IBM Watson Services - understanding various cognitive services provided by IBM Bluemix

• Watson Services are readily available on Bluemix, referral link http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html
• Watson APIs is adaptable, interactive and contextual in the way they provide information. Instead of simply returning prepared responses, these APIs provide answers based on what they know to be correct, relying on information they’ve acquired over time
• Overview of cognitive services in Bluemix
  • User Modeling: The IBM Watson User Modeling service uses linguistic analytics to extract cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level. 
    • Watson User Modeling offers another dimension of the "360 Degree View" of a customer or other entity and starts to paint a picture of a person not just through their data but their personality and personal preferences.
    • Demo/test link: http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/?reset=true
      • Input: Text (such as social media, emails, blogs, or other communication) written by one individual
      • Output: A tree of cognitive and social characteristics in JSON format and a visualization of those characteristics using HTML and SVG
  • Concept Expansion: Maps colloquial terms to more commonly understood phrases. This cognitive service learns by example, taking the concept set you already know and learning from it to reveal additional yet similar terminology that you may not have known existed.
    • Concept Expansion could identify that 'The Big Apple' refers to New York City and that 'getting in touch' means communicating by email, letter or phone.
    • Input: The starting point word, a few terms that are examples of that word, and a data set to analyze
    • Output: A ranked list of terms with contextually similarly to the starting point word based on analysis of the data set
  • Language Identification: Identifies the language in which text is written
  • Machine Translation: Globalize on the fly. Translate text from one language to another
  • Message Resonance: Communicate with people with a style and words that suits them. The Message Resonance service analyzes draft content and scores how well it is likely to be received by a specific target audience. This analysis is based on content that has been written by the target audience itself, such as fans of a specific sports team
    • The Watson Message Resonance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system, it is possible to recommend most resonant words to use when crafting messages targeted at specific audiences.
    • Input: Term to evaluate and the audience/community to measure against
    • Output: A score ranking how well the term will be received by the intended audience/community. Higher resonance means the message has a higher likelihood of being viewed and shared.
  • Question and Answer: Direct responses to user inquiries fueled by primary document sources. Interprets and answers user questions directly based on primary data sources (brochures, web pages, manuals, records, etc.) that have been selected and gathered in a body of data or 'corpus'.
    • Input: User questions
    • Output: List of candidate passages, Confidence scores, Links to supporting evidence from the corpus
  • Relationship Extraction: Intelligently finds relationships between sentence components (nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, etc.)The service maps the relationships between the components in a sentence, so that users or analytics engines can more easily understand the meaning of individual sentences and documents.The Watson Relationship Extraction service makes sense of large unstructured data sets. It enables browsing of large collections of data via predefined sets of concepts and relations among them.
    • Input: Text news articles
    • Output: Entities from the text and relationships between those entities in xml format
  • Visual Rendering: Graphical representations of data analysis for easier understanding. Render interactive data visualizations that can range from common business charts to more advanced layouts. Visualizations can be easily modified to match user needs, visual styling, and types of data being analyzed.
    • This service is an SDK that can be used to visualize any numeric data.

Adding Cognitive Computing Capabilities to Applications

Application development has been maturing from a simple standalone application to a more distributed, cloud based, automated etc., applications. Now is the time to add one more interesting Cognitive Computing abilities to applications to make them smarter by delivering predictive capabilities. 

If I take an example and explain... We had standalone accounting applications, installed on a standalone computer, helping users to manage expenses, income, etc., The next level is an accounting application client server architecture that stores all of the information in a central repository, transforming to lighter & faster clients, the same application could be shared across hundreds of users. Then came (accounting) applications with cloud technologies where the application could be shared across millions of users across the globe. 

Now is the time for applications use all the data, past user interactions stored by millions of users and perform cognitive computing to predict  and provide suggestions to the users. 

I am sure this sounds very futuristic and a programmer would start thinking how to implement such feature rich applications. Well, it is expected to 'use a wheel rather than re-inventing it'. Similarly, there are predefined services that could be leveraged by application developers. 

IBM provides Watson Services that could be readily integrated into cloud applications on the IBM Bluemix platform. For more information, please visit the following link.

 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

Can I abstract PaaS application development and deploy to any cloud?

 Yes! Juju from Canonical Ltd. can do this and much more. A new entry into cloud domain.

Juju is not a PaaS offering. It allows developers to develop applications and then choose a PaaS to deploy (any private or public cloud). The applications could be deployed to a local Ubuntu Server as well. Also allows applications to migrate from one cloud to another. 

So this application abstraction from a specific cloud is making applications more independent / generic so they could execute on any cloud

Juju supports Cloud Foundry, which means even applications built for IBM Bluemix offering should be managed by Juju. 

Juju can be seen as a 'do it yourself' PaaS that allows PaaS platforms to run next to "legacy" software stacks in order to create a customized PaaS.

Juju is a service orchestration management tool that can bootstrap the applications to many clouds- Amazon Web Services, HP Cloud Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, OpenStack, etc.,

Juju client can run on  Ubuntu, Mac and Windows

What is Internet of Things (IoT)

IBM identified the need for making smarter cities with the integration of various technologies, products and services. Around 6 years ago, IBM started it's investment in Smarter Cities business that helps cities gain value from analytics, deliver services from the cloud, to mobile devices and engaging people in cities using social media. IBM is applying CAMSS technologies in cities to  confront some of their biggest challenges and starting to see some very attractive returns. 

Today the world calls it "Internet Of Things" (IoT) which is making way for us to build Smarter Cities.

Watch the Smarter Cities IBM YouTube channel for more videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIOYaH-xjvKCuMncEaBl35Q

Platform as a Service landscape

Small and medium software companies wanting turnkey solutions that are better and cheaper, increased in the recent past and they make up ~90% of the IT market. Customers want a tight coupling with the software development so they get benefited from continuous integration and reduced turnaround time for new features/fixes. The solution is to leverage Platform as a Service.

The cloud market is heating up with multiple big players investing huge, big customers, increasing their cloud adoption and many service providers are ready to leverage provide Platform as a Service, so it is time for us to take a brief look at various players in the market.

• Amazon Web Service
• • URL to access is http://aws.amazon.com 
  • Users can start for Free (http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/) 12 months free access to AWS Free Trail. it's having hundreds of thousands of registered users and running ~11 million applications 

• Google App Engine 
• • URL to access is https://cloud.google.com/ 
  • Users can sign up for Free and get $300 worth Google Cloud Platform Services. this is expensed only if you exceed the free quota ( https://cloud.google.com/appengine/#pricing ) The trail ends in 60 days or $300 spent. 
  • It's having hundreds of thousands of registered users with a million applications running.

• IBM Bluemix
• • URL to access is http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/paas.html
  • Users can start free with IBM ID (anyone can create an IBM ID), no credit card information required
  • Currently having thousands of users with thousands of applications hosted & running

• Microsoft Azure 
• • URL to access is http://www.windowsazure.com
  • Users can start with free signup for 30 days with $650 to spend
  • User needs to provide a Windows Live ID, phone number and Credit Card information
  • Complete details of pricing can be found at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/overview/

• Redhat OpenShift
• • URL to access is http://www.openshift.com
  • Users can start free and does not require to provide Credit Card information 
  • Currently having thousands of users million applications running

• Salesforce1 platform 
• • URL to access is http://www.salesforce.com/platform/overview/
  • Users can start free with a 30 day trial using google+ / facebook / linkendin accounts (to save time) or create a fresh login
  • More pricing details at http://www.sfdcstatic.com/assets/pdf/misc/DS_Force_Pricing_Comparison.pdf
  • Currently having millions of users with millions of applications hosted and running

Open technologies are key components for Dynmic & Hybrid Cloud

It is important to understand why cloud strategy for an enterprise should comprise of open technologies and how it helps support the business transformation.

Composable Business

Business is all about people, processes, data, assets and applications/systems that engage all of these aspects. Technology that changes every day, is driving business to evolve and it's time for us to change the way we work and integrate the business. A Composable Business is bringing together Information Technology, Line-of-business and Development. It is proven that 86 percent of high performing enterprises integrate technology across the board keeping 'business' as central point of focus.

Dynamic Hybrid Cloud

Dynamic Hybrid Cloud address the needs to transform Business to Composable Business, enabling enterprises to be more integrated, elastic and spearhead the changes required to address the market needs. 

