Kategorie: technology

Announcing IBM Voice Gateway to make your call center cognitive

Cognitive solutions are transforming business. Company leaders are watching for new cognitive capabilities to come to market and learning how they can use them to improve business. One of the latest cognitive solutions is IBM Voice Gateway. I’m excited to introduce it to you here.
Before I go into the detail of what Voice Gateway is, I’d like to frame it within the context of other changes going on in the customer support space. Customer support—especially online support—has gone through a lot of change in recent years. Channels such as Twitter and Facebook enable businesses to reach out to unhappy customers who are posting their frustration. Cognitive chatbots are available to support customers 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
What we haven’t yet seen: businesses taking the cognitive bots that they have available online, and making them available over the phone. An omnichannel bot that provides support across multiple channels means that the experience for customers is the same, no matter how they want to contact a business. And it means that your investment into improving that bot benefits across your support workflow, instead of only improving online support.
That’s why we built IBM Voice Gateway – a solution that connects to Watson’s conversation service—the backbone of cognitive bots running on Watson—and brings that conversation service to your telephone network and call centers.
What does IBM Voice Gateway do?
First is the Cognitive Self-service agent. IBM Voice Gateway connects to a telephone network and routes the calls through Watson Speech-to-Text, Conversation, and Text to Speech services. Watson can understand what has been said and how to respond appropriately.
Simply put, Watson acts as a call center agent. This works out-of-the-box with Voice Gateway. IBM Voice Gateway helps you build integrations with databases as well as bring in additional Watson services like sentiment analysis. You can use Watson to access customer records, provide a customized solution to answer queries and provide quotes. With Watson, you can handle and resolve more customer queries on their first call.

If Watson can’t resolve a query a to your call center, IBM Voice Gateway can transfer calls to customer service agents. When a caller is speaking to an agent, IBM Voice Gateway can use Watson to detect what is being discussed, sending helpful information to the agent in real time.
For example, the system might send a link to an internal document showing the agent how to resolve a specific issue or answer a caller’s questions on a given topic. This can make it easier for agents to focus on the customer’s experience, not searching for answers. And this also means agents don’t have to be experts on every topic, reducing training time and helping agents to handle a wider range of queries.
Where does IBM Voice Gateway run?
Watson’s services are only available through IBM Bluemix, so that part of the solution will be running in the cloud. IBM Voice Gateway itself is delivered as a collection of Docker containers, so it can run either on-premises or in any cloud. You can run the whole solution in IBM Bluemix if you want to move to a full cloud deployment.  Or you could run it on-premises if you want to keep applications accessing customer data within your firewall. But know that you can secure your environment wherever you run IBM Voice Gateway. Your choice of where to run the solution can easily align with your overall cloud strategy.
Get started with IBM Voice Gateway
Want to learn more? Watch the quick demo to see IBM Voice Gateway in action. Or test out the caller’s experience with Watson by calling (855) 969-4241. If you’re ready to try Voice Gateway, download the developer and trial use Docker images from DockerHub linked from our documentation here.
The post Announcing IBM Voice Gateway to make your call center cognitive appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

OpenStack Summit Boston Replay

The post OpenStack Summit Boston Replay appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
OpenStack Summit Boston brought its best as it played for an open world. From the latest OpenStack news, to baseballs puns, to the surprise appearance of Edward Snowden, the show was a hub of excitement. More than ever, the expansion of OpenStack was evident, across consumption models as well as use cases.

As OpenStack matures, vendors are making it easier than ever to consume OpenStack, as was evident in the OpenStack Foundation’s newest addition to their Marketplace: Remotely Managed Private Clouds. Working to solve the people and process problem that once surrounded OpenStack, this new category enables vendors to provide the many benefits of OpenStack, but “as-a-service”. Companies large and small will be able to have the benefits and simplicity of a public cloud, but delivered as a private cloud package.
The movement towards private cloud was also echoed in The Foundation’s surprise guest, Edward Snowden. Snowden touched on one of the leading concerns of public cloud – that most large enterprises should approach public clouds cautiously due to issues with compliance and security. While public cloud promotes ease of use, it does not necessarily provide the privacy and security that enterprises seek from private cloud; data that sits in the cloud doesn’t have the same requirements for, say, search warrants before it gets turned over to law enforcement or other government agencies.
Within OpenStack, there was an emphasis on interoperability, for OpenStack as a whole, as well as the individual OpenStack projects. Keynotes showcased a range of live demos, each demonstrating how OpenStack is able to quickly and easily work with different technologies across the stack. Demos showcased how OpenStack can be used with more mainstream technologies such as Docker, down to niche technologies such as an open source multi-cloud continuous deployment platform called Spinnaker. OpenStack projects themselves were also showcased, and were emphasized as standalone technologies, with their own capabilities.
Get a glimpse of OpenStack Summit Boston with our highlights, and stay tuned for more in-depth coverage of what you missed.
The post OpenStack Summit Boston Replay appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
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Answering 7 common cloud architecture questions

This excerpt from Get started with architectures by Kim Gajda was originally published on the IBM Bluemix blog.

