IBM is offering an AI development studio with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source models, access to a data store so users can gather and cleanse training and tuning data, and a toolkit for governance of AI aimed at making AI more easy to adapt and scale.

The IBM watsonx platform is made up of three product sets: IBM watsonx.ai, IBM watsonx.data, and IBM watsonx.governance. All of these product sets are geared at addressing the need for businesses to build their own AI models, or fine-tune available models, on their own data and deploy them at scale.

“With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever,” said Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM. “Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged. With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.”

IBM watsonx.ai is expected to be available in July 2023 and provides users with a next-generation enterprise studio that allows AI builders to train, test, tune, and deploy traditional machine learning as well as newer generative AI capabilities through an open user interface.

Next, IBM watsonx.data, also expected in July 2023, is a fit-for-purpose data store built on open lakehouse that is intended for governed data and AI workloads, supported by querying, governance, and open data formats to access and share data.

Lastly, IBM watsonx.governance can be expected later this year, and it is an AI governance toolkit that is geared at enabling trusted AI workflows. It operationalizes governance to help reduce the risk, time, and cost that comes with manual processes, and offers capabilities to protect user privacy, detect model bias and drift, and help organizations meet ethics standards. 

IBM also plans to integrate watsonx.ai foundation models into all its major software products going forward, including:

• Watson Code Assistant: A solution that accesses generative AI to allow for the generation of code with an English language command.
• AIOps Insights: AIOps features with foundation models for code and NLP to offer heightened visibility into performance across IT environments.
• Watson Assistant and Watson Orchestrate: IBM’s digital labor products which are expected to be combined with an NLP foundation model to help improve employee productivity as well as user experiences 
• Environmental Intelligence Suite: IBM EIS Builder Edition is intended to allow organizations to create solutions to address and mitigate environmental risks based on their own goals.

To learn more, visit the website. 

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According to a study based on 14,000 interviews conducted by IBM and Morning Consult, 40% of respondents stated they don’t know where to start to make this career change. 

More than half of the respondents said they were not aware of the careers that would be considered STEM, and 62% had concerns about finding a job that pays enough to support themselves or their families. 

In addition, 61% don’t think they are qualified for roles in STEM because they don’t have the right academic degrees.

About the same number (60%) fear that obtaining digital credentials would be too costly. However, of those who have obtained digital credentials, 86% said that the education helped them meet their career goals. 

“Technology training can have a transformational effect on a person’s life,” said Justina Nixon-Saintil, chief impact officer at IBM. “There are many misconceptions about what’s needed to pursue a rewarding and lucrative career in today’s rapidly advancing workplace. This is why we must raise awareness of the breadth of science and technology roles that exist across industries.”

Despite initial hesitations, the results of the study do show that people are planning for the future. Sixty-one percent of respondents plan to seek out a new job within the next year, and 80% have plans to build upon their skills in the next two years.

More than 90% of the respondents seemed confident in their ability to learn new skills in an online setting. 

To help aspiring technologists overcome some of these misconceptions, IBM is partnering with 45 new educational partners as part of its SkillsBuild program, and includes organizations that focus on underrepresented groups in tech, such as mothers returning to the workforce, ethnic minorities, low-income individuals, and refugees.

The educational partners span many countries, and the ones in the US include CompTIA,   Digital Promise, Franklin Apprenticeships, HDG University,  ITExperience, Junior Achievement of Arizona, Mom Relaunch, RISE — The Mom Project, The Wond’ry at Vanderbilt University, Transition Overwatch, and University of the Cumberlands. 

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IBM Business Analytics Enterprise is a suite of business intelligence planning, budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and dashboard capabilities intended to provide users with a full view of data sources across their entire business.

This suite also offers users a new IBM Analytics Content Hub to help improve how users discover and access analytics as well as planning tools from multiple vendors in one dashboard view.

The new Content Hub is designed to allow users to view planning and analytics dashboards from several vendors. This includes tools such as IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, and more.

In addition, it includes algorithms that can recommend role-based content in order to help users surface new stories, reports, and dashboards from across the organization to help with decision-making. 