• Dynamic Cloud could change the enterprises application landscape by reacting to workloads using policy driven orchestration to automatically scale up based on increased demand or scale down to optimize resource utility. 
• Hybrid Cloud gives the enterprises the opportunity to keep critical data  & processes on a private cloud / on-premises while securely leveraging public cloud benefits. 

Open technologies for Cloud

Having openness at each layer of a cloud architecture for an enterprise helps integrating their systems of engagement with systems of record. Open technologies are a strategic component for Dynamic Hybrid cloud achieving composable business model. 

• OpenStack is an open technology addressing Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). IBM is a Platinum Sponsor of Open Stack Foundation and has made significant contributions towards improving the robustness and stability. IBM products are build on OpneStack including IBM Cloud Manager V4.2 that delivers quick and easy multi-platform cloud solution.

• Cloud Foundry is an open technology addressing Platform as a Service (PaaS). IBM is a Platinum Sponsor of Cloud Foundry Foundation which provides interoperable PaaS framework allowing users to have freedom of choice across cloud infrastructure and application programming. IBM's own PaaS, Bluemix, is built on top of Cloud Foundry, which includes open partner ecosystem for binding applications to services.

To conclude Cloud is for everyone and enterprises adopting open technology based solutions / architectures would benefit from seamless interoperability and their infrastructures would be ready for business transformations requited for today's evolving markets.

Standardizing a Start Up Company infrastructure by adopting IBM Cloud Services

When I started my IT career in the late 90's i have seen technology companies setting up local /personal infrastructure all by themselves that involves spending big money, soon the dynamic transformation of IT industry took place which have put pressure to retain / reuse the infrastructure. The dropping costs of hardware increased the demand for using newer hardware. We all agree that optimized usage of infrastructure is the key for any technology StartUp company.

In my previous blog post i have provided insights into how a technology startup could leverage IBM Cloud Services (http://goo.gl/nKa8B3). Now in this post i will try to provide more detailed information and scenarios of how this could be further achieved.

In general, the bottom up stack for any technology startup is Networking, Storage, Servers, OS, Middleware, Run-times, Data and Applications. Traditionally, companies manage all of this stack in their local / distributed office space, which we refer as on-premises (on-Prem in short)

Now let us see how this could be transformed into cloud managed stack

Adopting IBM Softlayer Infrastructure as a Service will offload 50% of the stack. Softlayer offers various packages and subscription models that a startup company could evaluate and subscribe so they need not worry about Networking, Storage and Servers.

Advantages

• 24/7 Guaranteed availability
• Pay as you use model
• Dynamic expansion of the storage
• Optimized usage by releasing the infrastructure when not needed
• Saving on real estate

In this very dynamic and volatile IT world we know how fast the technologies keep changing. In this environment the success of a startup company is defined on Speed to Market. The developers who perform the ground work should have quick access to various tools, open technologies and Runtimes to deliver before competition. Adopting IBM Bluemix Platform as a Service will off load another 25% of the stack which provides developers a treasure trove of services not worrying about Operating Systems, Middleware and execution Run-times.
Advantages

•  Developers/testers focus only on how to accomplish their goals without spending time on setting up the environments
•  Instant access to development tools and services with automatic inclusion of dependent packages
•  Develops delivery integrated & made easy

Value for money is important for everyone involved... Startup companies, delivery and end customers. Adopting Software as a Service model will offload 100% of the stack where applications are born on cloud, delivered on cloud and consumed on a cloud. Applications and it's Data are cloud managed. End customers just request for an instance that could be provisioned in minutes
Advantages

• No manual installation / deployment required
• No shelf life after procuring the software

Now let's see how, these various Cloud Service models make sense with a simple scenario.

Sara and her friends have great ideas to start a technology start up company. They quickly performed market research and found that the requirements from the field are very volatile and competitive, so they have to speed up the implementation and delivery. This is going to put pressure on the hardware to buy, networks to setup, software to use, etc., They have decided to start with the bottom up approach.

