IBM said its Watson Data Platform delivers the world’s fastest data ingestion engine and machine learning as a service to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) for business.
“Machine learning is incredibly powerful, but many of today’s data professionals lack the skills to fully exploit it for business and the ability to effectively collaborate on datasets,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Analytics.
“Watson Data Platform applies cognitive assistance for creating machine learning models, making it far faster to get from data to insight. It also, provides one place to access machine learning services and languages, so that anyone, from an app developer to the Chief Data Officer, can collaborate seamlessly to make sense of data, ask better questions, and more effectively operationalize insight.”
Built on Apache Spark, Watson Machine Learning intelligently and automatically builds models from structured and unstructured data and open machine learning libraries, while accelerating model deployment into business operations.
Its patented Cognitive Assistance for Data Science technology scores each machine-learning algorithm against the data provided to recommend the best match for the need. It also includes the most comprehensive set of algorithms in the industry.
AI for business
According to a recent Harvard Business Review survey, 80 percent of organizations believe the inability for teams to work together on common data is an inhibitor to an organization’s ability to achieve business objectives in a timely fashion.
Data professionals work in silos, are trained on different languages, lack a consistent view of data, and spend too much time on data collection and cleansing. Watson Data Platform helps address all of these issues.
Watson Data Platform enables a high level of collaboration across data professionals – such as data scientists, data engineers, business analysts, and developers – by allowing them to work together with a data set, applying the languages, services and tools they want to use.
Additionally, the platform enables data professionals to easily visualize and share insights across the enterprise.
Watson Data Platform capitalizes on IBM’s investment in Apache Spark, The IBM Cloud, cognitive computing, and The Weather Company – and takes advantage of several technologies developed by IBM Research.
Through the IBM Cloud-based Watson Data Platform, companies can combine their own data along with external data, leveraging built-in governance to address process, privacy and regulatory requirements, while maintaining control of their data.
The Watson Data Platform is building an expanding ecosystem of technology service providers, allowing data professionals to use the language they are comfortable with and the services they prefer.
IBM has incorporated SQL, Python, R, Java, and Scala into Watson Data Platform as well as more than 20 ecosystem partners to extend the platform services.