With this announcement, IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson also now offers new integration capabilities as well as enhanced forecasting to enable users to take multiple factors and seasons into account in their trend predictions.

Lastly, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson is also expected to be available as-a-Service on AWS later this year.

“Businesses today are trying to become more data-driven than ever as they navigate the unexpected in the face of supply chain disruptions, labor and skills shortages and regulatory changes,” said Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of data, AI and automation at IBM. “But to truly be data-driven, organizations need to be able to provide their different teams with more comprehensive access to analytics tools and a more complete picture of their business data, without jeopardizing their compliance, security or privacy programs. IBM Business Analytics Enterprise offers a way to bring together analytics tools in a single view, regardless of which vendor it comes from or where the data resides.”

To learn more, visit the website. 

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That means IT leaders are thinking about more than just the costs of moving and the timing of workload migration. They’re also faced with developing a strategy for taking full advantage of S/4HANA’s radically different, cloud-optimized application and database environments, and using the move as an opportunity to adopt a clean core methodology. After all, the real driver for moving to S/4HANA isn’t a deadline, it’s the business value of modernizing one’s code, data, processes, and infrastructure. Put another way, if customers are going to make a significant investment to migrate to S/4HANA, they want to do it in the smartest possible way.

A clean core methodology can decouple ERP environments from customization that has increased complexity and made such environments much more difficult to upgrade. Specific to SAP, clean core means keeping S/4HANA free of customization, creating a system that’s manageable, easy to upgrade, and extensible to meet unique business needs. Such modernization will enable businesses to leverage new sources of data, more effectively respond to changes in their markets, and innovate at a pace that will delight their customers.

Let’s break down S/4HANA migration into its component parts:

Code modernization

Code modernization – which relies heavily on the clean core methodology – establishes a path away from current monolithic ERP models and custom code, which make integrations across enterprise applications complex and slow innovation. The first step in code modernization is to ensure there is a cloud-native DevOps platform in place to contain the SAP extensions. During migration to S/4HANA, extensions requiring custom development should be done on the cloud-native platform and integrated to the digital core through web service APIs.

Once an SAP ERP digital core is “clean”, SAP version upgrades become significantly less disruptive. Businesses are also better able to use advanced technology native to cloud environments, including machine learning and AI. In addition, code modernization lets businesses incorporate new data sources into their applications. Consider, for example, the impact of adding weather data to a company’s applications for supply chain management, financial forecasting, predictive maintenance, or logistics routing.

When choosing a cloud-native DevOps platform that is inherently able to run your extension workloads on any major cloud provider, the natural choice for SAP extensions is SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP).  SAP BTP facilitates the necessary connectivity setup  that needs to exist between the extensions and the S/4HANA core in terms of users, authorizations and access to APIs. Additionally, SAP BTP comes with several modern cloud services for business workflows, integration and analytical scenarios.

In addition, many organizations have already chosen a cloud provider and used the cloud-native services available to create innovative solutions.  Many have a preferred cloud-native DevOps platform, supporting a “develop once, deploy anywhere” capability, such as Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, or VMware VCF.  Enterprise-scale DevOps platforms are sometimes selected because they can be used to extend any application across the enterprise, not just SAP.  Also, in addition to being able to deploy workloads to any cloud, a runtime and management tooling is provided to deploy cloud-native workloads to an on-prem datacenter.  Of the enterprise multi-cloud DevOps platforms available in the market, Red Hat Openshift has a strong leadership position with nearly 50% of the top Fortune 100 companies using it.

 Data quality and conversion

As businesses plan their move to S/4HANA, it’s critical to determine if the current state of data supports planned business outcomes, and to automate remediation of data errors to reduce overall data complexity and footprint. One of SAP S/4HANA’s biggest changes is the consolidation of master data and transactional data databases across the various application modules. In previous versions of SAP, for example, there were multiple customer master databases for ERP, CRM, supply chain, and other modules – each of which needed to be constantly synchronized for consistency.

In addition, a migration to SAP S/4HANA provides an opportunity to cleanse and archive data that has accumulated in SAP for years. In most cases, there are duplicate, incomplete, obsolete, and old records that are no longer needed.  Examples could include five different customer record entries for a single customer, or invoice records from 12 years ago.

