Stefan Mileschin

One software pack to rule them all

AI - Artificial Intelligence - is certainly the IT business word of the year as almost every company is working on it, or at least thinking about working on it. IBM has just announced a new software platform simply called IBM PowerAI Enterprise alongside with AI infrastructure reference architecture.

Companies will be able to use both these technologies on premise AI implementations and essentially this service may well be offered via IBM's could offerings.

Implementing AI is not a walk in the park as it addresses the challenges organizations face experimenting with a "proof of concept" and, later, production for enterprise scaling . Making an AI enterprise solution involves a team that includes data engineers, data scientists, business analyst developesr to deploy, app developers for model and developer operator to monitor the whole thing.

Choosing the right hardware, installing Linux or another operating system, installing and compiling frameworks and the necessary software is way too complicated for most enterprises. Enterprise need much easier almost like a flip switch solution.

When it comes to AI infrastructure, the stack is also complex. It involves applications and micro services specific to the industry segment. The second layer is the AI API such as Watson or in-house APIs custom models for acceleration of speech, vision, NLP or sentiments.

The third layer involves machine and deep learning libraries and frameworks such as TensoFlow, Caffe, SparkML or H20. The fourth layer is distributed computing that involves Spark or MPI and finally you get to the "data lake" and the data storage layer that involves Hadoop HDFS, NoSQL DBs in order to transform and prepare your data.

Of course, you need accelerated servers and storage as the part of accelerated infrastructure. Convincing your business manager that this is a good idea is another level of complexity on its own, as it will take quite some time until you get meaningful results you can include in your enterprise workflow and essentially save money.

https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/46599-i...rai-enterprise