Once upon a time, a developer’s job was simple: Write code to connect to your company database, and voilà, you have a new app and happy users.
That might have been your manager’s view of your job. In any case, today’s users are more sophisticated and expect more than access to data. They want insights. Enter App Delivery Act II, brought to you by the cloud, where your app can access cognitive services from Watson, scale workload on demand, and handle resiliency.
The good news is that you don’t need to start with a blank sheet of paper.
Based on years of consulting engagements between the IBM team of cloud experts and client IT shops, the IBM Cloud Garage Method distills a portfolio of practices and provides blueprints that address business challenges. The blueprints, or reference architectures, are based on proven solutions that combine compute infrastructure and cloud-based services. Each reference architecture documents the business scenario, functional requirements, and resources that deliver the solution.
Common architecture questions answered
Architectures and their implementations are meant to answer common questions:

Where do I start?
I have all of these services, but how do they fit together?
Do I want to use infrastructure, such as virtual machines (VMs), or services, such as a data store?
Now that I’ve proven an approach, how do I scale up and move into production?
How does my service talk to that other service?
How is security handled?
How can I build, deploy, and manage an application?

Each architecture provides a business challenge, a reference architecture description and diagram, implementations, links to related practices and learning, and more resources to answer your questions.

Reference architectures fall into two categories: application architectures and cross-cutting architectures.

Application architectures focus on building function into an application. Application architectures include web, mobile, data and analytics, cognitive, and Internet of Things (IoT).
Cross-cutting architectures emphasize how to address non-functional capabilities to scale applications into enterprise-grade production systems. The cross-cutting aspects often relate to the “-ilities” in a system, such as availability, resiliency, security, and scalability. All applications require one or more of the cross-cutting architectures, no matter what function the application provides.

The IBM Cloud Garage Method features over a dozen architectures in its Architecture Center.
The post Answering 7 common cloud architecture questions appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Fire and rescue service improves discovery and efficiency with BPM on Cloud

When one thinks of a fire and rescue service, the image of a firefighter courageously rushing into a burning building is likely the first to come to mind. While saving lives and property are inarguably the most important elements of the Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) mission, it encompasses more, including educational instruction and promoting fire prevention throughout the community.
CFRS is the fire and rescue service for the non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire and the unitary authority of Peterborough in the UK. The service operates 28 fire stations.
Several years ago, CFRS —like many other public sector organizations worldwide — found itself in the crosshairs of government austerity, mandated cuts to operational budgets that, if not surmounted, could come at a cost to public safety.

Absorbing mandated budget cuts
To avoid any impact on the integrity of its front-line operations, CFRS started an initiative called the Service Transformation and Efficiency Programme (STEP). Essential to the program’s success was automating inefficient, manual back-office administrative business processes, improving visibility into performance and data, and facilitating collaboration both internally and with other fire services.
CFRS leaders knew that one of the ways the service could become more efficient was by improving its local processes. Likewise, a way that we could be more efficient as a nation was by finding common ways of working.
Every fire service, although governed centrally, invariably does slightly different things or the same things in different ways. If you’re recreating a process, you don’t always want to start from scratch. So the goal is to find common ground, work together to identify best practices and adopt these processes across the nation.
Optimizing efficiency
IBM Blueworks Live with IBM Business Process Manager on Cloud (IBM BPM on Cloud), based on the IBM Bluemix cloud platform, delivers a smarter process: an open-standard, collaborative model for business process discovery and development. To-date, STEP has transformed 16 business processes within CFRS, engaging more than 600 staff members across 29 fire stations and other facilities in Cambridgeshire.
Business analysts, process owners and stakeholders within the organization map and model processes with Blueworks Live, while BPM on Cloud subsequently provides CFRS development teams with a platform for building new automated and optimized processes.
Collaborating with other emergency services
CFRS has realized a time savings of 60 to 90 percent in process development and deployment, requiring only hours for work that used to take a week. BPM on Cloud provides developers with a highly flexible platform for developing smarter processes and allowing them to focus on that value-add activity rather than on infrastructure.
CFRS has also expanded collaboration with other emergency services. It reached out to other fire and rescue services to show them what it had done and the efficiencies it had achieved. There’s almost zero startup cost for executing smarter process on cloud, so it’s cost effective for other services to join CFRS.
IBM BPM on Cloud and Blueworks Live offer a promising framework for coming together as fire services, finding common ways of working and developing common technical paradigms for systems integration and data sharing.
Learn more about IBM BPM on Cloud.
The post Fire and rescue service improves discovery and efficiency with BPM on Cloud appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Intelligence in the cloud: Beyond the hype

