IBM's new services to help enterprises with cloud migration

To help enterprises migrate and more easily generate business insights, IBM has announced a range of new services on its Bluemix cloud platform. The new services come just a few weeks after IBM merged its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure with its Bluemix services, scrapping the SoftLayer brand. According to IDC, the amount of high-value data worth analyzing will double by 2020, and much of this data will be in the form of complex, unstructured information. “Cloud is the platform that enables cognitive intelligence,” said John Murphy, Vice President, IBM Watson Data Platform.

“We’re continuing to grow our catalog of cloud data services on Bluemix so that we can help developers and data scientists better manage and more quickly interpret data for business innovation.”

According to Big Blue, the cloud is considered to be a powerful engine to collect and interpret vast amounts of data by organizations. However, many are struggling to move their already existing datasets to the cloud and retain control of where they reside and how they are accessed. IBM Decision Optimization, Bluemix Lift and dashDB for Transactions can help organizations overcome this challenge and make more informed business decisions by enabling them to more easily aggregate, ingest and analyze expanding workloads.

IBM’s new services

Big Blue’s Decision Optimization on Cloud claims that it can ingest large amounts of data including predictions, master and transactional data, business goals, and business rules to prioritize and rank business decisions such as plans and schedules. It includes the CPLEX Optimizer Engines and can run as a standalone, embedded in applications using a Rest API, or be used in Jupyter Notebooks within IBM’s Data Science Experience. According to the company its Bluemix Lift is a data migration tool that quickly, securely and reliably migrates databases from existing on-premise data centers to IBM Bluemix and IBM Watson Data Platform. Bluemix Lift encrypts data being transferred, helping to securely move it at a rate of up to ten times faster than traditional offerings. The technology is also designed to minimize downtime, so that applications using the source database can run uninterrupted during migration. In addition, Lift has been designed to be highly reliable, enabling data transfers to keep flowing even during a connectivity loss. IBM states that its dashDB for Transactions is a fully managed SQL database service on IBM Bluemix, optimized for transactional and web workloads to help developers fuel cloud-based applications. It offers high availability on selected plans, as well as pay-per-use units. It is part of IBM’s dashDB portfolio, offering a workload-optimized database environment designed to meet both the data warehousing and transactional needs of applications.