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Watson, what should I watch tonight?

The world is consuming an amazing amount of streaming video content.
From silly internet videos to binge watching hours of the latest trending show, the average person’s appetite for streaming video content is tremendous. By 2021, the research firm MarketsandMarkets expects the market to reach $70 billion. To compete in this increasingly crowded space, providers must find a way to differentiate themselves to keep subscribers engaged and actively paying subscriber fees.
There’s a simple method for reducing churn while engaging and pleasing viewers: providers must understand, at a deep level, what individual subscribers want to watch and point them directly to that content. This highly personalized approach to serving up streaming video content becomes possible when providers add machine-learning technologies such as IBM Watson to their streaming services.
Stop subscriber attrition with in-platform cognitive capabilities
IBM Watson can find patterns in the way people interact with video content, from the selections they make, to how often they rewind or pause, to which videos they have abandoned midstream or watched repeatedly. By identifying and analyzing commonalities between the types of programming a viewer enjoys, Watson can suggest options the viewer might not have even considered.
Today, a viewer&8217;s search for video content typically only involves basic metadata, such as the title, genre, and so on. However, Watson can amass advanced metadata about what happens inside streaming videos. It can index and catalog at a much deeper level.  This includes the ability to index spoken word, visual imaging, tone and much more.
These capabilities enable subscribers to interact with content in entirely new ways. In the future, a viewer could say, “Show me a movie to help me sleep,” or “Show me a move where people overcome difficult challenges,” and the library could bring up videos that help a subscriber’s mood or outlook in a new way.
A smarter way to plan a video content strategy
Watson collects viewer data from video platforms over time and combines that data from other sources such as social channels, third-party reviews, global trends, and other content including geospatial and real-time weather information. As that happens, providers can compile data-rich profiles of individual subscribers and proactively predict targeted and highly relevant content recommendations.
Watson&8217;s capabilities can also help providers identify users who are likely to drop off their platforms so they can take steps to prevent that from happening. For example, if customers who enjoy watching romantic comedies are particularly prone to churn, the provider can examine its current offerings and decide if it should license more movies. Or it might find that it has a wide range of similar content that would appeal to this segment of subscribers it could recommend instead.
The opportunities that this technology will uncover in improving customer experience and recommendation success on a video streaming platform are limitless. In a future blog, I will explore how cognitive systems can help with areas such as content acquisition and creation, marketing strategies, advertising intelligence, and general business decision making.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Video.
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Videos from the CentOS Dojo, Brussels, 2017

Last Friday in Brussels, CentOS enthusiasts gathered for the annual CentOS Dojo, right before FOSDEM.

While there was no official videographer for the event, I set up my video camera in the talks that I attended, and so have video of five of the sessions.

First, I attended the session covering RDO CI in the CentOS build management system. I was a little late to this talk, so it is missing the first few minutes.

Next, I attended an introduction to Foreman, by Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden

Spiros Trigazis spoke about CERN’s OpenStack cloud. Unfortunately, the audio is not great in this one.

Nicolas Planel, Sylvain Afchain and Sylvain Baubeau spoke about the Skydive network analyzer tool.

Finally, there was a demo of Cockpit – the Linux management console by Stef Walter. The lighting is a little weird in here, but you can see the screen even when you can’t see Stef.

Quelle: RDO

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4 top reasons businesses adopt hybrid cloud

The latest IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, “Tailoring hybrid cloud,” confirms that organizations are increasingly turning to hybrid clouds to pursue new customers, reduce technology costs, access remote capabilities and facilitate innovation.
In fact, the study found that the four top reasons organizations are adopting hybrid clouds are to keep costs down while differentiating themselves in terms of operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and innovation.

Here’s why executives found those four things so important:
Cut costs
More than half (54 percent) of executives surveyed cited the most popular reason for implementing hybrid cloud: to reduce the total cost of technology ownership. Hybrid clouds can cut costs by taking advantage of the economies of scale that cloud data centers provide. Data centers offer lower costs for hardware, power, facility upkeep and infrastructure staffing. Instead of locking up funds in soon-to-be outmoded capital equipment, cash generated from business success can be reinvested directly into near-term profit growth.
Furthermore, when deciding which workloads should be moved to cloud, more than half of surveyed executives identified cost as their most important factor.

