Kategorie: technology

Bluemix, Watson and bot mania: The cognitive era plays hard at SXSW 

The IBM activation this past week in downtown Austin earned it the number three slot in AdWeek’s compilation of the top eight topics that had attendees buzzing at South by Southwest.
No wonder. IBM at SXSW 2017 enticed developers to the golden age of cognitive by amping up its Bluemix services offerings, specifically around the APIs used to help Watson engage more sentiently with humans. IBM gave SXSW attendees access to Watson to create a bot, remix a song, design a t-shirt, or get a beer recommendation.
With no required badge, a full open bar and DJs on its mega roof deck, the IBM activation was fueled by a regular flow of deep dives at the Maker’s Garage and live talks with IBM heavyweights including CEO Ginni Rometty and Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of cognitive, blockchain and quantum solutions.
Conversation elevated from the cloud infrastructure layer to services throughout the entire activation. With Bluemix getting more recognition thanks to the Watson platform, the event spoke heavily to developers looking for a platform to build on and ways to pull together advanced applications.
Demo areas struck the right tone with non-developers, showing not only how Watson is making the world healthier, more secure, personal, creative and engaged, but also how Watson can now respond to human emotions, preferences and taste palates.
With SXSW interactive dovetailing into the mainstay SXSW music event, the creative aspects of Watson got lots of attention, giving musicians and enthusiasts an opportunity to collaborate and, even better, play with one of the world’s most advanced APIs.
Watson Beat, a research project born out of Austin’s Research Lab uses cognitive technology to compose and transform music by remixing any piece of music using a mood-driven palette to create a personal piece that suits the user’s emotional space.
Meanwhile, TJBot, an open source project, is designed to enable users to play with Watson Services such as Speech to Text, which teaches it to understand human speech. TJBot also demonstrates how Watson can hold a conversation and even respond to different moods using Personality Insights, which can analyze the emotive content of speech in real time.

Capitalizing on the year of the bot
IBM may indeed have had the edge on SXSW’s fever pitch around bots, thanks to Watson and Bluemix.
In one SXSW featured session, the IBM events team got together with Vancouver’s Eventbase, creators of SXSW’s Go Mobile App, to share perspectives on how mobile apps and, more broadly, human experience can be enhanced with augmented intelligence.
This year, both SXSW and IBM’s Events mobile app (debuting the week of 19 March) feature intelligent, conversational user interfaces that act as personal concierge services.
“IBM sits in a unique position to provide a platform for bots and other customer experiences,” said Ted Conroy, IBM Events lead. “The appetite for bespoke, personalized experiences is voracious, and IBM’s cognitive services definitely can feed it.”
As Conroy pointed out, bots today use a simple, cognitive service to respond to sets of questions. When a service can’t answer, it defaults to scripted answers. Soon, bots will be proactive and able to choose the optimal cognitive service to best answer a broad set of questions without the current context limitations.
Check out how to build a bot in 15 minutes with Watson conversation in this demo.
Learn how to build a TJ bot of your own here.
The post Bluemix, Watson and bot mania: The cognitive era plays hard at SXSW  appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

A new tool to manage multicloud with speed and control

In this post, we’ll cover the most critical steps to adopting a multicloud strategy. But first, some exciting news:  We will be announcing the IBM Cloud Automation Manager at InterConnect 2017.
IBM Cloud Automation Manager will be released in March 17, 2017. Companies can use CAM to manage their multicloud environment through a single dashboard. It will provide cognitive operations to facilitate deployment of workloads to cloud based on application requirements. IT operations won’t have to guess ever again.
Why does multicloud management matter?
Three out of four companies today have deployed more than one cloud. Is your organization leveraging multiple clouds to run business applications? Is your IT operations team able to build, maintain and operate these multicloud environments with speed, security, compliance and enterprise-grade quality?
The rapid expansion of business cloud portfolios requires a uniform cloud management platform. They need to manage multicloud environments without losing the visibility, governance or operational control that IT teams require to address business needs. Companies need a solution that provides:

Speed and agility
Control and compliance
A single “pane of glass” to manage multicloud environments
Support for traditional and emerging technologies such as containers, cognitive and analytics

What is a multicloud management solution?
A multicloud management solution will enable you to automatically deploy and manage multicloud environments. At the same time, it will provide easy access for developers to rapidly and securely create applications within company policy.
Multicloud management solutions typically provide an automatic provisioning capability, workflow management. They also accelerate application deployment and automate manual or scripted tasks to request, change or deploy standardized cloud services. You can execute these tasks across a range of cloud platforms, often leveraging other automation tools like configuration management.
What’s stopping enterprises from adopting multicloud management solutions? Many companies manage cloud services as silos of workloads and platforms. They may already have multiple tools to manage their on-premises and off-premises cloud services. Adopting new technology may happen piecemeal, and some IT staff may resist change.
Explore multicloud at InterConnect 2017
As you finalize your InterConnect schedule, check out the following multicloud sessions.

