IBM Watson Establishes Hybrid Cloud Capabilities to Accelerate New Insights for the Enterprise

ARMONK, N.Y. - 05 May 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) is rolling out new hybrid cloud capabilities for IBM Watson that will help clients bridge enterprise data with web-based cloud applications for faster and more insightful data intelligence.

This will bring together the powerful cognitive computing and content analytics capabilities from Watson with a growing list of Watson services found in the Watson Zone on Bluemix, IBM's cloud innovation platform that is based on open standards.

A common challenge that arises with cognitive computing application development is where data resides. Enterprise developers often can't move all of their data into a public cloud for various reasons; not the least of which being that some of the data sets will be too big to move in bulk as well as regulatory, privacy and security requirements.

By integrating IBM Cloud capabilities for hybrid cloud, users now will be able to gain faster intelligence from data across multiple secure traditional and cloud environments, allowing clients to deploy applications in seconds and with minimal configuration. Watson Hybrid Cloud will use Watson Explorer a cognitive computing exploration capability for the enterprise as the on-premises platform for the application development, combining enterprise data sources into the application through a scalable environment that keeps utilized data local, private and a secure.

According to IDC, 80 percent of new cloud applications are predicted to be big-data intensive, and much of it born on the cloud [1]. Hybrid cloud capabilities have become key for enterprises that want to have the ability to link data and workloads across multiple cloud environments or combining external data with on-premises, traditional IT infrastructure. IBM has long been a leader in the hybrid cloud space, most recently being named by Synergy Research Group as the #1 hybrid and private cloud provider for the enterprise.

Enterprise developers are building applications that are more than just using infrastructure, they're creating capability to process business transactions that fuse insights spanning various data sets, said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson. What we see today is that the cloud is transforming into a hybrid data delivery model, so naturally developers seek flexibility to run apps and services across on-premises systems and the cloud; thereby making it much easier to deliver Watson to the enterprise.

Watson Explorer provides users with a complete view of contextually-relevant information to help them find and understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain more insights from their unstructured content and improve business outcomes. Users will now be able to use the combined strength of analytics and cognitive capabilities in on-premises and public cloud capacity by tapping developer tools and services available on IBM Cloud, enabling them to start building their own hybrid Watson applications.

IBM s recently announced Watson Health Cloud platform is a prime example where a hybrid cloud environment is crucial for innovation. The Watson Health Cloud will help advance the quality and effectiveness of personal health care by allowing heath data to be anonymized, shared and combined with a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical, research and social heath data. The approach addresses patient privacy and data confidentiality, while providing a flexible platform for mining data for insights and innovation.

The introduction of new connectors to the family of Watson services including the recent addition of the Alchemy API suite of services now part of the Watson ecosystem will give developers the ability to easily leverage services, applications and any of the 25 APIs already on the Watson Zone, built on public data into their development plans.

This integrated development environment will facilitate access to advanced entity extraction, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, tagging, and other capabilities to enrich the data in Watson Explorer. Using Alchemy API s concept tagging for instance, Watson Explorer can now employ sophisticated text analysis to tag documents in a manner similar to how people identify concepts in minutes versus days.

IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing

Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability representing a new era in computing. The system, delivered through the cloud, analyzes high volumes of data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and proposes evidence-based answers. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. With the help of Watson, developers and partners are building apps and services that harness the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

IBM continues to build on its strengths in cognitive computing, analytics, security and cloud with IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud platform. This unit is helping improve the ability of doctors, researchers, health plans and individuals to innovate by surfacing new insights from the massive amounts of personal health data being created daily.

About IBM

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/watsonecosystem.

Check out the IBM Watson press kit at: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

Join the conversation at #ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTubeand Flickr.

[1] Source: IDC, Key Battles and Strategies for Dominance on the 3rd Platform Mar 2014 Doc # DR2014_GS2_FG

LINK:	http://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/46782.wss...
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