IBM launches services platform called IBM Services Platform with Watson

IBM is building out a cognitive services platform by using Watson and a data lake compiling operational information from banking, airlines and retails. The system, called the IBM Services Platform, will help businesses manage their IT infrastructure and make better data-driven decisions. The effort brings together parts and data from IBM’s services expertise to offer automation and insights to augment human intelligence.

It is aiming to use data gathered from the networks and operations of enterprises to predict and prevent potential problems. Bart van den Daele, general manager of IBM Global Technology Services in Europe said, “The new AI-capability will help IBM’s customers minimize disruptions such as server outages or switching malfunctions by predicting problems before they occur and automatically taking corrective action, such as brokering additional cloud capacity or rerouting network traffic around bottlenecks.” He also mentioned that the product offering, powered by IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform, will enable the company to maintain its market share in IT network infrastructure management.

The Watson-based IT infrastructure platform has received data feed from more than 10 million past incidents and the system can now handle more than 800,000 incidents a month. The service can also run client workloads on premises and in the cloud. Existing services can be integrated into the platform so that their data becomes available to the Services Platform for analysis. As the present day IT infrastructure of every enterprise is getting increasingly complex, cognitive services like this can be expected to manage the IT operations.