Data is the fuel, cloud is the vehicle, AI is the destination. The intersection of these three pillars of IT has been the focus of IBM. Through the launch of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, our modern data and AI platform, we have containerized numerous offerings and delivered them as microservices to accelerate client’s journey to AI. Clients have successfully been able to collect, organize and analyze data in order to infuse AI across their business – on any cloud of their choice.

We continue to optimize the platform’s capabilities and benefits for our clients with the release of Cloud Pak for Data version 3.0, a major upgrade with an enhanced unified experience, expanded ecosystem and optimized Red Hat integration. Running exclusively on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 4.3, Cloud Pak for Data 3.0 provides the open platform enterprises need.

What’s new in IBM Cloud Pak for Data 3.0?

We have taken Cloud Pak for Data’s integrated platform a step further with our enhanced user experience, built from the ground up by IBM Design. Utilizing a new modernized open source design framework – implemented across IBM – users can now seamlessly weave Cloud Pak for Data’s many data and AI services into their workloads, allowing clients to truly utilize enterprise data at scale. Along with the new experience, we are simplifying our packaging with a non-production edition for Dev, Test and QA requirements as well as expanded support in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese.

In addition, Cloud Pak for Data 3.0 is more tightly integrated with Red Hat ecosystem. We’ve updated the core Kubernetes container management to the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift (4.3), allowing users to deploy their applications faster while automating, governing and processing data at enterprise scale. Cloud Pak for Data will now be available in the Red Hat marketplace and will support OpenShift Container storage. This further ensures our commitment to an open, extensible platform supported on any cloud environment.

The Red Hat benefits extend into other areas, including in operations occurring after deployment. Customers will now be able to perform incremental in-place upgrades, enable backups, disaster recovery, audit events and further enhance their data security by leveraging integration with IBM Security Guardium.

Expanding IBM Cloud Pak for Data’s ecosystem in 3.0

The ability to tailor the platform to our customer’s needs through self-service analytics is critical, as such, we’re growing our ecosystem of data and AI services, to include:

• IBM Planning Analytics: An automated planning, budgeting and forecasting solution to Cloud Pak for Data’s already-extensive capabilities. With Planning Analytics, clients can save 63 percent of their time in completing annual budgeting cycles, according to Forrester Consulting. Take a look at this infographic for a quick tour.
• Master Data Connect: A single, trusted 360-degree view of data, enabling better insights through self-service analytics. Learn more.
• IBM Virtual Data Pipeline: Provisions and refreshes virtual test data environments in just minutes enabling 95 percent storage capacity savings.
• BigSQL: Enables powerful SQL on Hadoop and Object Stores for big data analytics.
• Watson OpenScale Model Risk Management is another new addition that automates model testing throughout the AI lifecycle and syncs results with systems of record.

And we continue to optimize our Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) services in Cloud Pak for Data, with adding governance into data virtualization objects, and the addition of InstaScan, an intelligent file analysis tool. As Watson Knowledge Catalog reduces time to automate data discovery, quality and governance by 90 percent, these enhancements further improve data management for clients.

Another important integration with the platform is external data sets from third party providers, including:

• Historical and real time weather data from The Weather Company, an IBM Business. Watch the video.
• Demographics data of consumers including Demographics, financial capacity, and credit information by Equifax.
• Dataset of B2B and B2C person data such as education, birthday, professional experience etc. by People Data Labs.

Finally, we’re also pleased to introduce a new partnership with IBM Systems, designed to drive new value to current and future customers. For the first time, Cloud Pak for Data will be available to run on Power Systems including PowerAI, a chip designed for building enterprise AI.

Ready to learn more?

As we are all challenged to cope with the new reality, where virtual collaboration, automation and self-service is not just a competitive advantage, but a basic necessity? Cloud Pak for Data is specifically designed with these features at its core and with version 3.0 we are making it simpler, better and more consumable with everything you need to tap into your enterprise data and accelerate your AI journey.

Register for our upcoming webinar on June 1 to hear directly from the experts on the benefits of our new release. And learn how you can achieve cost savings and a projected return on investment (PROI) ranging from 86 percent to 158 percent with Cloud Pak for Data, by reading our Forrester Consulting study commissioned by IBM, New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact of IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

Accelerate your journey to AI.