Improve operational efficiency
Tied for the second most popular reason for adopting hybrid cloud, operational efficiency was cited by 42 percent of respondents. Cloud enables organizations to quickly provision resources across an entire ecosystem to rapidly assemble tailor-made solutions for critical business needs. This can greatly reduce time spent on problem solving while enhancing the agility of enterprises in responding to constantly shifting market demands.
In the realm of IT, cloud enables operational efficiencies by optimizing the latest infrastructure, middleware and apps, rather than making do with subpar legacy systems.  For example, during online financial transaction processing, the latest third-party cloud-based API service can be plugged in to verify user identity.
Enhance customer engagement
Cloud’s agile attributes enable faster time to market for new products and services to attract and delight customers. For example, retailers can use cloud to tempt consumers with tailored promotions customized to their unique buying behaviors. Healthcare providers can address patient concerns any time with virtual medical assistance. Insurance companies can become trusted risk managers by warning policyholders of incoming destructive weather and recommend preventive actions to proactively avoid insurance claims.
Moving to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model helps organizations implement market-leading solutions quickly with minimal impact to existing infrastructure. The survey found that customer support is the top area that two-thirds of executives are targeting migrating to a SaaS model within two years.

Boost innovation
Cloud adoption fosters innovation because it can transcend geographic, industrial, organizational and operational barriers. Cloud accelerates innovation by enabling quick prototyping of new ideas for fast experimentation.
Astoundingly, at least 90 percent of executives surveyed said their most successful cloud initiatives had already significantly or moderately achieved expansion into new industries, creation of new revenue streams, and invention of new business models.
Clearly, cloud has evolved from a technological platform to an integral part of business enablement.

To get started with hybrid cloud, business leaders can ask these questions:

How strategically would you be using hybrid cloud?
What is the optimal mix of cloud and on-premises IT?
How effectively are you already scaling your business using cloud?

For more findings on how hybrid cloud can answer an enterprise’s unique needs, including more recommendations for getting started, read “Tailoring hybrid cloud: Designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth.”
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How to accelerate digital transformation in the banking industry

Like many other businesses, banks are increasingly adopting digital transformation. Why? They want to provide compelling customer engagement, retain all their customers and fend off defections to competitors. Now more than ever, it’s important that banks provide a differentiated, tailored experience that draws customers in, both online and in-person.
Banks are finding ways to deliver innovation in the customer experience, and they need a way to deliver that experience quickly. I’d say the global banking community sees speed of innovation as a top priority, while continuing to maintain strong governance, controls and risk mitigation.
BPM Wave helps banks worldwide navigate and accelerate their digital transformation. The company offers packaged and tailored digital applications that can help banks quickly launch new products, processes and services. New solutions can be deployed on a private cloud or as cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) applications that can easily fit into any existing environment.
BPM Wave’s applications and services are built on top of an IBM private cloud foundation, including IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM), IBM Integration Bus (IIB) and IBM PureApplication. The company uses this foundation to help banks quickly set up and deploy new applications across their private or hybrid cloud landscape.  Let me get specific:

IBM BPM helps automate and execute processes that involve a lot of human intervention and complex dependencies between stage activities. It easily integrates into banking IT systems.
IIB provides connectivity and universal data transformation to help simplify connectivity between new and existing applications, web services and data assets.
IBM PureApplication System (renamed IBM Bluemix Local System) and PureApplication Service provide a high performing and scalable private cloud application platform across a hybrid landscape.

