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/