IBM on Monday announced new services and features to its cloud platform Bluemix to help accelerate organisations’ cloud migration.
The enterprise IT major has added Decision Optimization, Bluemix Lift and dashDB for Transactions to Bluemix.
IBM Decision Optimization on Cloud (including the CPLEX engines) is now in beta on Bluemix.
Users can run it as a standalone, embedded in applications using a Rest API, or be used in Jupyter Notebooks within IBM’s Data Science Experience.
It can ingest large amounts of data including predictions, master and transactional data, business goals, and business rules to prioritize and rank business decisions such as plans and schedules.
The second service is Bluemix Lift, which is a data migration tool to quickly, securely and reliably migrate databases from existing on-premises data centers to Bluemix and Watson Data Platform.
Bluemix Lift encrypts data being transferred, helping to securely move it at a rate of up to ten times faster than traditional offerings.
The technology is also designed to minimize downtime, so that applications using the source database can run uninterrupted during migration.
In addition, Lift has been designed to be highly reliable, enabling data transfers to keep flowing even during a connectivity loss.
Third, the dashDB for Transactions, is a fully managed SQL database service on IBM Bluemix, optimized for transactional and web workloads to help developers fuel cloud-based applications.
It offers high availability on selected plans, as well as pay-per-use units. It is part of IBM’s dashDB portfolio, offering a workload-optimized database environment designed to meet both the data warehousing and transactional needs of applications.
The company believes that these features can help organizations to overcome the challenge of deriving insights from the huge heap of data sets.
“Cloud is the platform that enables cognitive intelligence,” said John Murphy, Vice President, IBM Watson Data Platform.
“We’re continuing to grow our catalog of cloud data services on Bluemix so that we can help developers and data scientists better manage and more quickly interpret data for business innovation.”
Bluemix, launched in 2014 with a $1 billion investment, has quickly risen to become the popular Cloud Foundry deployment.
According to the company, over 20,000 new developers join Bluemix every week and through the Global Entrepreneurs Program for Cloud Startups, IBM has worked with more than 2,000 startups globally.
It provides access to over 100 tools and services of the prominent open-source technologies combined with IBM and third-party services that let developers focus all of their energy on the creation of enterprise class cloud applications at consumer scale.
