Kategorie: technology

3 types of companies harnessing the power of cloud

What if you could redefine your competitive position by enhancing your products or services?  What if you had access to unlimited computing resources to scale your business? What if you could invent a new customer need and own a new market?
Cloud is the enabler that makes these scenarios possible.
Five years ago, only a third of senior business leaders in our study “The Power of Cloud” said they had a solid plan for adopting #cloud computing.  In 2016, more than three-fourths of the executives we spoke with for our ”Tailoring Hybrid Cloud” study describe their cloud initiatives as part of a coordinated program or fully integrated as part of an overall strategic transformation.

Cloud-driven revolution
In “The Power of Cloud,” we developed a “cloud enablement framework” which characterizes the impact of an organization’s cloud-enabled business strategy. This framework revealed three archetypes that represent how organizations can use cloud to improve their customer value proposition while adapting their company and industry value chains:

Optimizers
Optimizers use cloud to incrementally enhance customer experiences and improve organizational efficiency. They tend to deepen customer relationships without risking the potential failure that comes with radical new business models. While optimizers can expand the value they offer through improved products and services, enhanced customer experiences, and augmented channel delivery options, they tend to bring about lower revenue and market share gains than innovators or disruptors.
Innovators
Innovators significantly improve customer experiences through cloud adoption, resulting in new revenue streams. This alters their role within an existing industry ecosystem. In doing so, they transform the organization’s role within an industry or enter an adjacent market or industry space. By extending and transforming, innovators can reconfigure elements of their value chains and value propositions to gain competitive advantage.
Disruptors
Disruptors wield cloud to invent radically new customer experiences, generating new customer needs and segments while creating new industry value chains. They provide customers with products or services they didn’t even know they wanted. They capture a unique competitive advantage by creating a new market or disrupting an existing industry. By taking risks, disruptors can gain a “first-mover” advantage that confers higher rewards.
Whether companies choose to become cloud-enabled optimizers, innovators or disruptors depends on a variety of factors, including how much risk they are willing to take and their current competitive context. Business leaders should carefully assess their organizations to determine which archetype they most closely match today, as well as which one they aspire to be. Only then can they determine how cloud can help them create new business models that promote long-term growth and profit.

Getting started
You can start these three initiatives today to begin capturing value from cloud-enabled business models:

Establish shared responsibility for cloud adoption across line-of-business executives and IT management to help ensure cloud strategy and governance permeates business objectives.
Look within and beyond the organization’s borders and ecosystem boundaries to envision the optimal value that can come from cloud adoption.
Determine whether the organization seeks to be an optimizer, innovator or disruptor, and use cloud to reconstruct the business model to realize that potential.

Will your organization become a cloud optimizer, innovator or disruptor?
For more on what it takes to become a cloud optimizer, innovator or disruptor, including more steps to get started, please read “The Power of Cloud: Driving Business Model Innovation.”
For more on how hybrid cloud can answer an enterprise’s unique needs, please read “Tailoring Hybrid Cloud:  Designing the Right Mix for Innovation, Efficiency and Growth.”
The post 3 types of companies harnessing the power of cloud appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Cloud-based video analytics drive actionable insights

Keeping up with hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of hours of video can be a difficult task for any enterprise, institution or service provider. Beyond just storage, extracting valuable insights from this seemingly unending and rapidly expanding pool of data might seem beyond impossible.
Whether videos are generated in marketing campaigns, training videos, lectures, interviews, video surveillance, B-roll, video production or even from Internet of Things (IoT) devices or cameras using computer vision, it’s safe to say that the amount of video will continue to skyrocket as digital initiatives continue to expand.
One of the powerful advantages of video is that it can be used as an incredibly effective and versatile engagement and monitoring tool across many use cases in all industries. The downside is that most enterprises and institutions must devote a huge amount of manpower to monitor and tag those videos with descriptive metadata if they are to extract any actionable insights or information. In addition, turnaround times for traditional manpower watching these videos can be days, weeks or even months, which can limit the effectiveness of actionable insights, since they might be needed on a short timeline.
As a result, most video is left completely untapped and business-impacting insights that could be generated from these videos are left on the enterprise’s “cutting room floor.”
Imagine if you could teach a cognitive service to watch and listen to a video, recognize what was in it and do so in a fraction of the time?
How VideoRecon analyzes content
That’s exactly what our cloud-based video analytics platform, VideoRecon, enables for our users. Using cognitive computing technology in the IBM Cloud, it automatically sees, listens and understands video content in a fraction of the actual viewing time needed by a human.

