While data is an enterprise’s most valuable resource when it comes to gaining competitive advantage and improving business performance, time is a critical component. Businesses run 24x7, tasking our data citizens to maximize actionable insights that will drive the actions of tomorrow.
However, if they are spending weeks – or even months – trying to find the right data, decoding where it came from, and figuring out if it is accurate, they are not closer to closing the gap between business goals and results. This is happening across every department in your organization, from data science to finance to marketing.
According to Gartner, by 2021, AI augmentation will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity. With AI at the core of new product development, IBM is tackling the most prevalent data challenges by bringing out new tools that help clients get their data ready for business fast, and allow them to focus more time on generating insights.
For us, getting control of this situation starts with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, formerly IBM Cloud Private for Data, our container-based data platform that integrates, governs and manages data across clouds. Earlier this year we advanced Cloud Pak for Data by announcing Watson Anywhere, which brought key Watson capabilities to the platform and enabled organizations for the first time to bring Watson capabilities directly to their data – rather than the other way around – regardless of what cloud they were on.
This week, we’re advancing the platform even further with the addition of several premium add-ons all designed to help people automate and improve their DataOps and discovery processes.
This week we are bringing:
Watson Knowledge Catalog Professional for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is designed to improve data findability for analysis and provide advanced governance for data protection. It allows an unlimited number of catalogs and better definition of policies that control access to data easily, defining business rules to identify what needs to be restricted or masked—without having to explicitly call out which data assets the rules apply to. This benefits exploration-as-access becomes persona-driven, so the appropriate data lineage descriptions and new auto-suggested visualizations help each user trust and understand the data they access.
Establishing the quality, governance and lineage of your data, regardless of where it resides, helps build the trusted analytics foundation that will allow you to leverage the power of analytics, machine learning (ML), and AI in upstream tools. This trusted foundation is the first step to reduce time and workflow inefficiencies in your organizations.
DataStage Edition for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is designed to provide high performance parallel run times to reduce latency. With this premium add-on an extended palette of connectors and stages are brought into the tool, allowing graphic building of integration and visualization of extract, transform, load (ETL) pipeline. Users can schedule transformation jobs in advance and have the ability to share, reuse, and version jobs using Git directly from the tool.
Watson Discovery for Cloud Pak for Data is AI search that can be used regardless of where data resides. The offering is designed to close existing knowledge gaps and correct low productivity by surfacing expert-level information and answers quickly for every employee. Watson Discovery for Cloud Pak for Data incorporates important features from the Watson Discovery IBM Cloud offering as well as a number of powerful net-new features.
Unique features include Smart Document Understanding, which provides complex document understanding and enables users to retrieve answers instead of a list documents; a rich assortment of enterprise document connectors including SharePoint, Box, Salesforce and Microsoft, as well as database and file systems; multiple machine learning tools to customize AI search to the users domain; and lastly, compatibility with more than 12 document types, including images and tables.
In addition to all of this, IBM and Trifacta this week collaborated to tackle the challenges head-on by introducing IBM InfoSphere Advanced Data Preparation, a data preparation solution with a data citizen friendly experience and ML transformation recommendations designed to reduce preparation time. It allows IT to operationalize trusted data and data citizens to use that data to power business value.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Data add-ons.
Learn more about IBM InfoSphere Advanced Data Preparation.