IBM today announced the launch of IBM watsonx.data, a data store built on the open Lakehouse architecture. It enables businesses to easily integrate and manage structured and unstructured data, wherever that data resides, for high-performance AI and analytics. The solution is currently in closed beta and is expected to be generally available in July 2023.
What is watsonx.data?
Watsonx.data is at the core of IBM’s new AI and data platform, IBM watsonx, announced today at IBM Think. With watsonx, IBM launches a centralized AI development studio. It gives enterprises access to their own IBM and open source foundational models, watsonx.data to collect and clean data, and a toolkit for AI governance.
Watsonx.data allows users to access data through a single entry point and run multiple query engines for their own purposes across their IT environment. With Workload Optimization, organizations can reduce their data warehouse costs by up to 50% by enhancing this solution.[1] It also offers built-in governance, automation, and integration with your organization’s existing databases and tools to simplify setup and user experience.
Data management lifecycle support
According to IDC’s Global StorageSphere, enterprise data stored in data centers will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30% between 2021 and 2026.[2] As the volume of data grows, data silos, operational costs, and regulatory pressure can increase, increasing scrutiny and demand for improved business outcomes through investments in data, analytics, and AI.
This explosion of data spans every industry and presents an opportunity for organizations to transform it into actionable insights that can inform revenue strategies and improve operational efficiency.
said Vitaly Tsivin, EVP of Business Intelligence at AMC Networks. “Watsonx.data makes it easy to access and analyze vast amounts of distributed data, extracting actionable insights and maximizing resources to deliver curated, high-quality content from AMC Networks. We can give our viewers a great user experience.”
Specifically, watsonx.data runs both on-premises and in multi-cloud environments. The solution helps businesses tap into increasingly siled data and apply advanced AI and analytics to derive actionable insights. It also supports robust data governance and observability across the data management lifecycle.
Strong partnerships for even stronger solutions
Watsonx.data is designed to use Intel’s built-in accelerators on Intel’s new 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors and open source query engines such as Presto, Velox acceleration libraries and Spark for high performance SQL queries provides fast and reliable data processing for Reporting, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning.
Das Kamhout, vice president and senior principal engineer for Intel’s Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group, said: Partnering with IBM, he looks forward to optimizing the watsonx.data stack and achieving breakthrough performance through joint technical contributions to the Presto open source community. ”
IBM and Intel have a long working relationship on data and AI products such as IBM Db2 optimization on the Intel Xeon platform, AI acceleration with IBM Watson NLP libraries for embedding using OneAPI, and now watsonx.data. has a history of
Watsonx.data allows users to modernize their data repositories with data warehouse-like capabilities while benefiting from low-cost object storage and open data and table formats like Iceberg. , to make data-driven decisions in minutes.
Cloudera’s EVP of Product Management, Paul Codding, said: “IBM and Cloudera customers will benefit from a truly open, interoperable hybrid data platform that will facilitate and accelerate the adoption of AI across an increasingly diverse set of use cases and business processes. ”
IBM and Cloudera have a long-term strategic partnership that includes certified product integration and a joint sales and support model.
Wasonx.data is available on-premises as well as multiple cloud providers such as IBM Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This builds on last year’s announcement that IBM has expanded his relationship with AWS to offer IBM software as a service on AWS. This solution is also available on AWS Marketplace.
Soo Lee, Director of Worldwide Strategic Alliances at AWS, said: “By making watsonx.data available as a service on the AWS Marketplace, we further support our customers’ growing needs for hybrid cloud. It gives you the flexibility to run a software tailored to your unique requirements.”
Watsonx.data extends IBM’s market leadership in data and AI. More recently, evidenced by T’s reputation as a leader.The Forrester Wave: Data Management for Analytics, StepZen, Databand.ai, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog, IBM zSystems, IBM Watson Studio, and IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson. These integrations enable watsonx.data users to implement a range of industry-leading data catalogs, lineage, governance, and observability solutions across their data ecosystem.
Post-launch, watsonx.data will continue to incorporate the latest performance enhancements to the Presto open source query engine via Velox and through the recent acquisition of Ahana, the only SaaS for Presto and a strong contributor to Presto Open. , which is expected to undergo continued development. source community. Further development of watsonx.data also incorporates IBM’s Storage Fusion technology to enhance data caching between remote sources, as well as semantic automation capabilities built on IBM Research’s underlying model to enable conversational Data discovery, exploration, and enrichment are automated through the user experience of
details of watsonx.data
All statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
[1] When comparing published 2023 list prices normalized to VPC hours for watsonx.data to several leading cloud data warehouse vendors. Savings may vary by configuration, workload, and vendor.
[2] IDC, Worldwide Global StorageSphere Forecast, 2022-2026: An Installed Base of 7.9ZB of Storage Capacity in 2021 at a Cost of $370 Billion — Is It Enough? (IDC Doc #US49051122, May 2022)
