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Immersive Experiences in Cloud Pak for Data v5.0: Elevating User Engagement

By Malcolm Singh posted Wed June 19, 2024 02:39 PM

  

Authors:
Product Management: Sachin Prasad
Design: Marion Hekeler, Carmen D'Arlach
Engineering: Swaminathan Gounder,  Rahul Shinge
Content Management: Julia Bamford

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, organizations demand solutions that offer both versatility and efficiency. Cloud Pak for Data (CPD) v5.0 rises to this challenge with the introduction of "Immersive Experiences," a pioneering feature that revolutionizes the way users interact with multiple commercial products on a unified platform. This innovation addresses the significant feedback IBM received from its customers following the launch of watsonx, who found the need for separate namespaces in OpenShift to be inefficient. Immersive Experiences now seamlessly integrates these products within a single namespace, maintaining their distinct identities while streamlining operations and enhancing user satisfaction.

Addressing Customer Pain Points

Customers have highlighted the challenges of integrating and managing assets across different products, particularly when they are forced to install them in separate namespaces. This setup complicates asset consumption, lineage lookup, and overall integration processes. With Immersive Experiences, IBM aims to streamline these operations by enabling products to coexist in a single namespace while maintaining their distinct identities. This reduces the need for complex API integrations and makes it easier for users to manage and navigate between products.

What is Immersive Experience (IE)?

Immersive Experience ensures that commercially distinct products, even when installed on the same platform, are experienced independently. Each product maintains its branding, homepage, and navigation, creating a segmented yet cohesive environment to support the corresponding business use case. This ensures that while the technical deployment is unified, the user experience remains tailored and specific to each product. The immersive experience includes customized homepages, distinct menus, and targeted navigation for each product, ensuring a seamless transition for users. Immersive experiences also provide independent product URLs to access the product directly.

While Immersive Experiences enable independent brand identity, they also facilitate cross-product collaboration. This technology makes Immersive Experiences truly “immersive.” Based on the installed products, users can access various tools and features across different commercial offerings, not to mention the data catalogs and projects. These cross-product experiences are aptly called “Perspectives.”

A business user will see a 9-dot switcher that displays all available perspectives, allowing them to seamlessly switch between them and access the necessary tools and functions to complete their tasks. The following perspectives are enabled in the first release, depending on the products installed and activated:

  • IBM Cloud Pak for Data

  • watsonx

  • Data Product Exchange

  • watsonx Code Assistant

Benefits of a Common Platform Deployment Strategy with Immersive Experiences

  • Cost Efficiency: Utilizing a shared platform optimizes hardware resource usage, reducing duplication and costs. CPD and its services, known for their significant footprint, can now leverage shared resources, making the platform more competitive.

  • Streamlined Operations and Maintenance: Centralizing operations reduces management overhead, allowing for single upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, user management, and security management across all products.

  • Consistent User Experience: A unified platform ensures a consistent user experience across different products, enhancing usability and reducing the learning curve.

  • Avoid Risk of Churn: By integrating multiple products on a common platform, customers are more likely to remain loyal, as switching platforms would require significant effort and resources.

  • Ecosystem Lock-In: As customers become dependent on integrated platform-specific services, migrating to alternative solutions becomes challenging, increasing customer retention.

  • Holistic Analytics and Reporting: Centralized analytics and reporting across all products provide comprehensive insights and data consistency.

  • Simplified Licensing and Billing: A unified platform simplifies licensing and billing processes, reducing administrative overhead and ensuring compliance.

  • Better Footprint and Quota Management: Shared resources and infrastructure lead to better utilization of hardware and optimized quota management.

  • Single Day-2 Operations: Streamlined operations and maintenance processes reduce the complexity and time required for ongoing support and updates.

  • Sticky and Brand Cohesiveness: A unified platform enhances brand cohesiveness and user stickiness, fostering long-term customer loyalty.

Node Pinning 

A key feature supporting Immersive Experiences is "Node Pinning." This functionality allows for the allocation of specific groups of pods to predetermined sets of nodes, facilitating a form of soft segmentation within the cluster for accounting purposes. Node Pinning ensures compliance with licensing and VPC accounting when multiple products are installed in the same namespace. By using Node Pinning, customers can:

  • Coexist multiple products (e.g., CPD, watsonx, cartridges) without complicating VPC accounting.

  • Allow GPU-bound workloads to maximize ROI by pinning them to GPU nodes.

  • Benefit from an optional yet highly recommended feature to avoid non-compliance.

  • Utilize the updated Sales Configurator to provide precise VPC cost estimates during the sales process.

Conclusion

The Immersive Experiences feature in Cloud Pak for Data v5.0, supported by the Node Pinning functionality, represents a significant advancement in user engagement and platform efficiency and opens up the platform for future growth & innovations. By addressing customer pain points, enhancing operational efficiency, and providing a tailored user experience while ensuring proper tools available to users, IBM is setting a new standard in the industry.

This innovative approach not only improves customer satisfaction but also strengthens IBM's position in the competitive landscape, making it an even more compelling choice for enterprises seeking a unified, immersive Data and AI platform.

Learn about IBM Cloud Pak for Data v5.0 and Immersive Experiences

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Product Page

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Overview

Immersive Experiences

Cloud Pak for Data v5.0 Platform - What’s New blog


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