Following the announcement on Sunday 28 October 2018 that IBM will acquire US-based open source software solutions provider, Red Hat for approximately $34bn to bolster its hybrid cloud capabilities,

Analysts at GlobalData, a worldwide data and analytics company, offer their view on the blockbuster deal:

Chris Drake, Principal Analyst for Data Center Technology at GlobalData, comments,

“Although IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address data portability and security issues, and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption, there are questions about how they plan to do this and how this transaction will impact IBM’s main hybrid cloud play—IBM Cloud Private—which they announced last year. IBM has expressed plans to continue building and enhancing Red Hat partnerships, including those with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, Google and Alibaba. Does this mean that IBM will promote equal access to these additional public clouds as part of its Cloud Private offering and, if so, how will it do this?

“There is also a lot of speculation as to how this transaction will position IBM as ‘the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider’ in an emerging $1tn growth market. However, hybrid cloud is a fast-changing market that is being targeted by a growing number of major players. In addition, several large infrastructure vendors, including Dell EMC, HPE, Huawei and Cisco, have more than one hybrid cloud offering. Red Hat has been reporting strong hybrid cloud growth based on its OpenStack and OpenShift solutions. It’s unlikely that IBM would want to disrupt this growth and may therefore use the acquisition to develop a more differentiated range of hybrid cloud solutions.”

Despite all these questions, there are plenty of benefits for the two companies, particularly around access to one another’s existing customers.

Brad Shimmin, Service Director for Technology and Software at GlobalData, comments,

“The acquisition will give IBM a solid bridge between its existing on-premise hardware and its global cloud platform. However, the long-term and most profound ramifications will be felt within the Linux and broader open source communities. Hopefully, IBM will allow Red Hat engineers to continue prioritizing upstream contributions, regardless of whether or not those are in the best interest of IBM’s bottom line. If not, the driving force Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will very likely shift toward rival distributions like Debian, CentOS,  OpenSUSE, Ubunto, Gentoo, or perhaps some as yet unrealized new opportunity.” 

And finally, Charlotte Dunlap, Principal Analyst for Application Platforms at GlobalData, says,

“IBM would do well to gain access to RHEL customers and Red Hat’s greater loyal developer community. In recent years IBM and Oracle have made inroads in open-source software (OSS) by adopting technology from OpenStack to Cloud Foundry further up the stack, but no one’s got the following of the developer community like Red Hat for its initial commitment and business model around OSS. Once these hybrid cloud set ups are in play and enterprises move into the digital transformation phase, which converts their IT and data centers into modern app development/deployment architectures, operations teams (DevOps) are pinning a lot of hopes on OSS technologies such as Kubernetes (container orchestration), Istio (microservices) and Knative (serverless) to ease the complexity of moving app workloads into production. Application platforms providers like Red Hat having an advantage here carry a lot of weight among enterprises.”

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post IBM Acquisition of Open Source Software Red Hat for $34bn is a Win-Win for Both, Says GlobalData appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

IBM and SAP stand out as leaders in the market for cloud-based enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

The company’s new report: ‘Cloud-based Enterprise AI Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment’ states that IBM and SAP offer a full suite of AI capabilities and features, function- and industry-specific tools, and portfolios that include complementary offers, such as professional services to help customers identify and implement use cases.

Rena Bhattacharyya, Research Director at GlobalData, says: “AI deployments range in complexity depending on the details of a particular project or use case.  Cloud-based enterprise AI platforms consist of tools and resources that allow enterprises to incorporate cognitive functions into their applications and business processes more easily and quickly.”

Potential use cases are vast, and include deployments that improve efficiency and productivity, facilitate better and faster decision-making, uncover relationships in large data sets, and provide more personal, contextualized customer interactions. In addition to horizontal applications, such as those that manage sentiment, monitor security or perform sales related projections, AI is also making its way into industry-specific applications. It is being used by pharmaceutical companies to speed drug development, by the financial community to review loan documentation, and by retailers to suggest product purchases.

The market is flooded with companies that offer AI-infused solutions or provide AI-centric tools, but few competitors provide a complete platform that includes API’s, operationalized services, toolkits, libraries and processing power. In addition to IBM and SAP, GlobalData’s report includes profiles on platforms from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, and will expand to include other vendors in the future. The assessments will help enterprises select vendors to assist them with leveraging AI technology, whether they are looking for pre-built solutions for non-AI specialists or integrated toolkits and libraries for data scientists.

Bhattacharyya adds: “Companies of all sizes are exploring options for incorporating artificial intelligence into their business processes. AI platforms allow non-data scientists to incorporate AI features into their solutions quickly, and streamline deployment and management of custom machine learning or deep learning models.

“Enterprise AI platforms provide an integrated environment that facilitates the development of AI solutions for a range of audiences. Pre-built solutions are more readily accessible to non-AI specialists, and integrated toolkits, libraries, and resources help streamline deployments for data scientists.”

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

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The fast implementation of Artifical Intelligence might have left aside the inherent risks that comes attached to it. AI has proved a very useful tool to provide users a customized experience, however it does so in an aggressive and subtle way that most of these consumers aren’t aware of. The unseen dangers inherent in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are proving the importance of IBM and Google’s diverse approach to this multifaceted problem,

That’s the reason why Brad Shimmin, Service Director at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his perspective on this important issue:

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already changed the way consumers interact with technology and the way businesses think about big challenges like digital transformation. In fact, GlobalData research shows that approximately 50% of IT buyers have already prioritized the adoption of AI technologies, and that number is expected to jump to more than 67% over the next two years.

“However, there is a growing realization that good AI is hard to come by and such decisions AI makes, may only appear to be correct, when in reality they harbor unseen biases, based on incorrect or incomplete data. Many facets of AI such as Deep Learning (DL) algorithms are in essence a black box, unable to reveal how and why a given decision has been made.

“Over the last two weeks, IBM and Google, both took an important next step by introducing tools, capable of building trust and transparency into AI itself. Both offer highly divergent approaches yet neither solves the problem in its entirety.

“Google’s new tool, named What-If Tool, allows users to analyze a Machine Learning (ML) model directly, without any programming. Intended for use long before an AI solution is put into operation, this tool allows users to readily visualize how the outcome of a given ML model will change, according to any number of “what if” scenarios surrounding the model itself or its underlying dataset.

“Conversely, IBM has taken an operational approach to the problem with its new trust and transparency capabilities for AI on IBM Cloud. IBM’s new tools evaluate the effectiveness of a given model, based on how the business expects it to behave, explaining its effectiveness and accuracy in natural and business language.

“Despite each solution not being enough to solve the overall problem, what these two highly divergent solutions point to, is the necessity of a multi-pronged approach to building trust in AI; first in the underlying data, next in the model and algorithms, and finally, in the final solution running in the wild.”

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

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