Session #4112: Transform your IT operations with IBM Cloud Automation Manager
Automation is at the heart of cloud management in hybrid cloud environments. Hear about the new offering IBM Cloud Automation Manager from our esteemed panel: Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz & Associates; Justin Youngblood, IBM; Vishal Rajpal, Perficient and Markus Echser, SwissRe.
Session: #7187: Hybrid cloud management: Trends, opportunities and IBM’s strategy
As businesses procure cloud resources from multiple IT vendors, they are looking for a single tool that can agnostically manage these complex environments with ease. Hear from IBM experts and clients about the IBM role in shaping the future of hybrid cloud management.
Session #2443: Introduction to IBM Cloud Automation Manager
This session will deliver a technical introduction to IBM’s new Cloud Automation Manager offering. The new tool supports the orchestration, automated provisioning and configuration, as well as lifecycle management of resources across a variety of target clouds. Watch the demo of the new solution and get a look into the future.
Session #3718: Hey IT operators: Automation content makes your job easier
In this session, learn from a survey of real-world accomplishments and quantitative results achieved by using automation content. Use cases from different industries will be shared to illustrate how clients could use blueprints and templates to get their jobs done while deploying applications in the cloud.
Session  #7254: Integrating hybrid cloud management with other services
IBM Cloud Automation Manager allows you to integrate multicloud services with additional DevOps, configuration, monitoring, logs, events, security, costs and identity management available in your business. Learn how this new capability applies to both on premises and off-premises cloud infrastructure and applications.
InterConnect 2017 is just around the corner, brace yourself for an awesome cloud conference. See you there.
The post A new tool to manage multicloud with speed and control appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Intelligent services for elevators and escalators built with IBM Watson

If elevators and escalators do not work properly, it has a significant impact on the way cities function. People may not get to work in their office buildings. They may even end up with having difficulty getting home.
At KONE, we help people move in and between buildings as smoothly and safely as possible. Globally, we service more than 1.1 million elevators and escalators and move more than 1 billion people every day.
Intelligent services
That’s why KONE launched “24/7 Connected Services,” which uses the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) platform to bring intelligent services to elevators and escalators.
KONE wants to create a completely new experience for customers, with less equipment downtime, fewer faults and detailed information on the performance and usage of their equipment.
For people who use elevators and escalators, it means less waiting time, fewer delays, and the potential for new, personalized experiences.
The company uses the IBM Watson IoT platform and its cognitive capabilities in many different ways. For example, it helps predict the condition of the elevator or escalator, thereby helping customers manage their equipment over its life cycle.

Improving predictability and people flow
By bringing artificial intelligence into services, KONE can help predict and suggest resolutions to potential problems.
KONE can provide individualized services that specifically meet the needs of customers. Customers will get services and outcomes that fit their exact needs. This is significant, as outcomes and results are more important to customers than technological features.
Making machine-to-machine more human
This is is just the beginning for KONE. With this platform, KONE can bring new services and new innovations for customers and consumers to the market faster.
In a first for the industry, KONE is revealing real-time machine conversations between elevators and the IoT cloud. Teams at IBM and KONE worked together to introduce a popular marketing campaign that brings a human touch to intelligent services and demystify a complex topic.
It’s a fun way to demonstrate what 24/7 Connected Services would be like if elevators could talk.
Learn about other IBM clients who built their success on IBM Cloud.
The post Intelligent services for elevators and escalators built with IBM Watson appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Detours on the way to microservices

In 2008, I first heard Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix describe microservices as “fine-grained service oriented architecture.” I’d spent the previous six years wrestling with the more brutish, coarse-grained service-oriented architecture, its standards and so-called “best practices.” I knew then that unlike web-scale offerings such as Netflix, the road to microservices adoption by companies would have its roadblocks and detours.
It’s not quite ten years later, and I am about to attend IBM InterConnect, where microservice adoption by business seems inescapable. What better time to consider these detours and how to avoid them?
Conway&8217;s law may be bi-directional
Melvin Conway introduced the idea that&8217;s become known as Conway&8217;s Law: “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
But I saw it occur in reverse: When enterprise software organizations first decide to adopt microservices and its disciplines, I observed development teams organize themselves around the (micro-) services being built. When constructing enterprise applications by coding and “wiring up” small, independently-operating services, the development organization seemed to adjust itself to fit the software architecture, thereby creating silos and organizational friction.
More than the sum of its parts
When an organization first adopts microservices in its architecture, there are resource shortages. People who are skilled in the ways of microservices find themselves stretched far too thin. And specific implementation languages, frameworks or platforms can be in short supply. There&8217;s loss of momentum, attention and effective use of time because the “experts” must continually switch context and change the focus of their attention.
As is usually the case with resource shortage, the issue is one of prioritization: When there are hundreds or even thousands of microservices to build and maintain, how are allocations of scarce resources going to be made? Who makes them and on what basis?
The cloud-native management tax
The adoption of microservices requires a variety of specialized, independent platforms to which developer, test and operations teams must attend. Many of these come with their own forms of management and management tooling. In one case, I looked through the list of management interfaces and tools for a newly-minted, cloud-native application to discover more than forty separate management tools being used. These tools were covering: the different programming languages; authentication; authorization; reporting; databases; caches; platform libraries; service dependencies; pipeline dependencies; security threat model; audits; workflow; log aggregation and much more. The full list was astonishing.
The benefits of cloud-native architecture do not come without a price: organizations will need additional management tooling and the costs of becoming skilled in those management tools.
Carrying forward the technical debt
When a company embraces cloud migration or digital transformation, a team may be chartered to re-architect and re-implement an existing, monolithic application, its associated data, external dependencies and technical interconnections. Too often, I discovered that the shortcuts and hard-coded aspects of the existing application were being re-implemented as well. There seemed to be a part of the process that was missing when the objective was to migrate an application.
In an upcoming blog post, I&8217;ll consider some of the common detours and look to what practices and technologies are being used to avoid them.
Join me and other industry experts as we explore the world of microserivces at IBM InterConnect on March 19 – 23, 2017.
 
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud