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Dealing with the Itanium Fallout – Part 2 [IBM]

June 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Oracle’s decision in March to end software development on in Intel Itanium-based systems has a lot of IT decision makers taking another hard look at ways to improve their environment, lower costs and reduce the risk of future disruptions.

For those who want to stay on UNIX and remain loyal to Oracle software, moving to IBM Power/AIX is proving to be the clear choice.

IBM Power7 has the industry leading UNIX solution, offering better price for performance than comparable systems from Sun. Power Systems has over a 20-year history of technology innovations, and IBM has built a steady track record in Power’s road map during the past five years, gaining steady market share – in fact, IBM has gained 12 points of market share in the $14 billion UNIX space since 2005 and saw its server revenues grow 22.1% in the first quarter.

When it comes to performance, results on the new Power7 benchmarks such as Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C (TPCC), SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) and SPEC rates (integer and floating-point) range from 1.5 time to 2.5 time better than its closest competition.

In addition to performance, [Read more...]

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Watson & Your Business Part 4: Enabling visibility and understanding risk [IBM]

March 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“The recent financial crisis,” says financial services executive Jay Dweck, “highlights the problem of systemic risk. One thing that causes this systemic risk is interdependency and these failures that start to go like dominoes. You could use something like Watson to understand what creates those interdependencies.”

Whether an extension of banking or insurance or any business really, Watson’s understanding of language, its capability to learn and its sheer processing power – 2,800 Power Unix processors running in parallel – could put a significant dent in enterprise visibility – or the ability to see an organization’s processes and operations in action – not to mention understanding, managing and simplifying the types of risks every organization continually faces.

According to banking.com, “if a financial institution could harness Watson’s computing power, it could determine the proper actions as they happen. Watson has the ability to analyze multiple scenarios, many broader, more impossible and complex than those able to be executed on the average statistical model.” [Read more...]

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Watson & Your Business Part 2: Making better decisions in real-time. [IBM]

March 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In Part 1, I took a look at how the DeepQA technology behind Watson – IBM’s latest language-deciphering supercomputer – can help better understand people, whether they’re customers, donors or students.

But what about going beyond understanding? What about making, quite literally, life or death decisions?

“Built into Jeopardy!,” says IBM’s Katharine Frase, “is this notion of confidence. And in the real world there are lots of problems just like that. You don’t want your doctor to guess. You want him to have confidence in his answer before he decides to give you a treatment.”

Some of the leading minds behind Watson’s mind believe Watson’s DeepQA technology and the robustness of its hardware – 90 Power 750 servers with 2,880 POWER7 cores, 500GB per second on-chip bandwidth and 35 terabytes of memory and clustered disk storage – could significantly impact the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.

How?

Imagine medical records, texts, journals and research documents all stored in a Watson-type machine, one that doesn’t simply call it up the way search technology would, but rather understands the stored information and instantly delivers answers to healthcare providers. [Read more...]

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