If you follow developments in cloud architecture, you may have been hearing a lot recently on the importance of an “intelligent cloud” and an “intelligent edge.” Cloud providers who have traditionally focused on providing infrastructure and software have begun to realize that there is only so much value they can drive through these as-a-service offerings, and it is no surprise that the word “cognitive” has begun to creep into more marketing and speechifying on cloud.
But it’s important for developers and data scientists to be able to distinguish between the marketing and the reality of a truly cognitive cloud.
IBM is leading in artificial intelligence, with Watson’s deep domain expertise helping clients of every size, across all industries, every day.  Watson — which is available only on the IBM Cloud —has the full range of cognitive technology – ML, AI, cognitive — because that’s what is needed for decision making and transformative business outcomes.
Watson and the IBM Cloud represent the right, data-first combination for addressing these needs across industries and audiences. The value in clients’ data is not just in collecting and securing it, but also in extracting insights and knowledge from it for better decision-making. This is what IBM does. We want our clients to gain a competitive advantage through both data diversity and control. Just yesterday, for example, we announced the availability of Data Science Experience Local, a workplace designed to help data scientists more easily and quickly collaborate on analytic models that developers can use to build intelligent applications.
Our focus is on creating development environments in which it is easy for developers to navigate, create their apps and launch them – whether they are data scientists in a big bank, an analyst for a retailer, or a coder in a hospital system.
That’s also why we have the faster cloud for AI. Why is that important?
One of the key challenges in AI today is the time and cost of training a deep learning system. That’s where GPU technology on the cloud comes in. Just this week we announced that data scientists from IBM and Rescale conducted tests training deep learning models using the NVIDIA P100 GPU on the IBM Cloud and found a 2.8X performance gain — that could reduce deep learning training time by up to 65 percent. This is a major breakthrough in speed for the industry — showing IBM has the fastest cloud to run deep learning and is a major step toward reducing the cost and time required to train an AI system.
Edge analytics and the importance of Internet of Things (IoT) for a variety of industries is another topic du jour. We have been working closely with Cisco for more than a year to offer both Watson IoT analytics and Cisco edge analytics, bringing Watson capabilities to remote and autonomous operations on the edge of the computer network.
The reality is that no one has more experience and knowledge across industries than IBM. We offer a balanced platform, anchored by public, private and hybrid offerings, combined with the ability to deliver higher value cognitive services. AI, IoT, data analytics and blockchain, for us, are not added features, but are core to our cloud platform.
The IBM Cloud is also uniquely tuned to enterprises in highly regulated industries that face compliance or security challenges when adopting cloud infrastructure. That’s why we just launched Dedicated Hosts, a new offering that will provide enterprises with precise placement control of their cloud workloads. Unlike comparable offerings on the market, Dedicated Hosts on the IBM Cloud offer clients two distinct features including post-deployment control so they can move workloads at any time and the flexibility to deploy any size or combination of instances on the host.
As you listen to other cloud providers talk about intelligence in the cloud, remember to look beyond the hype and find the solution that is right for you.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

New PureApplication updates unleash virtual machines

Today, IBM is introducing IBM PureApplication 2.2.3. Customers can now deploy and manage VMware virtual machines (VMs) on Bluemix Local System. Updates also bring new disaster recovery capabilities and adds support for private VLANs.
PureApplication Software with Bluemix Local System minimizes time-to-value for deploying and managing enterprise applications. You get enterprise-grade capabilities, like auto-scaling, license management and workload portability.
Check out the new VM capabilities of IBM PureApplication v2.2.3 in this Q&A video:

Want a breakdown of what’s new? PureApplication 2.2.3 upgrades introduces the following new capabilities.
Create and deploy VMs directly with vCenter to Bluemix Local System

VMs are deployed to virtual manager cloud group, a new type of cloud group with dedicated nodes, network definitions and user credential definitions dedicated for running VMware VMs on Bluemix Local System
vCenter monitoring
DR scenarios to maximize application uptime with replication of virtual machine file storage (VMFS) storage between racks

Manage disaster recovery with PureApplication Software workload environments in Bluemix Local System

Create one or more isolated workload environments inside of PureApplication System
Each workload environment includes

Pattern engine
Catalog
Deployments
Virtualization constructs, including IP groups and environment profiles
User space and permissions

Perform recovery by replicating one or more workload environments across primary and backup PureApplication Systems

Use private VLANs in Bluemix Local System

Divide a primary VLAN into secondary sub-VLANs while keeping existing IP subnet and layer-3 configuration
Leverage enhanced client-server security, more advanced network isolation and multiple levels of communication between VMs. Use them to:

Allow all VMs to access the same backup server on a single VLAN without the VMs to be able to access each other
Securely separate VMs running within the same cloud group but supporting different applications
Secure virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that prevents workstations from seeing each other on the network

Interested in more information on PureApplication and how you can accelerate your application environment deployment? Remember to check out the video and discover more details here.
The post New PureApplication updates unleash virtual machines appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Benchmark tests show IBM Cloud is the fastest for AI

A set of benchmark tests published this week found that NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators on IBM Cloud provided up to 2.8 times better performance than the previous generation.
That means organizations looking to create artificial and augmented intelligence applications on the cloud can do so quickly, which is great for deep learning techniques.
IBM engineers and cloud simulation platform Rescale both conducted tests. The IBM tests were on a deep learning model for image classification, while the Rescale tests were on its own ScaleX platform, which has deep learning software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities.
“Innovation in AI is happening at a breakneck speed thanks to advances in cloud computing,” John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services, said.
For more, check out CloudTech‘s full article.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud