Summary
- The announcements IBM made at last week's Think 2019 conference around Watson AI services are well timed to meet evolving cloud computing demands.
- IBM said that through their Watson Anywhere initiative they are making Watson AI services available across AWS, Azure and GCP, in addition to their own IBM Cloud offerings.
- For situations where companies may want to develop and/or run AI-based applications in private clouds or their own data centers, the company is licensing Watson to be able to run locally.
Ever since the rise to prominence of cloud computing, we've seen businesses grapple with how to best think about and leverage this new means of computing. Some companies, particularly web-focused ones, dove in head first and now have their entire existence dependent on services like Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft's Azure (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Google's Cloud Platform (GCP) (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL). For most traditional businesses, however, the process of moving toward the cloud hasn't been nearly as clear, nor as easy. Because of large investments in their own physical data centers, thousands of legacy applications, and many other customized software investments that weren't originally designed with the cloud in mind, the transition to cloud computing has been much slower.
One of the stumbling blocks in moving to the cloud for these traditional vendors is that the shift has often required a monolithic change to an entirely new, distinct type of computing. Needless to say, that's not easy to do, particularly if the option you're moving to is seen as a singular choice, with few alternatives. In particular, because AWS was so dominant in the early days of cloud computing, many organizations were afraid of getting locked into this new environment.