First, they off loaded Network, Storage and Servers to IBM Softlayer by taking appropriate subscription that would suit their project. Remotely accessing their machines, they have installed the required software and kick started the development / testing activities and delivered on time.
Soon the enhancement requests followed, which provides enhanced capabilities like mobile access to their application. They also realized that they might not need all of the machines they subscribed to, but they might need a different configuration. Using Softlayer management tools they backup and release the unwanted machines, request for fresh hardware which is provisioned in minutes. To address the mobile requirement, Sara decided to leverage IBM Bluemix PaaS  that provides ready made mobile development platforms enabling their developers to develop right on the cloud, deliver using DevOps and automate the whole testing and integration efforts.
By now the Sara's company came a long way in gaining customer confidence and reputation. It is essential for them to manage the content they produce in the company like the policy documents, test cases, results, etc., and the importance of a content management system is clearly seen. Sara evaluates IBM Navigator on Cloud (INoC) and finds it as the best solution. INoC is delivered as a Software as a Service so Sara places a request for providing one instance (which is 4 nodes) and creates project specific folders to store documents and provided team specific access. Also store company policy documents, etc., providing secure access

In the above scenario we could see how a small Start up company leveraging IBM Cloud Service models could evolve into an enterprise while  standardizing their infrastructure during their growth path.

IBM Cloud services for a Technology Startup Company

I came across a friend who incorporated a Technology Startup Company, after few rounds of discussions, i could visualize his challenges which should be for any startup. The primary challenge for most of startup companies is getting fund / money to invest and optimized spending on real needs. Most part of it goes into finding a place to house the startup, human and hardware resources. Hiring the right talent,  setting up software and systems/servers/network infrastructure etc., with minimum utilization of real-estate.

IBM Cloud services offer Software, Platform and Infrastructure as a Service under one umbrella, which can address these challenges. By considering to use Softlayer IaaS offering, start-up companies could actually reduce lot of overhead

• Can have low power desktop machines connecting to mature development server setups in Softlayer environment
• Can depend on Softlayer professional team to manage the lab network, backup & recovery
• Can leverage IBM Navigator on Cloud to maintain enterprise content while giving access to the content / collaboration across desktop/laptop/mobile
• Quickly apply DevOps capabilities to optimize software scaling, integration and delivery which increases customer satisfaction

It is not necessary to subscribe for all of the services at ones. Adopting step-by-step bottom-up approach would give time to the entrepreneur to understand the real needs and expand accordingly.

First, optimizing infrastructure by subscribing to Softlayer IaaS will save on real-estate space and procurement of systems/servers. It's like leasing whatever hardware configuration is required, use it, scale it if the need be and once the work is done, release it. An important priority for a start-up would be to deliver value to market in the shortest possible time. So, securing the work done and using optimized infrastructure should be very important this is value to money

Second, focus should be on the Platform. Building an open standards based platform by using the existing services offered in the cloud and delivering it as a service (PaaS) to the workforce will enhance productivity. Companies can leverage continuous integration and devOps deliver platform using IBM BlueMix (and many other ever-growing services it offers)

Lastly, the in-house software used to manage company business/artifacts could be moved to cloud. Documentation like design docs, requirement specifications, test cases, finances, company policies etc., needs a work management / review process to harness the information, store and retrieve it effectively. Securing this company intellectual property is very important. Enterprise Content Management with IBM Navigator on Cloud delivers Software as a Service (SaaS) to address these concerns. Here is a demo of how this could be achieved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoPFKWdhnTI&rel=0


While the overall IBM Cloud offers much more that what we discussed, the above minimum services could be leveraged and scale to other offerings as the start-up grows into an enterprise.

• Some interesting case studies that help understand more : http://www.entrepreneurcountryglobal.com/ecosystem-economics/tag/case%20studies
• For more information please refer IBM Cloud Marketplace  http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/marketplace.html
• IBM SoftLayer woos startups  http://bit.ly/1usx3h8

Enjoy instant Applications like instant Coffee using IBM BlueMix - Part 1

Ever wondered to develop a software application using agile development methodology and continuous integration without the overheads of setting up a complex development environment? Ever wondered to distribute software applications with iterative enhancements and fixes, directly to your customers?

