Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Proud to be an IBM Champion

Just a quick post today about the IBM Champions program, which if you haven't heard about, is a special program run by IBM to recognize and reward non-IBM thought leaders for their work associated with IBM products and communities. 

IBM publishes the list of IBM Champions annually and the title is valid for one year. So, champions must be nominated each year to maintain their status.

I want to thank IBM for running such a wonderful program and for all they have done to help recognize those of us in the trenches using IBM's technology. I have been named an IBM Champion for Data and Analytics again this year... for the 10th time. So IBM bestowed upon me this Acclaim badge:


As an IBM Champion I have had the opportunity to interact with IBM folks and with other IBM Champions at events, webinars, and in person, and it has definitely helped to enrich my professional life.

Although the majority of IBM Champions focus on data and analytics, the program is not just for data people! IBM names champions in each of the following nine categories: 
  • Data & Analytics
  • Cloud 
  • Collaboration Solutions 
  • Power Systems 
  • Storage 
  • IBM Z 
  • Watson IoT 
  • Blockchain 
  • Security 
If you are, or know of, somebody who should be an IBM Champion, you can nominate them here: https://developer.ibm.com/champions/.

Thanks again, IBM... and congratulations to all of this year's IBM Champions.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

IBM Information on Demand 2013, Tuesday

The second day of the IBM IOD conference began like the first, with a general session attended by most of the folks at the event. The theme of today's general session was Big Data and Analytics in Action. And Jake Porway was back to host the festivities.

The general session kicked off talking about democratizing analytics, which requires putting the right tools in people's hands when and where they want to use them. And also the necessity of analytics becoming a part of everything we do.

These points were driven home by David Becker of the Pew Charitable Trust when he took the stage with IBM's Jeff Jonas Chief Scientist and IBM Fellow. Becker spoke about the data challenges and troubles with maintaining accurate voting rolls. He talked about more than 12 million outdated records across 7 US states. Other issues mentioned by Becker included deceased people still legitimately registered to vote, people registered in multiple states, and the biggest issue, 51 million citizens not even registered.

Then Jonas told the story of how Becker invited him to attend some Pew meetings because he had heard about Jonas' data analytics expertise. After sitting through the first meeting Jonas immediately recognized the problem as being all about context. Jonas offered up a solution to match voter records with DMV records instead of relying on manual modifications.

The system built upon this idea is named ERIC, short for the Electronic Registration Information Center. And Pew has been wowed by the results. ERIC has helped to identify over 5 million eligible voters in seven states. The system was able to find voters who had moved, not yet registered and those who had passed away.

"Data finds data," Jonas said. If you've heard him speak in the past, you've probably heard him say that before, too! He also promoted the G2 engine that he built and mentioned that it is now part of IBM SPSS Modeler.

This particular portion of the general session was the highlight for me. But during this session IBMers also talked about Project NEO (the next generation of data discovery in the cloud), IBM Concert (delivering insight and cognitive collaboration), and what Watson has been up to.

I followed up the general session by attending a pitch on Big Data and System z delivered by Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk and IBM's Dan Wardman. Stepehen started off  the session and he made a couple of statements that were music to my ears. First, "Data doesn't always have to be big to lead to better decisions." Yes! I've been saying this for the past couple of years.

And he also made the observation that since data is more readily available, businesses should be able to move toward evidence-based decision-making. And that is a good thing. Because if instead we are making gut decisions or using our intuition, the decisions simply cannot be as good as those based on facts. And he backed it up with this fact: organizations  using analytics are 2.2x more likely to outperform their industry peers.

O'Grady also offered up some Big Data statistics that are worth taking a look at --> here

And then Wardman followed up with IBM's System z information management initiatives and how they tie into big data analytics. He led off by stating that IBM's customers are most interested in transactional data instead of social data for their Big Data projects. Which led to him to posit that analytics and decision engines need to exist where the transactional data exists -- and that is on the mainframe!

Even though the traditional model moves data for analytics processing, IBM is working on analytics on data without moving it. And that can speed up Big Data projects for mainframe users.

