Data is organizations’ most strategic asset and AI can help unlock new value and insights from it.

Data is flowing through businesses at ever-increasing rates. AI can deliver insights, but the value of those insights can expire if organizations don’t act on them in a timely manner. They need the ability to derive insights and react to them in real time. IBM Streams can help them achieve this capability.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of IBM Streams as a premium add-on to IBM Cloud Pak for Data (formerly IBM Cloud Private for Data), delivering on the promise of joining data with AI together in real time.

What IBM Streams does

Streams is a market-leading streaming analytics offering from IBM that helps clients develop real-time streaming applications and deliver continuous intelligence across their businesses. It enables continuous and rapid analysis of massive volumes of data in motion or at rest to help improve the speed of business insight and decision making.

Streams is available in multiple form factors including SaaS in IBM Cloud and standalone on-premises. Development across the portfolio includes code centric and visual drag-and-drop. Language support includes Python, Apache Beam, Java, Scala and Streams Processing Language.

Use cases for streaming analytics

All industries can benefit from IBM Streams, from IT and telecom to retail, healthcare, banking and insurance.

Verizon began integrating Streams with its call center solutions to convert customers’ speech to text, analyze the text to identify key topics and search for relevant information in the company’s knowledge database within seconds. Call center agents could solve the customer’s problem in a single phone call, potentially increasing satisfaction levels while reducing costs.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is using Streams combined with machine learning to monitor data from ventilation monitors and to help physicians check whether a patient has successfully been intubated. By reducing the need for more invasive methods of checking a patient’s intubation status (such as X-rays), the solution aims to improve patient safety and avoid delays in surgery.

Learn more about these use cases.

Streams for IBM Cloud Pak for Data

IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a data and AI platform built on an open and extensible cloud-native information architecture. As a fully governed team platform, the platform also helps organizations keep data secure at its source and add preferred data and analytics microservices flexibly.

As part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, Streams enables teams of developers, data scientists, data engineers and more to gather, analyze and act upon insights from both stored and in-flight data.

Features and benefits of Streams for IBM Cloud Pak for Data include:

• Build and deploy streaming applications using IBM Cloud Pak for Data project notebooks in Python
• Connect to multiple streaming data sources, such as IBM Event Streams, HTTP, and Internet of Things (IoT)
• Apply simple to advanced analytics methods including machine learning to real-time data streams
• Deliver data and insights to data destinations within and outside the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform such as IBM Db2 Warehouse and IBM Event Streams.
• Elastically scale Streams applications to accommodate variable workloads

The Streams development experience is fully integrated into the IBM Cloud Pak for Data team experience, giving project members the ability to collaborate on a common purpose across stored and streaming data, developing and using machine learning models, and putting the insights developed into use around their organization.

The Streams runtime is a first-class resource of the platform and experience. Administrators can install, provision and manage access to and maintain multiple instances. Instances can be shared across teams to conserve resources or be dedicated to demanding or sensitive projects.

Experience the power of real-time analysis and decision making across your organization with IBM Streams for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Learn more about IBM Streams and how you can get started in the Developer Guidance, or go ahead and take IBM Cloud Pak for Data for a test drive with the easy-to-use, no-cost guided journey on IBM Cloud Pak Experiences.