News

IBM Adds Analytics to Cloud Development Tools

• By David Ramel
• August 14, 2015

IBM is beefing up its development tools for the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with new analytics functionality.

The new capabilities include a new open beta program for IBM Streaming Analytics, which the company claimed can instantly analyze data from thousands of sources. It said the Streaming Analytics service "enables an easier and more efficient way to visualize data" in a statement yesterday. "The service is completely scalable; dynamically building out the infrastructure as needed, giving developers time to focus on building important business logic and analytics."

In a blog post, IBM's Prachi Snehal said the service provides more than 50 toolkits to help developers connect streaming applications to data sources, along with connectors to analytics tools such as Microsoft Excel, for data visualization.

She listed real-world use cases for the service such Internet of Things (IoT) development, consumer marketing, event analytics, sensor data and equipment monitoring, and enhanced security intelligence.

"Developing these types of applications is easy and can be done in multiple ways," Snehal said. "Streaming Analytics supports a Java Application API, which means any Java developer can crank up an application with extreme ease. See the streamsx.topology Getting Started Guide on GitHub. You can also develop your applications both interactively (through the Streams Studio) and programmatically (through the Streaming Analytics REST API). If you need an environment to develop your IBM Streams application, you can start with the IBM Streams Quick Start Edition, free of charge."

The company also updated its already generally available IBM dashDB, a data warehouse that uses in-memory technology to provide fast information management, analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud. The updates include massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities, and increased compatibility with Oracle and Netezza databases.

More integration capabilities were also added to the ecosystem. "Businesses can solve harder problems faster with built-in Netezza analytics libraries, and integration with Watson Analytics, R, Cognos and third-party BI toolsets including Looker, Aginity Workbench and Tableau," the company said. "dashDB can integrate with Twitter data and Open Data, and supports data preparation with DataWorks."

Launched last year with a $1 billion investment, Bluemix is the world's largest Cloud Foundry deployment, the company claims, with a catalog of more than 100 open-source technologies and services from IBM and third parties. IBM said developers can access the new services here.