An S/4HANA migration provides a great opportunity to consolidate and cleanse this data. Because SAP S/4HANA requires the HANA database to run in-memory on the server, reducing the data footprint can provide significant savings on hardware or cloud IaaS subscription costs.

Process optimization

Process optimization offers a way to simplify and optimize business processes to improve outcomes. SAP is traditionally a transaction-driven application, not a process-driven application. SAP has a repository where processes can be graphically designed and documented, but there is no process runtime engine that ensures SAP users follow that process flow as they use SAP. 

A migration to S/4HANA provides an opportunity to analyze whether users are using SAP as it was intended based on the original process design, analyze for potential to improve business processes, and put technology in place that can automate and monitor processes in SAP. That gives businesses the opportunity to gain real-time visibility into active processes and to proactively manage inefficiencies through automation.

 Infrastructure modernization

 Infrastructure modernization involves introducing cloud native capabilities to ERP environments while extending the value of existing investments. When moving to S/4HANA and the SAP HANA database, businesses should look for a cloud provider that can accelerate time-to-value leveraging your existing investments and offer infrastructure capacity that can scale in granular increments. This helps you maintain right-sized environments and pay for only what you need, without being forced to overprovision capacity. 

Organizations have the choice of deploying SAP S/4HANA on-premise or in the cloud.  To deploy SAP S/4HANA on-premise an SAP perpetual software license is needed.  On-premise licenses can also be deployed through an SAP certified cloud provider.  However, most who choose to modernize their SAP environment with cloud IaaS will opt to license SAP as a subscription service.

In order to help smooth the transition of running SAP workloads in the cloud, SAP introduced RISE with SAP at the beginning of 2021.  RISE with SAP is a fully managed subscription service that comes with a pre-defined set of service-level argreements (SLAs) for parameters such as application availability, performance and backup retention.  Organizations can use their preferred cloud provider for RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud private edition, including IBM cloud.

HANA database sizes, and whether S/4HANA databases need to run on a bare-metal environment, should also be considered, or if there is more benefit in the flexibility of a virtualized cloud infrastructure to run their SAP workloads as part of modernization efforts.  SAP HANA is an in-memory database that works best when the entire database is fully contained in the system’s memory.  Some hardware platform options have limitations of how large of a HANA database can be supported while virtualization is enabled.  When clients hit the memory limits of virtualization on x86 platforms, they are forced to switch to bare-metal environments, which reduce the value/benefits of cloud and can involve a multi-year commitment to the specific bare-metal server.  As an alternative, the IBM Power platform does not have any limitations associated with HANA database size and virtualization and offers better scaling in granular increments as database size grows.  The ultimate goal is to not have to pay for more than what you need in the cloud.

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The models include the same language processing and speech libraries that IBM uses to power its own IBM Watson software. 

One of the new libraries is IBM Watson Natural Language Processing Library (NLP), designed to help developers provide capabilities to process human language to derive context. The library offers algorithmic choice and modular design so that natural language AI can be deployed in any environment. It can also analyze sentiment to determine if a customer is happy or dissatisfied and show why. 

The second library, IBM Watson Speech to Text Library was designed to enable speech transcription and to turn it into usable and searchable text. 

Lastly, the IBM Watson Text to Speech Library can convert written text into natural sounding audio for real-time speech synthesis. 

“Enterprises must commit to a significant investment in expertise, resources and time required to build, deploy and manage AI-powered solutions,” said Kate Woolley, the general manager at IBM Ecosystem. “By bringing to market the same portfolio of embeddable AI technology that powers our industry-leading IBM Watson products, we are helping Ecosystem partners more efficiently deliver AI experiences that can drive business value for their clients.”

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According to a recent study by IBM, organizations that don’t have sufficient security teams experience $550,000 more in costs related to data breaches compared to companies with sufficiently staffed security teams. 

Faculty and students at these 20 schools will be able to access coursework, lectures, immersive training experiences, certifications, IBM Cloud-hosted software, and professional development resources, for free. 

This includes access to IBM Security’s Command Center, where students can experience a simulated cyberattack to learn and practice response techniques.

“Collaborations between academia and the private sector can help students prepare for success. That’s especially true for HBCUs because their mission is so vital,” said Justina Nixon-Saintil, vice president of IBM corporate social responsibility and ESG. “The Cybersecurity Leadership Centers we’re co-creating with Historically Black College and Universities epitomize our commitment to the Black community and STEM education; it also builds on our pledge to train 150,000 people in cybersecurity over three years.”

The HBCUs that are part of this partnership include Alabama A&M University, Talladega College, Tuskegee University, Edward Waters University, Florida A&M University, Albany State University, Clark Atlanta University, Grambling State University, Southern University System, Xavier University of LA, Bowie State University, Morgan State University, Alcorn State University, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina Central University, South Carolina State University, Voorhees University, Texas Southern University, Norfolk State University, and West Virginia State University.

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The solutions that are submitted can address a diverse range of climate challenges and provide things such as new ways to improve sustainable production, consumption, and management of resources; reduce pollution creation; protect biodiversity; and much more. 

“From rising sea levels, extreme weather events, wildfires and droughts, to food insecurity, health impacts, mass migrations, and increasing global conflict, there is no denying that climate change is a humanitarian crisis. With its global reach and history of success over the years, we’re excited to work with Call for Code, as it has proven to be the gold standard when it comes to engaging developers around the world to innovate for social good,” said Bill Stark, Chief Impact Officer at Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Alliance.

The teams that register on the new Global Challenge resource site on BeMyApp can attend Challenge Accelerator events to help fast-track their projects that include skills-building materials, exclusive toolkits, APIs, and data sets from The Weather Company and participating IBM Ecosystem partners.

The challenge opens today and projects can be submitted before the deadline of October 31, 2022. The Grand Prize winner will receive $200,000 and solution implementation support from IBM Ecosystem partners.

Also, Call for Code was selected as the preferred innovation platform of Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Alliance, one of the largest public/private climate partnerships.

Additional details are available here. 

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This release is geared towards making the lives of developers easier, bringing them:

• Increased speed and agility with on-demand access to z/OS
• Accelerated DevOps practices with consumption-based pricing 
• A reduction in the need for specialized skills with a consistent cloud-native development experience 

“By leveraging both IBM Z and IBM Cloud, clients can benefit from a hybrid cloud approach that allows them to capitalize on the innovations, technical advancements, security, resiliency of each platform. With hybrid cloud, you keep your workloads where they need to be—in the cloud, on premises, and at the edge—to help reduce risk and improve time to market,” said Tarun Chopra, VP of IBM Z hybrid cloud.

Updated testing guidance on Android

The Android development team recently announced that it has upgraded two testing sections on d.android.com. This revamp comes in response to user feedback that Android’s tools and libraries can sometimes overlap, as well as to accommodate for Compose and new architecture guidelines.

This update starts with the new Testing training, which brings users the fundamentals of testing in Android with two additional articles: What to test, a guide for beginners, and a detailed guide on Test doubles. 

Additionally, the team has updated the Testing section of the Tools documentation that places a focus on tools that work to assist developers in creating and running tests, from Android Studio to testing from the command line. 

TypeScript 4.6 RC announced

Microsoft said that there are not expected to be any new updates or changes between this Release Candidate and the stable release of TypeScript 4.6, aside from any critical bug fixes. To get started using this RC, see here or use npm with the command “npm install typescript@rc”. 

This RC brings several new features, including:

• Allowing Code in Constructors Before super ()
• Control Flow Analysis for Deconstructed Discriminated Unions
• Improved Recursion Depth Checks
• Indexed Access Inference Improvements 
• Control Flow Analysis for Dependent Parameters
• –target es2022
• More Syntax and Binding Errors in JavaScript
• TypeScript Trace Analyzer

For more information, see here. 

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A few of the highlights from the release include 

• Just-in-Time, all the time: accelerated build times, stackable variants, arbitrary value support, better browser performance, and more
• Every color out of the box: including all of the extended palette colors 
• Colored box shadows: for fun glow and reflection effects as well as more natural looking shadows on colored backgrounds 
• Scroll snap API: a comprehensive and composable set of utilities for CSS-only scroll snapping 

In addition, Tailwind CSS 3.0 includes a new documentation website, bringing users improved content and examples on every page. To start exploring Tailwind CSS 3.0 directly in your browser, visit here. 

IBM and MuleSoft announce partnership

IBM and MuleSoft announced a global partnership with a plan to deliver increased integrations for solutions around the IBM Z mainframe product family in order to support financial services and other mutual customers. 

With this, MuleSoft plans to extend its Anypoint Runtime Fabric, a container service for multi-cloud hybrid environments, to run on the enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift. 

Additionally, IBM plans to expand its overall investment in integration software and industry expertise. This will include increasing the number of MuleSoft certified professionals in its consulting services organization. 

Datadog launches Sensitive Data Scanner

Datadog, the monitoring and security platform for data applications, announced the launch of Sensitive Data Scanner. This new service provides users with a simplified solution in order to detect, classify, and protect sensitive data found in their application logs. 

This new Sensitive Data Scanner is designed to help users comply with regulatory requirements (such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA), industry standards, and business policies. In addition, Datadog’s Sensitive Data Scanner mitigates risks through a simple, stream-based pattern-matching service that uncovers, classifies, and redacts sensitive information in real time and at any scale. 

“Datadog provides us with a single pane of glass for both monitoring and securing our critical data. Datadog’s Sensitive Data Scanner provides complete visibility into the flow of PII data, and is a critical part of our data loss prevention strategy,” said Kevin McGill, VP of cloud services at Citizens Bank. 

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With this, users will join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals. The beginning phase of the program will focus primarily on the most commonly serviced modules, such as the iPhone display, battery, and camera, with additional repairs becoming available later next year.

In order to ensure a user can properly perform the repairs, it is essential that they first review the Repair Manual. Next, the user will place an order for the parts and tools they will need for the repair from the online store. The new Apple Self Service Repair Online Store will offer more than 200 individual parts and tools, allowing users to complete the most common repairs on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13.

PlanetScale now generally available 

The PlanetScale development team announced that its MySQL-compatible serverless database platform is now generally available. This announcement comes six months after the product was released in beta.

The goal of the PlanetScale database platform is to bring developers a powerful and easy way to use databases in order to provide the best possible developer experience. This is why the platform is serverless, allowing developers to be productive without having to worry about scale.

With the release of the database platform, PlanetScale also closed $50 million in series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from existing investors a16z, SignalFire, and Insight Partners. Tom Preston-Warner, Max Mullen, and Jack Altman also contributed to the financing round.

IBM reveals winner of Call for Code

Call for Code founding partner, IBM, and its creator, David Clark Cause, announced the winner of the fourth annual Call for Code Global Challenge. The challenge invited innovators from around the world to combat climate change with open source-powered technology.

The goal of Call for Code is to bring together the world’s software developers in order to take on pressing societal issues by using the most advanced technologies to solve problems by creating cutting-edge solutions. 

The top prize this year went to Saaf Water, an accessible water quality sensor and analytics platform created for people living in rural areas. Saaf Water will receive $200,000 as well as support to incubate, test, and deploy their solution from the IBM Service Corps and partners in the Call for Code ecosystem. 

Netlify acquired OneGraph, raises $105 million 

Netlify, the web developer platform, today announced that it acquired OneGraph in order to drive innovation in the Netlify platform to simplify composing apps with API and services. 

With the combination of Netlify and the Y Combinator- and SignalFire-backed OneGraph, users will be able to easily build and manage integrations across third-party services as well as access their own internal services and data. OneGraph utilizes GraphQL as a modern standard for connecting these services, using tooling that is fast, extensible, and reliable.

In addition, Netlify has raised $105 million to accelerate the growth of Netlify developer platform and Jamstack ecosystem. The Series D funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, EQT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Mango Capital, and Menlo Ventures. This brings the company’s total value up to $2 billion.

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