März 2017 - Seite 88 von 221 - Cloud Computing Köln

Understanding information is more important than ever, but many of the tools organizations use aren’t exactly built for this complex and changing digital age.
High-value employees are overloaded with:

Data, scattered across many tools, including enterprise applications (enterprise resource planning [ERP], customer relationship management [CRM], and support systems), spreadsheets, calendars, apps, social media and email
Endless routine tasks, such as sifting through email clutter, adding countless action items to various lists, finding information on demand and keeping up with updates to collaboration channels
Constant interruptions, such as meetings, phone calls, instant messages and other endless requests that ruin to-do lists

Workers aren’t imagining being spread too thin; it’s really happening. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2020, there’s likely to be a shortage of approximately 40 million high- skilled workers and 45 million medium-skill workers.
At the same time, IDC reports that digital data is expected to surge to 160 zettabytes by 2025. With a shortage of workers to manage this mounting data, employees need to work smarter.
To help make that happen, IBM is announcing a solution: IBM Digital Business Assistant. It’s a customizable, intelligent personal assistant that integrates with the existing data sources that matter to users, helping to optimize productivity. Powered by analytics and IBM Watson, the digital assistant can proactively detect complex situations, integrate information from diverse sources, and make smart and actionable recommendations based on context.
While many digital assistants are difficult to use and configure or have trouble handling complex demands, IBM Digital Business Assistant is different.
Ease of use
IBM Digital Business Assistant empowers business users to rapidly create that the personal assistant can understand. It can then automatically detect and respond to complex business situations without the need for IT intervention.
Users can configure the tool to either take immediate action or make recommendations for next steps. This can save workers hours of time sifting through information and numerous tools. Improved efficiency, better decisions and customer experiences are some of the potential benefits.

Customized by users, for users
Many productivity tools focus on improving collaboration and organizing information, but these capabilities alone aren’t customized for a specific user’s key performance indicators and preferred tools and processes for working.
IBM Digital Business Assistant enables employees to integrate information from sources they use and customize actions and notifications. The tool even learns their interactions and makes proactive recommendations based on context.
Connectors that will be available in IBM Digital Business Assistant include:

Pre-built skills to accelerate adoption
IBM Digital Business Assistant helps workers easily build on productivity assets created by others through a catalog of customizable, pre-built skills. This helps users get started quickly, without relying on IT. Because this capability lends itself to easy scalability, it’s particularly useful for departments and business partners.
Here’s an example of how it works:
Scenario: Alice is a relationship manager for dozens of customers. She’s faced with an overwhelming amount of data in disparate locations, including new sales opportunities, trouble tickets, product logs, CRM updates and more. Depending on the relationship between these pieces of information, she could need to take any one of dozens of actions.
The IT department can’t configure and reconfigure a personalized solution to help her recognize important events, automate responses and advise her on best courses of action. But now she can do it herself with IBM Digital Business Assistant.
Alice goes into the IBM Digital Business Assistant catalog, where she sees a pre-built skill for “Spot Opportunities.”

She clicks to personalize this skill for the customers in her territory. Alice wants to be notified when one of her customers has a new cross-sell opportunity but also has existing support tickets that could affect the success of that sale.

IBM Digital Business Assistant will now notify Alice when it detects this situation, saving her from manually synthesizing the information.

Sign up to participate in the free beta version of IBM Digital Business Assistant and send us your feedback.
And be sure to check us out at IBM InterConnect at booth #566, starting 20 March, 2017.
The post Redefine digital productivity: Announcing IBM Digital Business Assistant appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

20. März 201720. März 2017

da Agency

Open Technology Summit focuses on contributors

The Open Technology Summit, now in its fifth year, has become an annual state of the union for the established and budding open source projects that IBM supports.
The conclusion drawn at Sunday’s OTS during IBM InterConnect in Las Vegas is that the state of open tech is strong and getting stronger.
The event brought together leaders from some of today’s top open source #cloud projects: #OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, the Linux Foundation, JS Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation, plus the IBM leaders that support these projects.
“The open source community is only as good as the people who are contributing,” Willie Tejada, IBM Chief Developer Advocate, told the capacity crowd.

“We’ve been systematically building an open innovation platform — cloud, #cognitive, etc.” @angelluisdiaz https://t.co/HHMqWmi3v4 #ibmots pic.twitter.com/945FkRbkZg
— IBM Cloud (@#IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Judging by the success stories shared on stage, contributor quality appears to be quite high. In short, the open source community is thriving.
Finding success in the open
The Linux Foundation has become one of the great success stories in open source, thanks largely to the huge number of contributors it has attracted. In his talk, the organization’s executive director, Jim Zemlin, told the crowd that across its various projects, contributors add a staggering 10,800 lines of code, remove 5,300 lines of code and modify 1,875 lines of code per day.
Zemlin called open source “the new norm” for software and application development.

&8220;Open source is now the new norm for software development.” – @jzemlin IBMOTS #ibminterconnect https://t.co/y3V3IGfcTK pic.twitter.com/83k9yLdJdf
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns stressed her organization’s commitment to bringing forward greater diversity among its community.
“When I think about innovation, I think about diversity,” said Kearns, who took over as executive director four months ago. “We have the potential to change our industry, our countries and the world.”
Like Cloud Foundry, the OpenStack community has seen tremendous growth in its user community thanks to increased integration and cooperation with other open source communities. OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce and Lauren Sell, vice president of marketing and community services, shared their community’s pithy, tongue-in-cheek motto:

&8220;In 2014, there was 323 developers contributing to OpenStack. In 2016, we had 531.&8221; @jbryce IBMOTS ibminterconnect pic.twitter.com/6PxYzrVxsL
— IBM WebSphere (@IBMWebSphere) March 20, 2017

The community, which aims to create a single platform for bare metal servers, virtual machines and containers, has seen 5 million cores deployed on it. Contributors have jumped from 323 in 2014 to 531 in 2016.
Sell echoed several of the other speakers, when she noted that we’re living in a “multi-cloud world,” and that open technologies are enabling it.
IBM: Contributors, collaborators, solution providers
While it’s well known that IBM has helped start and lead many of the open source communities that it supports, the company also offers a robust set of unique capabilities around these technologies. The company is constantly working to expand its offerings around open technologies.
For example, IBM Cloud Platform Vice President and CTO Jason McGee previewed the announcement that Kubernetes is now available on IBM Bluemix Container Service.
“This service lets us bring together the power of that project and all of the amazing technology in the engine with Docker and the orchestration layer with Kubernetes and combine it with the power of cloud-based delivery,” McGee said.
David Kenny, senior vice president, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, also spoke about “the power of the community to move the technology faster and to consume it and learn from it.”
“We’re very much committed as IBM to be participants,” he said. “Certainly IBM Cloud and IBM Watson are two pretty big initiatives at IBM these days, and both of those have come together around the belief that open source is a key part of our platform.”

“IBMCloud and Watson have come together around the belief that #opensource is a key part of our platform.” &8211; @davidwkenny IBMOTS pic.twitter.com/gU9DCzMsoC
— Kevin J. Allen (@KevJosephAllen) March 20, 2017

Moving forward as a community
Looking toward the future of open tech, it was clear that its success will depend on the next generation of contributors.
Tejada went so far as to call the open source movement a religion. “The most important piece is to understand the core premises of the religion.” He identified those as:

Embrace the new face of development
Acknowledge and adapt to the new methodologies of application development
Seize the opportunity to do more with less at an accelerated rate

For more on IBM work in open technology, visit developerWorks Open.
The post Open Technology Summit focuses on contributors appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud