Kategorie: technology

European companies turn to IBM hybrid cloud and AI for growth

Companies are migrating to the cloud at increasing rates across the globe. At the forefront of this move are companies in the US and Western Europe, according to a report from ResearchandMarkets.com. Though many companies have only completed 20 percent of their cloud journey, industries and regions continue to emerge with new solutions to meet industry challenges, differentiate from the competition and delight clients.
“IBM is writing the next chapter of business and social transformation together with our clients,” IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty shared in a company statement. “Companies across Europe and the world are working with IBM to put the hybrid cloud infrastructure in place and to start infusing AI into businesses processes as a means to accelerate future innovation.”
European companies transform with IBM Cloud and AI
IBM this week announced a wide range of European client solutions using IBM Cloud and AI.

The Agricultural Social Insurance Fund (KRUS), a social insurance provider for farmers in Poland, is adopting IBM Cloud to help modernize and expand its e-learning platform.
Confindustria, the chief association representing Italian manufacturing and service companies, is moving its full IT infrastructure to the IBM Cloud. The move will help the association power more personalized, innovative offerings for members.
Endesa, the largest Spanish power company is using IBM Watson and IBM Cloud to transform its call center experience.
Performance for Assets (P4A), a Belgian startup, worked with the IBM Cloud Garage team to enhance wind turbine output. The company created an advanced asset management monitoring system for wind turbines with IBM Watson on IBM Cloud that enables predictive maintenance and boosts asset performance.
ERGO Aktiv, a Czech neurorehabilitation center, developed a Watson-based virtual assistant on the IBM Cloud to help patients return to an active life and resume work after a stroke.

European automotive companies adopt IBM hybrid cloud
The European automotive sector is also looking to IBM Cloud and AI solutions. IBM recently announced client wins with Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH in Germany; Moovster, a Munich-based mobility and AI startup; and Vinturas, a Netherlands-based automotive logistics company.
Read more about these moves in the European market from Gigabit Magazine and Zacks.com.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Why Serima Consulting developed its smart grid solution on IBM Cloud Private

Germany is in the process of completely transforming its energy sector at a pace unmatched by other industrialized nations. Nuclear power is phasing out as renewables are gradually taking over, according to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.
The country’s politically supervised shift in direction from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is expected to reduce security hazards and ensure Germany creates a greater share of its own power in the future.
Serima Consulting GmbH, a leading specialist in network management, monitoring and automation solutions, was selected by a device manufacturer to help in the creation of a smart grid offering for a German power company.
Developing the smart grid solution
As an IBM business partner and an IBM Cloud user itself, Serima chose IBM Cloud Private for its development environment.
Because this would be a first-of-a-kind installation that would open the market for monitoring and predicting energy consumption, Serima wanted to protect its intellectual property and keep its smart grid development efforts in house.
Testing, monitoring and marketing elements, along with Kubernetes capabilities, are included with IBM Cloud Private in a microservices architecture. Those capabilities make developing and maintaining applications easier and faster than traditional software development methods.
The smart grid solution includes IBM Netcool Operations Insight and the Agile Service Manager extension, which enable alarms, event management and a view across the grid infrastructure.
Rolling out the solution
The initial rollout of the smart grid solution was successful. With IBM Cloud Private, Serima can show the solution live to potential customers to demonstrate the solution’s grid monitoring and managing functionalities as well as its scalability to accommodate new customers.
There are already other customers interested in projects that would replicate what Serima is doing. And because IBM Cloud Private is open, it’s possible for customers to easily make adjustments to suit their specifications.
Read the case study for more details.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

How bioscientists tackle data overload to advance medical research

The International Center for Scientific Debate explains that the ability to better collect, store, organize, integrate, analyze and share biomedical data provides opportunities to advance the detection, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.
Yet the greatest challenge bioscientists face is how to handle the flood of information from an array of devices that assess patient health. These devices include genomic sequencing machines, high-resolution medical imagers, electronic health records, smart phone applications and more.
Databiology has created a biomedical information management and orchestration platform for the life sciences and healthcare sectors that helps researchers tap into many different data sources.
Enabling faster, more effective medical research
When a research team creates a workspace on Databiology’s platform on the IBM Cloud, members can load any type of biomedical data and perform intensive processing tasks requiring high-performance compute power.
The platform functions as a central data and analysis management hub for conducting end-to-end biomedical research. By provisioning the required technology to manage large and complex data assets, Databiology enables clients to perform faster and more economically effective research.
Additionally, the platform can take on any third-party application stack and orchestrate it to run in any number of connected compute environments. The platform includes an app store, which has more than 250 different biomedical analytics and visualization applications. If researchers need an application that isn’t in the app store, they can rapidly add their own using Databiology’s CIAO application onboarding framework.
Tailoring research with hybrid cloud capabilities
The Databiology platform can be deployed either on premises or on different clouds and can use IBM Aspera to transport terabyte-sized biomedical data sets from disparate locations to the workspace quickly.
Databiology has two offerings to fit the needs of different biomedical companies.

The Databiology for Enterprise platform is integrated with IBM Power Systems, IBM Spectrum LSF, and IBM Spectrum Scale to enhance workload, resource and data lifecycle management in the cloud, on- and off-premises, and in hybrid models. IBM Power Systems servers are built on a flexible, open platform and the processor is designed for big data workloads. Power Systems servers combine computing power, memory bandwidth and I/O in ways that are easier to consume and manage, and provide high resiliency, availability and security features. IBM Spectrum Scale provides world-class storage management with extreme scalability, flash accelerated performance, and automatic policy-based storage tiering from flash through disk to tape. IBM Spectrum LSF provides highly scalable and reliable resource-aware workload management platform that supports demanding, distributed and mission-critical high-performance computing (HPC) environments offering an enhanced user and administrator experience.
Databiology Lab runs exclusively on IBM Cloud. The secure, high-performance cloud offers dynamic burst capabilities for intense compute requirements. Databiology Lab is designed for smaller teams or academic use, or for larger customers to try out the capability of the platform before they decide to go with the Enterprise platform.

Automatically securing the provenance trail and capturing scientific insights
The Databiology platform is making research more efficient by capturing all the metadata about scientific analysis automatically. The platform maintains a sophisticated knowledge graph, which delivers reliable reproducibility with the same software, with the same data, on the same environments if needed later. Users are now able to understand how different items of data are related to each other.
For pharma company customers, this provenance graph is hugely important. For example, if they’ve developed a product that went through regulatory approval, and, years later, discover issues they’ve got to be able to demonstrate exactly how they derived certain insights.
In academia, and push-button reproducibility of the scientific process is becoming increasingly important because of how much poorly reproducible science is out there and how many papers ultimately cannot be verified independently.
Researchers know exactly how results were derived from the multitude of pieces of data and by which process. This drives data interoperability and reuse, which is something every enterprise is after today.
Learn more about how IBM supports the healthcare and life sciences industry.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

5 keys to overcoming cloud migration challenges

Cloud migration challenges continue to bedevil enterprises, despite the fact that the cloud itself has been around for nearly 20 years.
Many enterprises have yet to realize the full promise of an abstract, distributed, federated data environment because migrations are still often so difficult.
Nobody embarks upon a cloud migration expecting to fail, of course. The basic problem is that few people understand the nuances of such a complex project, particularly as it relates to ongoing processes and operations. Unexpected challenges are the bane of any major undertaking, and cloud migrations are chock full of unexpected challenges.
Cloud migration and performance
Laurence Guihard-Joly, the Global Cloud Migration Factory’s general manager for cloud migration, points out that cloud migrations require careful strategic planning, with a “multipronged approach” that takes time to get right.
Take application performance as a key example. Misplacing applications in the wrong cloud environment or putting them in the cloud when they belong on premises results in over- or under-provisioned resources, which can diminish app performance or drive up costs. In addition, a poor understanding of workload dependencies can introduce performance issues, as well as security risks.
The so-called “lift and shift” approach, in which an application is moved as-is from a traditional environment to the cloud without any redesigning, might work for simple applications, as TechTarget suggests. However, more complex, resource-intensive applications, such as those that use big data or image rendering, might need an overhaul before being migrated.
Failing to align workload requirements with the proper cloud architecture can wreak havoc on the entire cloud strategy. In most cases, it leads to reverting back to traditional infrastructure, which costs time and money and can damage performance, reliability, manageability and overall trust in the cloud by the knowledge workforce.
5 keys to success
Before you embark on the cloud migration process, it helps to have a clear understanding of what’s involved. Here are five key elements identified by IBM for a successful cloud migration:

Develop a strategy. This should be done early and in a way that prioritizes business objectives over technology. This should also include an analytics regime that gathers information in a consistent format.
Identify the right applications. Not all apps are cloud friendly. Some do better on private or hybrid clouds rather than on public. Some may need only minor tweaking, while others might need in-depth code changes. A full analysis of architecture, complexity and implementation is easier to do before the migration rather than after.
Develop the right skills and resources. Choosing a service provider that does not have the proper expertise and technology is a recipe for disaster. A provider must be able to open established systems to new channels using microservices and new APIs that foster platform-based development.
Maintain data integrity and operational continuity. Managing risk is critical, and sensitive data can be exposed during a migration. Post-migration validation of business processes is crucial to ensure that automated controls are producing the same outcomes without disrupting normal operations.
Adopt an end-to-end approach. Service providers should have a robust and proven methodology to address every aspect of the migration process. This should include the framework to manage complex transactions on a consistent basis and on a global scale. Make sure to spell all of this out in the service-level agreement with agreed-upon milestones for progress and results.

No matter how prepared you are, there will inevitably be surprises during a migration. This is why two of your most important assets will be innovation and creative problem solving. At the same time, it helps to have a technology partner with vast experience regarding today’s cloud migration challenges. Chances are the unforeseen problem you face has already been successfully managed by someone else.
Even the best-prepared enterprises occasionally come up against their own unique cloud migration challenges. Check out our recent white paper to learn how to find a path to the cloud that minimizes disruption.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Vodafone Idea signs 5-year cloud and AI agreement with IBM

Vodafone Idea Limited, the largest telecom operator in India, recently signed a five-year, multi-million-dollar agreement with IBM to modernize and consolidate its IT infrastructure.
Through the multi-year agreement with IBM, the Indian telecom company plans to use IBM hybrid cloud and multicloud services, plus analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) security capabilities, to better engage with customers.
The collaboration will also provide Vodafone Idea with a hybrid cloud-based digital platform to enable enhanced business efficiency, agility and scale, plus simplified business processes.
ZDNet explains: “In addition to better serving its 387 million customers, Vodafone is updating its infrastructure to realize the efficiencies of Vodafone India’s 2018 merger with Idea Cellular. Specifically, IBM will help it consolidate applications and infrastructure, including data centers, and disaster recovery centers. Solutions deployed by Vodafone India Limited and Idea Cellular Limited earlier will be merged and their big data capabilities will be enhanced.”
Read more in the full story from ZDNet.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud