IBM Watson Vs Wipro Holmes

Recently one of my esteemed customer asked me how IBM Watson compares to Wipro Holmes. Well I must admit I never heard before that Wipro had made a product named Holmes. And I am sure most have not as well. So that prompted me to do some research on this. And to my surprise I found that not only Wipro had made "Holmes " but even TCS have "Ignio" and Infosys made "Mana" and all being put as a potential competitor to IBM Watson by some enthusiasts. The product name "Holmes" brought a chuckle on my face. A good afterthought from Wipro - taking a leaf from Arthur Conan Doyle stories, may be oblivious of the fact that IBM Watson was named after its founder and CEO. So how good is this Holmes? Well I think its best summed up by Wipro CTO KR Sanjiv quoting that "We are working with Watson, we have people trained on Watson. Watson can address certain kinds of use cases, Holmes certain others. Watson does not, for instance, do visual learning (learning from images). We are building Holmes in a way that it will also do visual learning," he said.

And then as I delved further, to my utter dismay I found that its nothing more than an automation tool made for automating back-office support jobs. So it would not be prune to compare it with Watson - a cognitive computing system, one that behaves like our brain, learning through experiences, finding correlations, and remembering and learning from the outcomes. Add to it the 50+ APIs that make Watson stands out and having applications in over 20 industries across 50 countries, 50,000 developers and 4000 partners, 9 languages. Well its like comparing my running 100 meters Vs Bolt. We both can run 100 meters but..

So what is Holmes? HOLMES stands for Heuristic and Ontology-based Learning Machines and Experiential Systems. Uses pattern recognition, incident resolution and self-healing processes to solve incidents across the application stack. It also intents to do visual learning based on open source technologies. Worked with IPSoft for its Amelia natural language processing computer interface. It is still in a beta version and not much technical information is available with pilot happening in 2 healthcare companies.

All ISCs are now investing in Automation and Wipro lags its peers in productivity while HCL generates the most revenue per employee. Cognizant enjoys high revenue per employee especially after TriZetto acquisition but its non-GAAP OPM per employee is lower than most ISCs by design for reinvestment. Infosys’ productivity has a downward trend due to pricing pressure, low utilization, employee cost, etc. One of Infosys’ 2020 goals is generating $80K per employee by 2020. So its prune that all ISCs are investing in Automation. And that's what fears me. IBM invested billions in Watson a decade ago with a vision of having computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify. So with such varying goals and objectives can they compete?

• TCS's Ignio is again at a very early stage with ability to run a wide variety of IT processes autonomously and with 8 clients. Ignio, a neural automation centre for enterprises where you can plug into the company’s IT infrastructure and ingest all the data. The company said that the algorithms that form “the neural brain” of Ignio are capable of performing repetitive tasks. The system, which took almost four years to develop, can also predict peak demand for computer servers and ration storage capacity accordingly.

But its still miles away before it becomes Watson. And its history that the ISCs need to fight against as they are not known to have made a market leading product that has lived its life except acquiring. And that's what make me skeptical. Will these products live its life or die like its predecessors?

To develop a product it needs a strong venture ecosystem, University Tie-Ups, Culture of Innovation. Its a big cultural change in these organizations whose key strength has been performing System Integration.

Trust me Watson would love to have competitors breathing on its neck as there is no fun running a race alone..So I hope I can do more justice to the comparison in the coming years..

Till then I have started running....