Watson Weekly: A Connectors Festival

October 14, 2015

I read “IBM Adds to Watson Analytics with Expert Storybooks, Connectors to Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, AWS.” Watson is no longer a game show winning, recipe making, and cancer curing search system. Watson does analytics, which means that various IBM acquisitions’ technology can be used to count, calculate, and predict. Well, Watson is not search anymore, gentle reader. Watson is the brand, the new IBM, the revolution in cognitive computing for which you and I have been been longing.

The write up reports:

IBM today is announcing new ways for business users to easily explore and visualize company data with its Watson Analytics cloud-based big data analytics tool.

The cloud. Big data. Yes.

I learned:

IBM put together the Expert Storybooks — for working with data on sports, weather, marketing, social media, and finance — in partnership with AriBall, The Weather Co., OgilvyOne, Twitter, American Marketing Association, Nucleus Research, MarketShare, and Intangent.

Expert story books. Yes. Yes.

And what makes this solution hum is revealed in this way:

The connectors make it possible to hook up with the Redshift data warehouse service form the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, the Microsoft Azure public cloud (IBM’s SoftLayer competes with both Azure and AWS), IBM dashDB (competes with AWS Redshift) MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2 (which competes with SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase), Cloudera Impala, Apache Hive, Box (now a prominent IBM partner) Pivotal Greenplum, Salesforce, and Twitter, among others.

Isn’t Greenplum part of EMC Dell? Why not just use the Greenplum tools? Why not use the EMC import tools? Frankly I am not sure what IBM is offering. With some time and scripting ability, it may be possible to do analytics and “story books” with the systems to which IBM is “hooking up.”

My take is that IBM is trying really hard to make Watson into a significant revenue generating machine. Pitching as a benefit 100 million lines of code and telling readers of the New York Times about dozens of APIs are interesting approaches to making sales.

Connecting to competitive services, I must agree, is a master stroke on a par with the Watson business strategy. But IBM faces a long par five with Watson, the cognitive computing beastie.

Stephen E Arnold, October 14, 2015

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.