But my coverage of Tuesday at IOD would not be complete without mentioning the great concert sponsored by Rocket Software. Fun. performed and they rocked the joint. It is not often that you get to see such a new, young and popular band at an industry conference. So kudos to IBM and Rocket for keeping things fresh and delivering high quality entertainment. The band performed all three of their big hits ("Carry On", "We Are Young", and "Some Nights", as well as a bevy of other great songs including a nifty cover of the Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

All in all, a great day of education, networking, and entertainment. But what will Wednesday hold? Well, for one thing, my presentation on Understanding The Rolling 4 Hour Average and Tuning DB2 to Control Costs.

So be sure to stop by the blog again tomorrow for coverage of IOD Day Three!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

100 Years of IBM


If you have anything at all to do with computers or information technology, you have something to thank IBM for. Watch this video to find out what!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

IBM Information On Demand 2010 - The Final Keynote

The keynote session for the third day of the IOD conference features the authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I've read their first book and it is an excellent read... I highly recommend it.

But, of course, there are the IBMers that must speak first. The session kicked off with a video on intelligence being infused into the devices we use in our everyday life. And this “smarter planer” improves our life in countless ways. Smart grids, smart healthcare, smart supply chains, etc. All of which make us more productive and effective not just in business, but in all aspects of our lives. IBM calls this the “Decade of Smart.”

The first part of the session then featured Mike Rhodin, Sr. VP IBM Software Solutions Group. He indicated that we are at the beginning of what is going to constitute massive changes to the way we look at and solve problems. He explained by talking about solutions for commerce that have changed over the last decade or so. The experience is vastly different today across the board. This is so in terms of how buying decisions are made, how buying is done, and how the transaction is completed.

But how can we know what the customer of the future wants? The idea now is to look at how you can leverage things like social media to perform “sentiment analysis” to engage in conversation. By making it a dialogue instead of a one way street we can start this transformation.

He talked about a Southwest flier who was dissatisfied by a delay and tweeted about it. A few days later a Southwest representative contacted him and offered him “something” to assuage his dissatisfaction. Although that is good, he said it would have been better if the Southwest rep was waiting for him at the gate at his destination. OK, but in my opinion, it would have been even better if the Southwest rep could have made contact before the plane took off (either on the plane or at the gate if they had not yet boarded).

Next up was Brenda Dietrich, VP Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences and IBM Research. It was good to hear from someone in the research group because they don't get "out" to speak much. Dietrich espoused the global reach of IBM’s research group with 9 major offices across the world and many more co-laboratories, which are smaller labs with the goal of working with more local talent.

If it has to do with the future of technology, IBM Research is probably involved in it. Examples include nanotechnology, supercomputing and workload-optimized systems, cloud computing, and analytics.

The future of the “smarter planet” is at optimizing individual systems, like an electrical grid. And then developing systems of systems where those individual systems interact with other systems. For example, where the electrical grid interacts with the traffic grid. Additionally, today things are being digitized and we are analyzing and reacting to this information. We are moving toward using this information to model and predict outcomes.

She also discussed an analytics project called Smart Enterprise Executive Decision Support (SEEDS). It is a super-dashboard that IBM Research is working on. It incorporated a common data model with multiple IBM technologies to perform analytics that delivers better answers. Sounds exciting to me!

And IBM Research has even created a computer that plays Jeopardy! The video she played that demonstrated that was very impressive. This is especially so because it understood the questions in natural language, which is very difficult for computers to accomplish.

Then the Freakonomics dudes came out. And they were very entertaining. They took turns telling stories. Levitt is the economist and Dubner is the writer, but both were eloquent speakers who mixed information with humor extremely well. Dubner started out with my favorite story from their first book: how the legalization of abortion led to a decrease in crime. If that surprises you, you really need to read the book(s).

Levitt followed and told the story of how adding social security number to the tax forms caused 7 million children to vanish from the face of the Earth. It turns out that Americans are very immoral and had created children for the tax deduction. Levitt had troubles believing this until he talked to his father and was told that he himself had lost two brothers!

I would try to explain how they then moved from trying to teach monkeys to use money to a discussion of the proper pricing for prostitution services... but it would be far better if you read about it in their book(s). I know after seeing them that I am going to buy their new book, SuperFreakonomics.

All in all, though, it was a thoroughly entertaining and education final keynote session at the IOD show.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

IBM Announces DB2 10 for z/OS Beta Program

IBM announced the beta program for the next version of DB2 today, now "officially" known as DB2 10 (no more DB2 X). It is a closed beta program that will begin on March 12, 2010. That means you have to be selected by IBM to participate.