Watch what Jon Wiener, a partner at BPM Wave, says about how to accelerate digital and process transformation for banks:

Interested in learning more about the software that helps BPM Wave deliver transformation to banks?  Learn more about IBM BPM here.
Check out all the business transformation stories to be shared at IBM InterConnect 2017 in March.
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Performance Metrics (APM) for Spring Boot Microservices on OpenShift

OpenShift provides a built-in monitoring tool called Hawkular. That tool is in charge of collecting metrics from Docker containers through the Kubernetes interface and storing, aggregating, and visualizing them. The metrics collected are CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network usage. Hawkular offers a “black-box” view of container performance but does not deal with application metrics like service performance or distribution of response time through application layers. For this specific case, the Hawkular community is working on another module called Hawkular APM that provides insight into the way an application executes across multiple (micro) services in a distributed (e.g. cloud) environment.
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Using Dynamic Provisioning and StorageClasses

OpenShift can integrate with underlying infrastructure, enabling OpenShift to dynamically interact with infrastructure and extend its functionality. Specifically, this can allow us to set up OpenShift to process a PersistentVolumeClaim and then allocate that storage dynamically.

I am going to cover what is needed to get started with dynamically provisioning storage, including cloud provider configuration, StorageClasses, and the Default StorageClass.
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Goodbye OpenShift All-In-One VM, Hello MiniShift

After almost 100,000 downloads, the time has come to retire the OpenShift All-In-One VM. The intent of the VM was to give developers a simple and easy way to bring up OpenShift on their local machine for development purposes. In the meantime, there was movement within the Kubernetes community to create MiniKube – a means to run a Kubernetes “cluster” on your local machine. Jimmi Dyson saw this work and started MiniShift which built off MiniKube except for OpenShift. It fulfills all the original use cases we had for the All-In-One with the added bonus of actually having an engineering team maintaining it!
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Crédit Mutuel Arkéa breaks new ground in France with blockchain

With blockchain, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa saw an opportunity to make application processes easier for customers and staff by creating a single, cross-business know-your-customer (KYC) platform.
The bank’s numerous divisions had no way of sharing KYC documents. If a customer provided a passport or other identification to open a new life insurance policy with Crédit Mutuel Arkéa’s insurance group, Suravenir, that person would have to provide the same information again to do business with the bank’s consumer credit group, Financo.
A leading bank in France, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has nearly 9,000 employees, 3.6 million customers and EUR 110 billion in total assets. Its history goes back more than 100 years in Brittany and continues today across Europe. The bank has always taken an entrepreneurial and open approach, looking to adopt new strategies and continually develop its capabilities and services.
It makes sense, then, that the bank would be a pioneer in working with blockchain technology.
Juliette Macret, IBM financial services sector business development director with IBM France, offered this insight:
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa applied IBM Design Thinking and agile development methods to turn a simple idea into a strategic, decentralized platform for collaboration. The availability of IBM Blockchain services and DevOps tools on the IBM Bluemix innovation platform was key to accelerating time-to-value during the development phase. As the foundation of a robust system of trust, blockchain technology can help businesses create frictionless business transactions that improve customer satisfaction and employee efficiency.
The potential of this blockchain solution extends beyond Crédit Mutuel Arkéa’s own operations. It’s possible that the French bank will be able to take advantage of the blockchain as a system of trust that customers could use to deliver proof of identity to third parties, such as utility companies, retailers and service providers.
“Blockchain is a transformative agent in our operational application, as proven by this project, the first of its kind in France,” says Frédéric Laurent, chief operating officer of innovation and operations at Crédit Mutuel Arkéa. “This pilot offers a complete view of customers’ documents across our distributed network. The project helped us to understand and master blockchain for other client uses. Now, we are ready to incorporate this technology in our ecosystem.”
Curious about blockchain and what it can do for your business? Come to InterConnect, March 19-23, Las Vegas, session 1518.
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Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 Boosts NFV Performance and Streamlines Operations