BlueMix - IBM is the way to explore! "A platform where developers can act like kids in a sandbox..." BlueMix is built on top of Cloud Foundry (PaaS) leveraging the power and flexibility offered by Softlayer (IaaS) 

So let's start understanding Cloud Foundry now. 

Cloud Foundry (CF) is a popular Cloud Computing Platform as a Service funded by VMware and EMC Corporation. As it's an open source project many experts refer it as Open Cloud for Platform as a Service (PaaS) where applications could be deployed, executed and scaled dynamically. Often, enterprise scale applications, due to their complexity, demand special skills to deploy and configure. Cloud Foundry PaaS eliminates this cost.

At a very high level CF has the following components 

• Self-service application execution engine: Manages executing application instances, tracks started instances and broadcast status messages
• An automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management: An orchestration process that governs the sequence of events to install, deploy and configure applications
• Scriptable command line interface (CLI): Used for deploying and managing applications in Cloud Foundry

These components aid the developers to create cloud based applications, push the apps (deploy) to stage them on the cloud infrastructure, trouble shoot when needed. As developers, we also understand that applications require various types of Runtimes, which are provided by Buildpacks. The moment an application is pushed to the CF, it examines the application artifacts, detect which runtimes are required and applies the respective buildpacks. CF by default provides System Buildpacks (java, node.js, GO, PHP, Python, Ruby) also there are many Community provided buildpacks (hosted on github)

Upcoming... Part 2 - Deployment of an application on Cloud Foundation (CF) and discuss the relationship between BlueMix and CF

What is all the buzz about "Infrastructure as a Service" offered in Cloud

With Cloud technologies gaining momentum I am sure many of us want some insights into this area. I came across Softlayer after IBM acquired this company and started exploring to understand how it provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the Cloud environment. So I started this journey looking into aspects like what Softlayer offers, it's strengths and a use case.

Softlayer is a global hosting company with ~21 thousand customers located in 140 countries. In the late 90's the word hosting company mostly referrers to hosting websites but now, Softlayer host machines / servers/nodes (with pre-installed images / software if required). It could be imagined like a huge mega lab that has the capacity to instantly provision machines with a variety of configurations for its customers located in 140 countries.

In order to cater to customers across the world, Softlayer has 13 data centers (expected to grow to ~30 by this year end) strategically located in various parts of the world. To improve network throughput, it uses private network lines between data centers for which customers are not charged. As we know that both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic are existing in today's network, Softlayer supports Dual Network Stack, which means the nodes (and its network infrastructure like routers etc.,) are capable of processing both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Also Softlayer uses Global DNS.

The moment a customer request is processed & approved, the enterprise scale servers (with high availability / load balanced / clustered) are deployed and provisioned in real time using orchestration and automation framework. The framework defines & executes the installation / deployment sequence of a software stack and automatically configures the environment in one-go, ready for the customer to start using it.

Benefits to the customer-

• Need not worry about real estate space, maintenance and  availability of the servers.
• Improves consumibility as there is no shelf life after procuring the software
• No skills required to install / deploy & configure enterprise scale software
• Software / Hardware issues are addressed by professional monitoring & services teams instantaneously (almost the same time, customer encountered the issues or in some cases even before the customer realizes)

Use case
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43260.wss
http://www.musicmastermind.com/
Music Mastermind's  ZyaMusic a cloud based solution using its patented Sound Better technology, allows users to create original music and share it using smartphones and tablets. They adopted hybrid cloud architecture and successfully launched their product world-wide, reducing the total resource footprint that translated into visible monthly savings

The biggest differentiating factors for a SoftLayer when compared with its competition are

• Its capability to provide Hybrid Cloud for customers. A Hybrid Cloud is a combination of nodes/ servers hosted, on-premises (on-Prem) of an enterprise and nodes hosted in the Softlayer Cloud. This type of Cloud offering is preferred among enterprises with strict regulatory policies to keep critical data inside the enterprise (example Banking industry)
• Allows customers to mix & match bare metal servers and virtual server instances to be provisioned in the cloud

To conclude, as more and more enterprises are considering to shift their focus to cloud services, offering infrastructure and platform as a service in the cloud will become the fundamental element to develop software using pure Agile methodology and deliver software services, fixes and new features in real-time, reducing the overall cost.