IBM watson open to all Cloud

Watson Artificial Intelligence (AI) services which was typically and solely deployed on IBM cloud is now made available to other private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud services which include that of its rivals – Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

This announcement was made at IBM’s annual Think partner and developer conference by Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Data and AI. “With most large organizations storing data across hybrid Cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored. By breaking open that siloed infrastructure we can help businesses accelerate their transformation through AI,” said Thomas.

Using Kubernetes, IBM has now extended the reach of their Watson platform which houses Watson Studio, Watson Assistant, Watson OpenScale, and other applications to run on other cloud services. IBM is also extending Watson Machine Learning with the Watson Machine Learning Accelerator for high-performance GPU clustering. Also, making Watson available on the PowerAI platform for on-premises deployments led IBM to renaming the PowerAI Enterprise platform to “Watson Machine Accelerator”.

Although Watson will be available to rival cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, IBM is however, out with a takeover strategy as Thomas said, “We are confident in the IBM cloud that if clients try our products anywhere, they will eventually be drawn to IBM cloud and the uniqueness it provides.”

Dan Kirsch, a managing director at Hurwitz & Associates, said that Watson is really significant as businesses are increasingly looking out for solutions that are from independent vendors. “You look out of touch with your customers if you say you can only have our software and our capabilities if you adopt everything only from us,” Kirsch added.

As the need for data processing increases in the AI world, vendors of AI solutions such as IBM, have their brand on the list of prospective customers as they are recognized leaders in AI and cloud computing. To make it to the top of the list, IBM is now making itself available on all cloud platforms thereby, coming closer to the customers directly or otherwise. Although Watson is expected to perform more efficiently on IBM cloud infrastructures, recent tests demonstrated the ability to develop AI models up to ten times faster than competing platforms as reported by IBM.

In the nutshell, Thomas said that the new Watson will enable a level of openness that hasn’t been available to date.