IBM Launches Real-Time Insights and Spark Services on the Cloud for All Types of Data

IBM-apache-spark2Today, about 80 percent of all the available data — images, voice, literature, chemical formulas, social expressions, external – is not being utilized and companies are struggling to effectively analyze and capitalize on its value. To address this challenge, IBM is unveiling the industry’s first real-time Insights Services on the cloud, a dramatic shift in its analytics strategy through the re-design of its portfolio based on Spark and new cognitive capabilities to advance capture and extract more information and insight from enterprise documents.

Some analytics vendors respond to the big data challenge by focusing on one product to handle traditional types of data, offering grab-bags of hard-to-use analytics tools and selling proprietary products that are out of step with today’s open-standards ethos and rapidly changing technology environment. IBM is leading the technology industry to make data analytics easier for business leaders and developers alike, to embrace openness, and to accelerate innovation–by spreading cognitive technologies to every corner of business and society.

IBM is unveiling the following:

  • The industry’s first Insight Cloud Services that deliver data and data-science based insights using external data about people, events, geospatial and businesses from sources such as Twitter and The Weather Company. In the Cognitive Era, organizations can use Insight Cloud Services to gain clarity about their business, find new demand signals and act more confidently. These services doesn’t require deep domain knowledge to deploy, can be used in action-oriented decision-making or embedded in mobile apps, enterprise applications and business processes.

  • The availability of IBM’s Spark-as-a-Service offering – IBM Analytics on Apache Spark – on IBM Bluemix which followsa successful 13-week Beta program with more than 3,000 developers using it to build intelligent business and consumer apps fueled by data. The company also redesigned more than 15 core analytics and commerce solutions with Apache®Spark™ – helping to dramatically accelerate their real-time processing capabilities.

  • By applying a combination of advanced imaging, natural language processing, and machine learning technologies, a new cognitive offering, IBM Datacap Insight Services, that can automatically classify and understand the document – including format and structure, as well words and numeric information – from any document type to quickly and accurately determine the appropriate action to take.

By embracing the insights-as-a-service model, you’re not buying raw data or analytics tools. You’re purchasing solutions to the problems and challenges you face every day,” said Rob Thomas, vice president, IBM Analytics. “There is no need for you to make and manage separate arrangements with numerous data providers, to stay on top of the latest analytics technologies, or to recruit and retain the most expensive professionals in the insights economy–data scientists. IBM handles all of that for you.”

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