VideoRecon was built by our digital development company, BlueChasm, which specializes in building open digital and cognitive platforms on IBM Bluemix. VideoRecon was originally born out of one of BlueChasm’s prototypes but grew organically into a full enterprise platform, due to the incredible feedback of our clients over the last year.  
In a nutshell, VideoRecon watches and listens to videos; identifies key objects, themes or events within the footage; tags and timestamps those events; and returns the metadata to the user via an API, our VideoRecon portal or one of our flexible integrations (such as Box). It also supports full audio transcription capabilities for use cases that need more than just basic concepts and descriptors.

VideoRecon at work on Bluemix
From a Bluemix backend services perspective, VideoRecon temporarily uploads new video footage into the IBM Cloud Object Storage platform where our other VideoRecon microservices (deployed via IBM Containers and mostly written in server-side Swift) can access and analyze the content. Next, the IBM Watson Visual Recognition API and some of our unique services analyze the footage and identify its contents.

BlueChasm also leans on the IBM Watson Speech to Text API to convert audio content from the videos into text. Transcripts are fed into text analytics algorithms to identify specific words or phrases and determine the most relevant keywords across all the spoken dialogue.
Whenever an interesting visual, audio object or event is detected, the VideoRecon service creates a tag denoting what is recognized and a timestamp of the point in the video when either the object was recognized or the event occurred. The tags are stored in the IBM Cloudant fully managed JSON document store before they are provided back to the user. You can view a basic demo of our original prototype of VideoRecon here.

Video analytics in the real world
BlueChasm is continuing to work and collaborate with clients and partners of VideoRecon in many industries, including oil and gas, media and entertainment, retail and distribution, government, and higher education
Because VideoRecon is a cognitive platform that improves with custom training, there is typically upfront and ongoing work required to train the platform on industry-specific data and industry-specific use cases. For example, a retailer might teach VideoRecon to identify specific types of products, while a law enforcement organization might teach it to recognize certain types of vehicles, weapons or other objects of interest. A media and entertainment company might use VideoRecon to “watch” and classify hours of B-roll or video footage so that they can much more effectively and swiftly execute on their video production process.

Working with IBM cognitive analytics and cloud data services gives BlueChasm the power to transform the way today’s industries handle all kinds of tasks, from monitoring to content management to actionable insights.
Learn more about IBM and BlueChasm.
The post Cloud-based video analytics drive actionable insights appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Use cloud integration to build customer relationships

It’s no secret that the business world is changing rapidly. Sometimes it can seem like it’s changing faster than you can keep up. This pace is only going to continue to increase. New companies, and even new industries, appear every day. To stay competitive, you’ll need to create inventive and interactive customer experiences that bring you closer to your target audience.
It’s not just about selling anymore. Customers are increasingly searching for a connection with businesses where they spend their money. Traditional commerce is not set up to facilitate these kinds of relationships, but that’s exactly where the digital economy shines. Transforming into a digital business might seem like a daunting undertaking, but it’s all about connections, whether it’s connections between people or processes. IBM Cloud Integration can help you achieve these connections by allowing you to move data easily across your business network and by providing the flexibility you need to serve your customers.
The emergence and evolution of cognitive APIs is fueling this economic atmosphere by lowering the barrier of entry for new businesses and enabling existing businesses to transform. The goal of this evolution is to achieve a point of presence, which is when a business connects with a customer at the perfect moment with the perfect offer. The point of presence allows customers and businesses to transcend the buyer/seller relationship and enter a mutually beneficial partnership.
Cognitive APIs provide the capability to easily connect applications and data wherever they exist. By combining cognitive services with information from Internet of Things devices, such as weather and traffic data, complex processes like supply chain become more intelligent. You get a whole new view where potential problem areas are identified and integrated. Cognitive services can even predict problems and recommend changes before they pose a risk to businesses or the public.
Imagine a dairy shipment headed from Wisconsin to California on a refrigerated truck that’s due to have a layover in Nevada for a night. Hours before the truck arrives, a sensor in the facility’s cooler shows that the equipment is not functioning properly. Rather than waiting to find out about the problem when the cargo is lost, businesses can use a supply chain solution to locate and contact an alternative facility. The driver is seamlessly rerouted and the business avoids any compromise to the cargo or the schedule. That’s just one small glimpse into the power of a fully integrated, cognitive API-fueled digital business.
The Trends and Directions session at InterConnect 2017 will demonstrate the importance of points of presence. It will dive into the emerging technology that creates these crucial integrations and enables them to interact both inside and outside of your organization. You’ll learn not only what you can accomplish with IBM Cloud Integration, but also how far-ranging and significant integration can help you achieve next-generation customer experiences.
Join me Tuesday, March 21 from 3:45 PM to 4:30 PM in Bayside A. If you still haven’t registered for InterConnect, be sure to sign up today.
The post Use cloud integration to build customer relationships appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud