IBM Launches Cloud Services Marketplace

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IBM is opening up its cloud services offering with the launch of a new marketplace for developers. 25 services will now be available on the IBM cloud with the goal of helping developers build, deploy and manage web and mobile applications and enable data scientists to discover hidden trends using data and analytics in the cloud.

The hybrid cloud services can be deployed across multiple cloud providers and are based on open source technologies, open ecosystems that include company and third-party data, and open architectures that allows data to easily flow amongst the different services.

In addition to the marketplace, IBM launched four new services including predictive analytics and Analytics Exchange, an open data exchange that includes a catalog of more than 150 publicly available datasets that can be used for analysis or integrated into applications. The predictive analytics service will allow developers to self-build machine learning models from a broad library into applications to help deliver predictions for specific product use cases, without the help of a data scientist.

The marketplace is the company’s next phase in its backing of Apache Spark which supports a range of big data services. In addition to the analytics components, IBM launched IBM Graph the first fully managed graph database service built on Apache TinkerPop that provides developers a complete stack to extend business-ready apps with real-time recommendations, fraud detection, IoT and network analysis uses.

The company has allocated some 3,500 researchers and developers to work on projects with Apache Spark.

As CivSource has previously reported, more government agencies and offices are coming to rely on machine learning and predictive analytics to develop response plans for healthcare and public safety. IBM already offers software that uses predictive analytics to help with traffic patterns and other city services.