlenecking of the problem was the speed of the transfer of big files in the cloud computing based environment in the cloud. The ‘Fasp Technology’ – as patented by Apsera Inc would be very useful for the company to manage the big data and large files to move in and out of the internet cloud.

It was further elaborated in the press release statement that Aspera’s technology related to the fast movement of the data into the cloud would decrease the transmission time by up to 99.9% – for example, 24 GB file transferring half way around the world would be reduced from 26 hours of transfer to just 30 seconds!

In the press release statement, Vice President, B2B and Commerce Solutions, IBM John Mesberg said, “Our experience working with thousands of clients on Big Data projects tells us that companies can better compete and win when they can quickly extract value from massive volumes of data – and with this acquisition, IBM addresses a key challenge for globally integrated enterprises by allowing them to move large data files much faster to the individuals who need them, wherever in the world they may be.”

By the combination of Aspera’s fasp technology with the power of cloud computing, the enterprise and corporate customers would be able to get full control on the worth of their big data by moving it into the cloud and processing for the business value.

By: Maria Dehn
Link: http://greatresponder.com/2013/12/21/ibm-aspera-cloud-computing-based-internet-data/

 

 

IBM Patents Cryptography Invention to Advance Security in the Cloud

IBM announced it has patented a new cryptography solution that is aimed at enhancing privacy and security in the cloud.

IBM has patented yet another cloud computing innovation, this latest one for a breakthrough data encryption technique that is expected to further data privacy and strengthen cloud computing security.

The patented breakthrough, called "fully homomorphic encryption," could enable deep and unrestricted analysis of encrypted information—intentionally scrambled data—without surrendering confidentiality. IBM's solution has the potential to advance cloud computing privacy and security by enabling vendors to perform computations on client data, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing or revealing the original data. 

In recent months, IBM patented a new technique for protecting sensitive data prior to transmitting it to the cloud, a cloud-based business process management (BPM) system and a cloud security invention that prevents mobile devices from running compromised code.

Now, with its new homomorphic encryption technique, IBM solves a daunting mathematical puzzle that confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption over 30 years ago. 

Invented by IBM cryptography researcher Craig Gentry, homomorphic encryption uses a mathematical object known as an "ideal lattice" that allows people to interact with encrypted data in ways previously considered impossible. The breakthrough facilitates analysis of confidential encrypted data without allowing the user to see the private data, yet it will reveal the same detailed results as if the original data was completely visible.

IBM received US Patent #8,565,435: Efficient implementation of fully homomorphic encryption for the invention, which is expected to help cloud computing clients make more informed business decisions, without compromising privacy and security. 

"Our patented invention has the potential to pave the way for more secure cloud computing services—without having to decrypt or reveal original data,"  said Gentry in a statement. "Fully homomorphic encryption will enable companies to confidently share data and more easily and quickly overcome challenges or take advantage of emerging opportunities." 

Following initial revelation of the homomorphic encryption breakthrough in 2009, Gentry and co-inventor Shai Halevi began testing, refining and pursuing a working implementation of the invention. In 2011, the scientists reported a number of optimizations that advanced their goal of implementing the scheme. The researchers continue to investigate homomorphic encryption and test its practical applicability. 

IBM invests more than $6 billion annually in R&D and consistently explores new approaches to cloud computing that will deliver a competitive advantage to the company and its clients. For 20 consecutives years, IBM has topped the list of U.S. patent recipients. 

IBM has a tradition of making major cryptography breakthroughs, such as the design of the Data Encryption Standard (DES); Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC); the first lattice-based encryption with a rigorous proof-of-security; and numerous other solutions that have helped advance data security. 

In October IBM patented its technique for protecting sensitive data prior to transmitting it to the cloud. In November, IBM patented its cloud-based BPM system for combining big data from cloud services with data stored on in-house IT systems to gain insights that could enable greater business efficiency and performance. And less than a week ago, IBM patented its solution that improves the security of cloud applications accessed by mobile devices. 

By: Darryl K. Taft

Link: http://www.eweek.com/security/ibm-patents-cryptography-invention-to-advance-security-in-the-cloud.html/