Storm Clouds Rising with Unlimited Ceiling Cloud, open computing and AI in convergence, convections and more

By Evan Kirstel @evankirstel

Business technology is now reaching farther and faster into new and open cloud formations. In the new few minutes I will explore some of the most exciting issues facing business today. Starting with open computing which has been around since the beginning of computing but like many tech efforts it only appeals to a few bold and brave developers risking their applications and the businesses they work. IBM is now driving open "cloud" based on their past performance starting with Linux and others long ago Initially to be more competitive, open source is really core to their approach to computing today with an open source operating system that lets you scale existing apps — and roll out emerging technologies — across all types of cloud and on-premises environments. That is, IBM is merging and converging technologies, applications and solutions together. This means that "IBM has invested close to $1 billion and dedicated hundreds of open source development, marketing, and evangelism resources over the past five years." Clearly, IBM sees open computing and now open source cloud as the real wave in computing going into the future. IBM also noted, "We invest heavily in areas such as security, scalability, robustness, live upgrade, globalization, documentation, continuous integration, and delivery in the projects that we consider strategic. We often lead the efforts to define interoperability and portability. We do this because interoperability and portability are critical to the success of any open technology endeavor." Yet one must look critically at what they are doing to see where they are going in terms of benefits to customers in guiding them in their own business computing, communications and applications challenges.  

The open source development by IBM "works across all layers of the cloud stack, application development, blockchain, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and machine learning" which means they are pursuing closer if not total integration of their own systems with code and concepts developed by others. This open approach brings them even closer to customers than ever before but also opens them up to emerging and innovative business and developers not wanting "canned" or closed computing solutions. As I am of many things quite skeptical of any one cloud computing solution, the fundamental reasons is that dominant providers today may not provide the technologies needed tomorrow. As you may have heard from many sources, most enterprise customers have up to five cloud providers and others many more. This is likely to grow even more with platforms such as smartphones, IoT, AI and other computing concepts. Coupled with developer shortage, rapidly changing customer demographics and the always-present development time shrinkage makes even more complex. Yet cloud computing is not new. IBM invented the cloud with remoting computing on IBM 3270 "green screens" connected to distant mainframes. As a result, IBM has been there all along the journey to where the cloud is today and where it will be in the future. Cloud computing for others like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and many others was and is their own attempts at building clouds for their own needs rather than purely open approach. However, by saying a cloud is open or closed isn't really the issue. Integrating one or many of these multi/hybrid storm clouds is the real challenge as one cloud does not fit all bringing a convergence of high pressure computing demands, so fasten your seatbelt it will likely be a rough ride in the skies ahead. IBM understands the journey from on-premise data center cloud to open co-location and other cloud venues is very complex. I have found from CIOs there is no "one size fits all" however, CIOs see the cloud giving greater flexibility in many areas. Yet each company needs a strategy as one CIO noted "I need something that fits me, not the provider, frankly we are tired of trying to fit provider services, we are planning our own open cloud." Many CIOs are looking far beyond what we see in the marketplace today. They see like among so many other concepts, AI and quantum computing are key topics in the mix. Many CIOs know that AI for many is just something to say without any real foundation. They also see that IBM is also deeply committed to AI with IBM Watson, "Every day another 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created, and as that data continues to expand, many businesses need a solution that can help both employees and customers find information, make decisions, and complete tasks faster. With a cognitive search solution like IBM Watson Discovery, a business is able to enhance human intelligence using varied AI technologies such as natural language understanding (NLU), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) to deliver the ability to sort through ubiquitous data to find specific information." To make search, machine and deep learning possible IBM Quantum brings massive power that is hard to imagine. This is not just talk as users can start writing code now for the IBM Quantum solution, as the "IBM Q Experience beta offers its community the opportunity to write and execute code to run on real quantum hardware and graphically compose and optimize quantum circuits." There is so much more to quantum computing but just imagining some of the amazing benefits is really exciting to ponder.

Summary - Open, hyper, multi/hybrid and other cloud concepts as we know it today is really like what we know about storms in nature both subject to vast change in many different directions often at the same time and without any notice. By combining many elements of open source, quantum cloud computing and advanced machine intelligence aka AI, IBM brings all the critical concepts to solving the most challenging of business issues today and far into the future. I would like to thank IBM for the opportunity to share a few thoughts with you on this exciting topic.

Read more about IBM and Red Hat – delivering the next-generation hybrid multicloud platform

References:

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2019/06/forrester-names-ibm-watson-discovery-a-leader-in-ai-search/

https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-open-architecture-update/