The healthcare industry is an excellent use-case example of where innovations and emerging technologies are taking hold. IBM is set to provide analytic solutions and intelligent decisions with applications like IBM Watson and platforms like Apache Spark.

Rod Smith, VP of the IBM emerging Internet technologies and IBM fellow, revealed to Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM Insight 2015 that collaborative technologies, like notebooks, are shaping innovation.

New technologies in open source

Smith explained that new technologies in open source, such as Spark technologies, want to “help solution developers bring analytics into applications quickly.”

While it used to take Spark one week to update and put data into an analytics platform and utilize it, it now only takes a few hours. As Smith puts it, “Breakthroughs need to be deployed fast,” and these new innovations make it so workloads can shift to newer systems and lead to the acceleration in the use of analytic data.

Notebooks are live analytics documents that help provide open-ended answers to the open-ended questions that businesses are now asking. Smith described this as a “spreadsheet of what-ifs” rather than the traditional in and out application data. These “interactive dashboards” can be handed off to business users who will be able to interact with the information that’s relevant to them.

Vellante noted that the platform is much more than an “observer” and “trend spotter,” and Smith explained that they gather “customer examples to see if trends have weight behind them,” looking for a minimum of roughly 12 to consider it adoptable. By getting the customer’s reaction to this service, users can ensure that they don’t “miss the mark” and can apply relevant information as needed for the customers.

Notebooks were used to develop Watson, and notebooks, along with Watson, have incredible potential in their effect on the human condition, such as in the healthcare industry, where applications like Watson can be used to help doctors provide healthcare solutions for patients tailored to what the doctor needs.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE