IBM has made Watson portable across any cloud and empowered businesses to prevent vendor lock-in and start deploying AI wherever their data resides.
“Businesses have largely been limited to experimenting with AI in siloes due to the limitations caused by cloud provider lock-in of their data,” said Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Data and AI. “With most large organisations storing data across hybrid cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored. By breaking open that siloed infrastructure we can help businesses accelerate their transformation through AI.”
Watson, IBM’s AI, is designed to help organisations put AI to work to improve the performance of business. With a clear set of applications, development tools, machine learning models, and management services, Watson is helping organisations around the world mine their data, predict outcomes, and automate time- and resource-sensitive processes, claims IBM.
IBM says organisations can now run IBM Watson services, including Watson Assistant and Watson OpenScale, on any cloud. Through their integration with IBM Cloud Private for Data (ICP for Data), Watson and Watson OpenScale can now be run any environment – on premises, or on any private, public or hybrid-multicloud – enabling businesses to apply AI to data wherever it is hosted. Businesses will be able to infuse AI into their apps, regardless of where they reside. The flexibility this affords can remove one of the major obstacles to scaling AI, since businesses can now leave data in secure or preferred environments and take Watson to that data.
Though the use of AI continues to gain attention in business, many organizations are still challenged to move projects forward. According to an MIT Sloan report, 81 percent of enterprises do not understand what data is required for AI, or how to access it. And a recent Gartner study found that, “data and analytics leaders continue to struggle with the complexity, time to integration and cost implications of their data integration projects, thereby inflating their schedules and delivery costs with multiple cycles of revised project scope.”
Still, the vast majority of enterprises, 83 percent, according to the MIT Sloan report, agree that driving AI across the enterprise is a strategic opportunity.
Qatar Development Bank has collaborated with IBM to establish the IBM Innovation Hub Doha. One of the key technologies that the Hub will deploy is IBM Cloud Private for Data. “The exciting thing about IBM Cloud Private for Data is how quickly we will be able to drive new innovations in FinTech and SportsTech using the microservices within the platform,” said Abdulaziz Al Khalifa, CEO, Qatar Development Bank. “What makes it especially attractive is that it enables us to develop and deploy new models quickly that brings the tools to the data, rather than the other way around.”
ICP for Data is IBM’s open, cloud-native information architecture for AI that comes integrated with advanced data science, data engineering, and application-building capabilities, and is designed to help companies uncover previously unobtainable insights from their data.
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