UPDATED 15:28 EDT / JUNE 23 2017

BIG DATA

IBM pushes speed and governance buttons at Munich conference

Speed and governance were the major themes coming out of the IBM Fast Track Your Data event in Munich, Germany, this week. Keynote speakers made several announcements designed to promote IBM Corp.’s data management portfolio and strengthen its marketing position on machine learning.

“Every company is a tech company now. IBM is enabling them to catch up in a fraction of the time,”said Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, during the event’s keynote address.

In keeping with the continued push for speed, IBM announced enhancements to its DB2 relational database management system with the introduction of a revised Developer Community Edition. It now comes in a Docker container that features faster deployment. The new Community Edition, which Thomas described as “download and go,” will give users “the ability to get to value in 15 minutes or less on any product.”

The European Union has mandated a set of requirements around the protection of personal data, scheduled to go into effect in 11 months. In response to this General Data Protection Regulation, IBM announced a new set of data governance tools and machine learning solutions to support customers who will need to comply with the far-reaching rules.

One of the new tools is a data management software platform that can be mapped to the GDPR’s reporting requirements. “The clock is running. Clients have to do something now,” Thomas said.

As part of its governance solution, IBM also announced the launch of the Open Data Governance Consortium for Apache Atlas. One of the members of the group is Hortonworks Inc., a key IBM partner. Just last week, the two companies announced a set of strategic partnerships involving Hadoop, an open-source-based software used for storing, processing and analyzing big data.

IBM also used the Fast Track forum to announce a new set of initiatives in machine learning. The company is launching the Data Science Experience in its London data center and is installing a machine learning hub in Böblingen, Germany.

Hopes to foster machine learning collaboration

The hope is that these two initiatives will foster more collaboration in the machine learning area between IBM and European companies through educational programs and hands-on workshops. Other machine learning hub teams at IBM have focused on use cases ranging from fraud detection to patient diagnosis.

“We’ve always believed in open approaches to data. Many companies force you to use their model, their framework, their language, and that’s not what we’re doing,” Thomas said.

The Fast Track announcements follow an active first half of 2017 for IBM, as the company faces competition in both governance and machine learning from technology powerhouses Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., to name just a few. In February, the company announced that it would move the Watson machine learning platform to its z/OS mainframe. And earlier this month, IBM released a series of announcements designed to combine its data science tools with Hortonworks’ software platform.

In his keynote remarks, Thomas compared the current state of data science to the time in U.S. history when mass commercialization of car technology ignited the automotive revolution. “We’re at a tipping point right now. Data science is like that first car,” he said.

Also speaking at the Munich conference was Hilary Mason, founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs Inc. The data technologist, who spent four years at Bitly Inc. before founding her company, described examples of projects she has worked on to illustrate the future of data science.

One initiative involved a text summarization algorithm that can accurately summarize pages of written material it might take 20 minutes to read into a couple of paragraphs that can be digested in two minutes or less.

“The real way to think about data science is not as a pure technology problem, but as a human problem,” Mason said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the IBM Fast Track Your Data event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Fast Track Your Data. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: IBM Fast Track Your Data event

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