Last week at IBM InterConnect 2016 in Las Vegas, the company highlighted its new technology through customer stories. One of the most compelling stories was shared by Simon Wheatcroft, a long-distance runner, who happens to be blind. Jason Jacobs, founder and CEO of Runkeeper (FitnessKeeper, Inc.), and Wheatcroft joined John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about Wheatcroft’s journey using Runkeeper.

The race begins

Jacobs, also a fitness enthusiast, founded the startup seven years ago, and Runkeeper was recently acquired by the running shoe manufacturer ASICS. So as the mobile app grew to support over 50 million users in about 200 countries, Jacobs said he wanted to start gaining insight from the data and building personalization into the product to become more adaptive by offering personalized functionality on an individualized basis all over the world.

“These are some of the things we’ve been working with IBM over the last several weeks to start to lay the foundation to make those things possible,” he said.

Passing the baton

Adam Kocoloski, CTO, cloud data services for IBM, partnered with Jacobs and immediately moved Runkeeper to IBM Cloudant (a Distributed Database as a Service) as a way to access world-class technology and expertise without having to create and maintain it in-house. “For years now we have been managing that data layer making sure that Runkeeper keeps on running,” Kocoloski said. According to IBM, Cloudant supports 120,000 global data requests per second.

Over the past four weeks, the IBM team and the technologists at Runkeeper have been working to reveal the insights buried in their user data to deliver a more personalized experience. Using several cloud-based services from IBM, Runkeeper leveraged the technology of several products, including the newly announced Graph service, which enables organizations to build and work with powerful applications using a fully-managed graph database service. This provided insight into geospatial and route complexity.

Using the cloud to win the marathon

Looking to the future for Runkeeper, Kocoloski explained that it is “as much about gaining insight into the data and figuring out new ways to personalize the experience, new ways to create a vision for how this information can be used.”

Along with Graph service, Runkeeper employed dashDB, the IBM cloud-based data warehouse, along with social media and personality services from Watson, IBM’s cognitive processing system. The mission for IBM is to “Open for Data” in order to offer its customers an integrated set of services built on an open-source foundation. Customers will now have a self-service method to unravel the mystery hidden in their data.

Photo by Pixabay