The post Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 Boosts NFV Performance and Streamlines Operations appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Many of Mirantis’ largest customers are telcos using OpenStack for NFV, and in the new Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 release, we build upon the NFV features introduced in version 9.0 to better support high-performance and large-scale VNF deployments. MOS 9.2 also adds important new features to streamline operations, including improved lifecycle management and an enhanced update mechanism that more gracefully handles customizations, patches and plugins.
Emphasis on DPDK
Most of the NFV improvements in Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 focus on optimizing performance and security of Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit (OVS DPDK). Cloud users running DPDK applications, such as for packet forwarding or processing, load balancing, and so on, on a VM that also utilizes OVS DPDK at the host OS can now achieve near wire speed performance thanks to efforts to harden OVS DPDK for the DPDK VNF use case. This includes NIC multiqueue support for improved network performance when scaling VNF workloads with additional vCPUs. VXLAN based segmentation and OVS based security groups enable high-performance tenant networking that is scalable and secure. IPv6 support has also been added for tenant networks that use the latest Internet Protocol version with DPDK.
Besides OVS DPDK related improvements, MOS 9.2 also updates the Linux kernel to version 4.4 as part of the included Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release so that cloud owners can deploy MOS with the latest servers to meet their capacity needs. Updating to Linux kernel 4.4 can also potentially improve OVS and KVM performance.
A Pipeline to Improved Operations
Another big change in the Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 release is a new system of lifecycle management, based on a Git repository. Using Git enables infrastructure operators to manage all the configuration files for cloud infrastructure from a single, centralized system with precise version control, thus providing auditability of cloud configuration changes.
Based on principles of Infrastructure as Code, which favors continuous small changes over occasional batch updates, this new approach greatly streamlines Day 2 (post-deployment) operations. Fuel orchestrator capabilities continually push freshly committed configuration and/or package files from the Git repository through a deployment pipeline to nodes that satisfy predefined update criteria. As a result, small, frequent updates are quickly deployed into a cloud. This can be done automatically through scheduled maintenance jobs. Rollbacks to previous configurations are supported too. In particular, updating configurations on a global or role-based level is much easier with Git-based lifecycle management than with Puppet Enterprise Master and ConfigDB or custom graphs uploaded to the Fuel Master node.

To improve scalability in Day1 and Day 2 operations, MOS 9.2 also supports the decomposition of the Fuel controller role by moving some critical services – namely Neutron, Keystone, MySQL and RabbitMQ – onto separate nodes. Spreading them onto separate nodes helps to prevent bottlenecks in huge deployments for better performance and reliability.
Besides new features related to Git-based lifecycle management, MOS 9.2 has also made updates faster and easier. Infrastructure operators with clouds running MOS 9.0 or 9.1 can update to 9.2 and retain previously installed customizations and patches, as well as plugins for Contrail, StackLight or Murano. Eliminating the need to re-install these items helps to minimize downtime during updates. Additionally, the 9.2 update will uniformly update any previously deployed Ceph nodes.
Software Updates
Last but not least, Mirantis OpenStack 9.2 includes several software updates worth mentioning:

RabbitMQ 3.6.6
Linux kernel 4.4
OVS 2.6.1
QEMU-KVM 2.5
DPDK 16.07

Ready to update to MOS 9.2? Read the instructions here and reach out to our support team for assistance.
Previous installation of MOS 9.0 or 9.1 is required, and you can get them here.
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H&R Block teams with IBM for cloud-based Watson tax services

When you’re watching the big game this Sunday, keep an eye out for H&R Block&8217;s new ad that highlights an initiative to use cloud-based IBM Watson services to help customers make sense of the time-consuming and often confusing process of filing their taxes.
The first phase of the two companies&8217; collaboration involves training Watson to knowledgeably answer the numerous questions that come up during the tax preparation process. To do so, H&R Block fed the IBM supercomputer all 74,000 pages of the US tax code. That&8217;s just the first step. NetworkWorld explained what comes next:
IBM said that Watson’s initial training was validated by H&R Block tax experts – who have filed some 720 million returns since 1955 – and the initial corpus will expand over time through each subsequent tax season. During the next phase, H&R Block tax professionals will work with IBM to continue teaching Watson all about tax and apply the technology to innovate in other areas of their business.
Applying Watson&8217;s machine learning, natural language and image recognition capabilities to world of tax preparation adds another industry to its skillset. It has also worked in fields including healthcare and cybersecurity.

For more, check out NetworkWorld‘s full article.
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