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Using its Watson AI platform and Bluemix cloud, IBM is aiming to develop the tech skills of millions of young Africans for free.

It’s won Jeopardy, produced a cookbook, and helps call-center agents with frontline support, but IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson is about to embark on what could be its most socially-important venture yet: teaching tech skills to 25 million African youths.

In partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), IBM has unveiled a $70m, five-year initiative it’s calling Digital-Nation Africa.

In doing so, it joins fellow tech giants like Google, SAP, and Microsoft, which are running large-scale digital literacy schemes on a continent facing both a massive skills shortage and an unemployment problem that Digital-Nation Africa will try to help address.

Digital-Nation Africa is based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform, and will include a range of tools for different audiences. At its most basic, it offers courses on elementary computer and web usage, which IBM’s Juan Napoli says will include advice on internet security and privacy.

For those with some digital skills or entrepreneurial ambitions, Digital-Nation Africa will offer coding classes, a mobile app suite and marketplace, and marketing materials for promoting apps.

Watson will be used for personalizing learning programs based on student progress and knowledge, to make recommendations on what parts of the course to take next. It will also gather anonymized data from the behavior of those who enroll on a Digital-Nation Africa course to identify key areas where skills and knowledge are lacking for future development of materials.

For entrepreneurs using the Digital-Nation Africa courses to develop apps and systems, Watson will recommend building blocks from Bluemix to improve their software, as well as suggesting potential market needs.

To hit the ambitious target of 25 million 15- to 34-year-olds learning through Digital-Nation Africa, Napoli says the firm has a network of 50 NGO, academic, and government partners it will use to reach both urban audiences and those in rural areas, and it will recruit more over the next five years.

Napoli says it is also building a network of volunteers, including IBM employees, who can teach digital literacy programs at the community level, where access to equipment and teachers has traditionally been limited.

IBM will provide VMware-based cloud services to channel partners to boost their hybrid cloud offerings, the company announced Tuesday. IBM Business Partners will now be able to sell VMware Cloud Foundation and help clients extend existing VMware environments to the IBM Cloud.

The new integrated services allow IBM partners to provide a “one-stop shop” for migration of on-premise VMware platforms to the cloud. IBM says its VMware-based fully automated service for VMware Cloud Foundation is a market first.

“Enterprises need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads between private and public cloud environments,” said Zane Adam, VP of IBM Cloud. “By being the first to market with channel partners and VMware, IBM is enabling organizations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud environment.”

Clients and partners can automatically provision pre-configured VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) environments. The platform provides infrastructure flexibility by integrating VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and SDDC Manager.

“IBM and VMware share a common goal of empowering organizations to quickly and easily extend their workloads to the cloud,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president, Cloud Provider Software, VMware. “Through the IBM and VMware strategic partnership, customers can easily move and implement enterprise applications and disaster recovery solutions across a global network of cloud data centers.”

The announcement further builds on the strategic partnership announced by the companies a year ago to ease enterprise adoption of hybrid environments, and VMware Cloud Foundation, which the company introduced in August to sell a single platform cloud stack as a subscription service supported by IBM cloud.

VMware also partnered with Amazon to sell its data center automation software on the AWS cloud to enterprises in October. VMware has been shifting steadily toward a role of providing connections and management for multi-cloud environments, and CEO Pat Gelsinger discussed the impact of changing infrastructure technology on channel partners with the WHIR in June.

IBM has opened a $200m global headquarters for Watson Internet of Things in Munich, Germany.

The centre will be home to what IBM is calling “cognitive collaboratories” with Avnet, BMW, BNP Paribas, Capgemini and Tech Mahindra – where they will work with IBM to identify opportunities for using data from IoT sensors to train machine learning and other AI systems to make smarter decisions. The centre is part of a $3bn investment in IoT that IBM pledged in 2014.

Craig Smith, director of IoT for Avnet Technology Solutions, said that developing IoT systems is “immensely complex”, needing to combine cognitive computing, data analytics and cloud platforms, saying “it really is more than any one firm can put its arms around”.

SEE: IBM Watson: The smart person’s guide

IBM has about 1,000 IoT experts based at the Watson IoT centre, working with partner companies.

Together they will explore ways to use IoT data and cloud services to improve connected cars, to prevent disease, and to devise new financial services products and new managed services across industries ranging from agriculture to manufacturing.

As an example of how combining internet-connected devices and cloud services can help create new products and services, IBM revealed a new partnership with Visa, which they say will allow support for secure payments to be added to connected devices, without the need for dedicated infrastructure.

IoT devices will be able to be linked to the Visa Token Service, a security technology that replaces sensitive payment account information found on payment cards with a unique digital identifier, which will be available via IBM’s Watson IoT platform.

Jim McCarthy, executive vice president, for innovation and strategic partnerships with Visa, gave an example of how the service could be used to support on-demand billing, for instance, to pay by the mile when driving connected cars or by how much you drink when sipping from a connected cup.

Dr John Kelly is IBM’s senior VP of cognitive solutions and research, who helped develop the IBM Watson system that defeated two world champions at the quiz show Jeopardy in 2011.