The announcement highlighted some of the areas of improvement to be delivered by DB2 10 for z/OS, and at the top of that list, to no one's surprise, is performance. DB2 10 promises to deliver out-of-the-box savings by improving operational efficiencies ranging from 5% to 10% out-of-the-box CPU savings for traditional workloads and up to 20% out-of-the-box CPU savings for nontraditional workloads.

Other areas called out by IBM in the announcement include
  • Improved business resiliency through scalability improvements and fewer outages (planned or unplanned).
  • Schema evolution or data definition on demand as well as query performance manageability enhancements support improved availability.
  • New features such as hash access, index include columns, inline large objects, parallel index updates, faster single row retrievals, work file in-memory, index list prefetch, 64-bit memory enhancements, use of the 1 MB page size of the System z10, buffer pools in memory, access path enhancements, member clustering for universal table spaces, efficient caching of dynamic SQL statements with literals, improved large object streaming, and SQL procedure language performance.
  • Rapid application and warehouse deployment for business growth including improved concurrency for data access, data management, and data definition.
  • The ability avoid an outage by adding active log data to a subsystem.
  • Improved application and data warehousing support including temporal data, a 64 bit ODBC driver, currerntly committed locking, implicit casting or loose typing, timestamp with time zone, variable timestamp precision, moving sum, and moving average.
  • Improvements to DB2's XML support including expanded pureXML, customer-driven performance and usability requirements, schema validation in the engine, binary XML exchange format, multiversioning, easy update of subparts of XML document, stored procedures, user-defined functions and triggers, XML index matching with date/timestamp, and a CHECK XML utility.
  • Enhanced query and reporting facilities, including QMF V10 with over 140 new analytical functions, support for HTML, PDF, and Flash reports, and more.
So it would seem that there is a lot of new functionality for us to begin to become acquainted with. As IBM rolls out more details, and customers begin to use the new version of DB2, we will examine some of these new features in more depth here on the DB2 Portal blog.

If you are interested in the beta program, the pre-requisite for DB2 10 is z/OS V1.10 (5694-A01) or later running in 64 bit mode. More information about the DB2 10 beta program is available on IBM's web site.

No GA date for DB2 10 has been announced.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

IBM Manages the Data Lifecycle

Data lifecycle is a somewhat new-ish term, at least in terms of what I plan to talk about in this blog posting. The data lifecycle – and data lifecycle management – deals with tracking, managing, and understanding data and metadata as it flows through organizations. From its inception…whether entered by a clerk or read via a feed or loaded from an external source, etc…through its various usages…whether to conduct business, analyze trends and patterns, and so on…tracked from system to system, application to application, and user to user…and finally through its end of life.

Not many companies today can track all of their important data and what happens to it throughout its entire lifecycle. But doing so is important. Having such a capability enables organizations to adapt and react, gaining a competitive advantage. Much can go awry as data moves throughout an organization. Schema changes, policy changes, regulations adapt, programs change, formats changes, and so on. Any of these things can cause data quality issues, which should be brought to the attention of the business analyst using the data. But how often is this done? Knowing the history of data and its related metadata can improve business processes. But it is a major task – both for businesses and IT vendors hoping to offer solutions.

Which brings me to today’s (February 3, 2010) announcements from IBM. Big Blue announced new data protection software, a line of consulting services and resources and previewed information monitoring software to help organizations expand their use of trusted information to improve decision making. These moves further bolster IBM’s already formidable arsenal of data lifecycle management solutions.

The data protection announcement was for Optim Data Redaction. This solution, engineered for unstructured data like Word documents and PDF files, automatically recognizes and removes sensitive content from documents and forms. For example, a customer’s credit scores in a loan document could be hidden from an office clerk, while still being visible to a loan officer. In today’s atmosphere of more and more stringent regulations, a data redaction solution is becoming a requirement. For example, PCI DSS industry standards dictate specific rules regarding the display of debit and credit card information on receipts and reports.

Optim Data Redaction is planned for general availability in March 2010.

The information monitoring announcement was for InfoSphere Business Monitor. This technology is based on a combination of work from IBM’s research group and technology gained when IBM acquired Guardium. Guardium is a database activity monitoring (or auditing) solution. InfoSphere Business Monitor tracks the quality and flow of an organization’s information and provides real-time alerts of potential flaws. For example, if a health insurance company was analyzing profit margins across different product lines (individual, group, HMO, Medicare, etc.), decision makers would immediately be alerted when a data feed from a specific geography was not successfully integrated.

InfoSphere Business Monitor is available as a technology preview; it is not generally available and no GA date was announced.

At the same time, IBM announced its intention to acquire Initiate Systems, a provider of data integrity software for information sharing among healthcare and government organizations. Initiate's software helps healthcare clients work more intelligently and efficiently with timely access to patient and clinical data. It also enables governments to share information across multiple agencies to better serve citizens. IBM plans to continue to support and enhance Initiate's technologies while helping clients take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio, specifically Cognos and InfoSphere solutions for BI and analytics. This acquisition bolsters IBM’s data lifecycle management offering along these verticals.

And all of today’s announcements serve to clarify IBM’s ascent to the throne within the realm of information and data lifecycle management.

Monday, October 26, 2009

IBM IOD2009 Day One

It is Monday, October 26, 2009, and the annual IBM Information on Demand (IOD2009) conference is officially underway. Well, actually it kicked off with a bang on Sunday. The exhibition hall opened at 6:00 pm and the early goers traipsed through the vendor hall sharing stories, checking out the vnedor's wares, and looking for the latest tschotskes (the favorites seem to be a mini-book light being given out by SPSS and the nifty DB2 t-shirts being given out by SEGUS, Inc.).

But the event really does not get started (at least as far as I'm concerned) until the big Monday morning kickoff, which this year was emceed by Terry Fator (the ventriloquist impersonator who won America's Got Talent) last year. He did a very nice job, and his mimicry and ventriloquism skills are great... but I think ventriloquism works better in a more intimate setting.

Before Terry came on an IBMer shared several tidbits of data from research and from polls they have been taking at IOD. For example, did you know that 15 petabytes of data are created every day? Regarding the even, they shared that there are more overall attendees here than there were at last year's event (6,000+) and that the average distance folks traveled to attend #IOD2009 is 2500 miles. You can actually participate in the daily IOD polls at http://iodpoll.com.

In between the entertainment respites, we got to hear from several IBM folks, including Ambuj Goyal, Arvind Krishna, and Frank Kern. According to Mr. Goyal, IBM is building an information on demand software stack to deliver trusted information. This can solve a very real problem that organizations are experiencing today. You see, it seems that one in three business leaders frequently make critical decisions based on inaccurate or non-existing information. Business executives don't just need data, but trusted information that can be relied upon for analysis to make accurate business decisions.

Again, according to Goyal, he sees IBM's Information Agenda doing for trusted information what ERP did for enterprise resource processes. IBM will help move its customers from information projects to information-based architecture and operations, moving organizations from information on demand to information transformation.

Then Frank Kern hosted three IBM customers as he asked each of them to explain how they benefited from IBM's Information Management solutions. The representative from BlueCross BlueShield talked about their data warehouse with 54 millions records, which happens to be the largest healthcare data warehouse in the world. Their analytical data is made available thru a portal. Offering integrated healthcare details helps improve healthcare. And the Chevron representative spoke about how IBM has helped Chevron improve its supply chain operations using integrated information.

And
Arvind Krishna, GM of the Information Management group at IBM, told about IBM's on-going investments in research and development for IOD. So far, IBM has invested over $12 billion in R+D and acquisitions.

IBM also unveiled some announcements today at IOD including several new offerings to provide organizations with analytics capabilities to make better use of their archived information and improve business processes. These offerings are part of IBM's unified archiving strategy called IBM Smart Archive. Most intriguing to me is the preview of a SaaS offering called IBM Information Archive Cloud Services. The entire press release can be read here, if you're interested in the topic.

I also attended a presentation on DB2 X which was quite interesting, too. Delivered by Jeff Josten, there was much good news for mainframe DB2 folks including improved performance, temporal support, improved utility operations, hashed data and access paths, and more. I tweeted about this quite extensively on Twitter.

In fact, if you want to follow my tweets all week (well, thru Wednesday) be sure to follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/craigmullins... even when I'm not at a conference like IOD, I regularly tweet on DB2, database, and information management topics.