Kelly said the centre would allow IBM and its partners to devise industry-specific cognitive services fueled by IoT data. Partnering with industry experts allows their expertise about specific verticals to be combined with IBM Watson IoT Platform’s cloud infrastructure and cognitive computing capabilities in areas such as speech and image recognition and signal processing, he added.

“We are doing it through an industry lens, we believe decades from now, before we have a general-purpose, all-knowing system, these systems must be trained in the domain you’re in,” he said.

The conference heard how the granular data being captured by IoT devices and sophisticated analytics at the backend is reshaping the way companies operate, such as the French railway operator SNCF. The rail operator is using sensors on overhead wires and tracks to do predictive maintenance on its 30,000 kilometres of railways, using the Watson IoT Platform to analyze the data. Meanwhile the aerospace manufacturer Airbus is creating detailed digital models, dubbed “digital twins”, of de-icing systems on plane wings to allow more effective approaches to designing and operating such systems.

The centre will also house an innovation hub for the European IoT standards organization EEBus, which will develop standards for connected home devices.

IBM also announced new products and services using its IBM Watson IoT platform’s cognitive capabilities:

Dutch unmanned aerial vehicle designer Aerialtronics making a drone that uses Watson’s Visual Recognition APIs to allow it to understand what’s being captured by its 360-degree camera, with potential uses in areas such as crowd safety, damage assessment and aviation inspection.
Ricoh is launching an IBM Watson-powered, voice controlled digital whiteboard, which can also do its best to transcribe and translate what a speaker is saying in real time.
Bosch will make its industrial Bosch IoT Suite available on IBM’s Bluemix and Watson IoT Platform.
IBM will offer free access to Watson IoT Platform via Bluemix to companies pitching products on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo that have been certified by Arrow Electronics.

Mumbai, February 16:

IBM will pick 50 universities in India this year in a bid to ensure that they impart curriculum suited to the changing needs of the technology industry. The US tech major is also ramping up research & development in India to customise and localise its flagship cognitive technology platform Watson.

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO of IBM, told BusinessLine: “We have been investing in education in India for over two decades and are looking at how to revamp that for the future. We have partnerships with a lot of universities. This year we are looking at picking 50 universities on new curriculum.”

IBM is also looking at how to adapt its Pathways to Technology (Ptech — a programme launched in the US) to India. “This was developed for US schools so we are looking at how we can bring it to India. There are six other countries adopting this approach. You tell a school this is what the industry is looking for, so teach that curriculum,” Rometty said.

LAS VEGAS—IBM is putting all its chips into the cognitive computing pot at its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference here this week.

“Cognitive computing, and Watson in particular, are becoming the essence of transformation at IBM,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said during her keynote address here.

According to Rometty, IBM is betting the company on cognitive computing in the cloud, dedicating its 54 cloud data centers to support Bluemix—the dashboard for Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities and application programmer interfaces (APIs).

Rometty said the architectural changes made by Bluemix at IBM would trickle-down to influence everything downstream in computing.

“There are three areas affecting all businesses today—one is the need for new architectures like the open worldwide data platform in the cloud offered by Bluemix and Watson,” she said.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty explains how IBM is putting all its chips into the Cognitive Computing pot at Las Vegas’ PartnerWorld Leadership Conference. SOURCE: IBM

“Secondly, artificial intelligence (AI) is adding meaning to both structured and unstructured data. And thirdly, transparent machine learning specifically targets each user’s domain resulting in insights never before uncovered,” Rometty said.

She predicted that one billion users from 45 countries in 20 industries would be using the Bluemix model by the end of 2017. By 2022, every decision made by consumers will be influenced by this model, she added.

And as the knowledge base of known valid solutions to everything from medical conditions to cybersecurity grows, the movers and the shakers writing those apps will become the world’s leading companies, Rometty predicted.

IBM claims it is already opening a $2 trillion market for using cognitive computing for decision support by 2025, and another $1.5 trillion market in increased productivity by 2020. SOURCE: IBM
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IBM also announced a “Watson Build Challenge” to kick-off efforts to open the cognitive-market to all by challenging users to contribute IBM tested and verified apps on the IBM market place site, which previously had only IBM-written Watson apps.

The Watson Build Challenge will allow anyone, from the top 45 Fortune 50 companies already on-board to the smallest startups, to participate. The effort was modeled on an internal contest where all 380,000 IBM employees were asked to build a Watson app last year. The winners of that contest now have their apps for sale on the IBM Marketplace. Winners are expected to be announced by the end of this year.

For medical applications, the difference between machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing is, for example, the ability to detect a tumor from x-rays (machine learning), to the ability to detect cancer before the tumor grows by analyzing the dynamic flow of blood in vessels/capillaries to the ability to comparing the above data with that of every cured case of cancer from the relevant literature to accurately diagnosis and ultimately cure it. SOURCE: IBM
Click here for larger image

“We now have about 70 percent of our data center workloads running IBM APIs with about 30 percent of all Bluemix calls going to Watson,” said Dave Wilson, vice president of IBM cloud business partners and channel innovation, in an exclusive interview with EE Times. “BlueMix is being used for Watson and IoT apps of all sorts and sizes.”

Wilson echoed Rometty in confirming that IBM is putting all of its eggs into the cognitive basket. Not only is IBM selling BlueMix and its Watson links to its partners to develop their own apps, but almost 30 percent of its partners are selling BlueMix to their customers to run their built-for-purpose solutions, he said.

More = > http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331363

he next big step in the evolution of the IBM Cloud portfolio is here.

IBM Bluemix is integrating SoftLayer products and services into its vast catalog of infrastructure, platform, and application services.

The SoftLayer products, services, tools, systems, and support will become a cornerstone of a unified Bluemix cloud experience that delivers the performance, flexibility, and consistency of SoftLayer infrastructure alongside the extensive catalog of cloud resources that include IBM Watson services, development runtimes, containers, database services, and more.

And now that SoftLayer is integrated into the IBM Bluemix, one can only expect the best as it will bring all the cloud together in one place with developer-centric compute models – Bluemix makes it easier to ship powerful, high-quality software every day.

But what exactly is IBM SoftLayer, now Bluemix, and what does it do?

The Bluemix cloud platform is not just about creating new apps or migrating existing ones, on-prem or off-prem implementations, or offering IaaS and PaaS cloud services. It’s designed to bring all of these aspects together to help you solve your real, complex business problems in the cloud.

If your organization requires high performance computing, or you manage very large databases, Bluemix provides leading edge, dedicated architecture and ease of provisioning specifically designed to accommodate high input/output intensity for online gaming, mobile applications and digital marketing.

For larger organizations that need a correspondingly high level of infrastructure control, it provides the ability to customize hardware. It also features network control and control infrastructure via simple and intuitive application programming interfaces (APIs).

More => http://technology.mb.com.ph/2017/01/30/bring-the-cloud-together-with-ibm-bluemix/

Abstract

This IBM® Redbooks® publication is based on the Presentations Guide of the course “Essentials of Cloud Application Development on IBM Bluemix” that was developed by the IBM Redbooks team in partnership with IBM Middle East and Africa (MEA) University Program.
This course is designed to teach university students the basic skills that are required to develop, deploy, and test cloud-based applications that use the IBM Bluemix® cloud services.

The primary target audience for this course is university students in undergraduate computer science and computer engineer programs with no previous experience working in cloud environments. However, anyone new to cloud computing can benefit from this course.

After completing this course, you should be able to accomplish these tasks:

Describe the factors that lead to the adoption of cloud computing.
Describe infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service.
Define cloud computing.
Describe IBM Bluemix.
Describe the architecture of IBM Bluemix.
Identify the runtimes and services that Bluemix offers.
Explain how to get started with Bluemix.
Describe Bluemix organizations, domains, spaces, and users.
Create Bluemix applications.
Use services in a Bluemix application.
Set environmental variables that are used with Bluemix services.
Deploy and run Bluemix applications.
Describe how to create an IBM SDK for Node.js application that runs on Bluemix.
Explain how to manage a Bluemix account with the Cloud Foundry CLI.[
]Describe how to integrate workstation development platforms with Bluemix.
Manage application code and assets with IBM Bluemix DevOps services.
Work with the Git repository that is used by DevOps services.
Describe the characteristics of REST APIs.
Describe the use of JSON as the preferred data format for REST APIs.
dentify the data services that are available on Bluemix.
Describe the features in Bluemix for developing mobile applications.
Create a MobileFirst Services Starter application on Bluemix.
Send push notifications from Bluemix and receive them on the mobile device emulator.

Link => http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248374.html?Open

Managed IT and cloud communications company, Inabox Group Limited (ASX:IAB), has bought Hostworks Group from BAI Communications, in a move aimed at strengthening its cloud offering.

The $7 million purchase of the digital media solutions business, sees Inabox yield strategic business synergies and cross-selling opportunities as the company gains access to Hostworks’ large enterprise customers such as Seek, Carsales, Ticketek, Foxtel, AHL and Seven Media.

Additionally, the deal will see Inabox leverage Hostworks’ cloud infrastructure along with its existing relationships with key vendors, spanning AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer and Google Cloud Platform.

More ==> http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/613688/inabox-buys-hostworks-7-million/

The next big step in the evolution of the IBM Cloud portfolio is here.

IBM Bluemix is integrating SoftLayer products and services into its vast catalog of infrastructure, platform, and application services.

The SoftLayer products, services, tools, systems, and support will become a cornerstone of a unified Bluemix cloud experience that delivers the performance, flexibility, and consistency of SoftLayer infrastructure alongside the extensive catalog of cloud resources that include IBM Watson services, development runtimes, containers, database services, and more.

And now that SoftLayer is integrated into the IBM Bluemix, one can only expect the best as it will bring all the cloud together in one place with developer-centric compute models – Bluemix makes it easier to ship powerful, high-quality software every day.

More Here => http://technology.mb.com.ph/2017/01/30/bring-the-cloud-together-with-ibm-bluemix/