It’s been one year since we launched IBM Cloud Pak for Data (previously IBM Cloud Private for Data), IBM’s data and AI platform for today’s modern enterprise. Since then, this platform has been embraced by hundreds of customers, and Forrester ranked it No. 1 in their “Enterprise Insights Platform” Wave™.  For our 1-year anniversary, we continue to build upon our innovation that’s defined our leadership in this space with the announcement of v2.1.

Cloud Pak for Data addresses the fundamental challenges of today’s modern business. For one, it’s built on cloud-native architecture leveraging containers and Kubernetes as the foundation. This enables it to run on any public cloud—including IBM Cloud, but also Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. You can also install it on-premises as a private cloud, while still delivering the benefits of cloud within your data center. Cloud Pak for Data is a platform that offers integrated and pre-configured data, analytics and AI services to help your business collect, organize and analyze your data—ultimately, helping prepare you to operationalize AI rapidly into your business.

The platform addresses the data proliferation challenge many are facing with information distributed across multiple silos, databases and clouds. Cloud Pak for Data does this through data virtualization, a unique technology developed by IBM Research that allows customers to access, govern and analyze data sets without physically moving them. Cloud Pak for Data includes all the capabilities a business would need for building, deploying and managing data science and AI models at scale.

Our latest release, v2.1, comes packed with several exciting new capabilities:

• We recently announced a new deployment option: IBM Cloud Pak for Data System, an Intel x86-based, hyper-converged data and AI offering. It contains all the Cloud Pak for Data capabilities while removing the burden of businesses having to configure hardware and software infrastructure. This drastically simplifies private cloud deployment, enabling services to be up and running in four hours, the ability to scale across hardware and software on-demand, and pre-configured and optimized hardware out-of-the-box for data and AI workloads.
• IBM Streams, a proprietary technology you can use to process real-time streaming data, is now part of the platform’s base offering. This expands our use cases to handle IOT and other real-time streaming scenarios.
• IBM premium add-on services such as IBM DataStage, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog Professional and IBM Watson Applications and APIs such as watsonx Assistant, Watson Discovery, Natural Language Understanding, Speech to Text and more, are now included in Cloud Pak for Data.
• New third-party add-ons from PostgreSQL, Knowis, WAND, NetApp, Prolifics and Lightbend are now available. These significantly expand the third-party services currently supported on Cloud Pak for Data—including MongoDB, Datameer and Figure Eight.
• Our data virtualization feature now includes support for new data sources such as Excel and CSV files. Other enhancements include automatic remote data discovery, query pushdown optimizations for data sources and an optimized process model for ingesting large amounts of data.
• New database enhancements include:
  • Db2 Warehouse, allowing you to provision an instance in under two minutes, and providing high availability.
  • Systematic backup and restore of MongoDB and Db2 Warehouse databases is now available.
• Our add-on, Watson Openscale has been enhanced with:
  • Bias detection to automatically detect certain protected attributes in a model
  • Support for Azure Machine Learning service as a machine learning runtime engine
  • Metrics to show before and after accuracy of the de-biased models to compare the impact with fairness value
• Industry accelerators for three use cases in the wealth management space are now available:
  • Dynamic segmentation: Advanced dynamic client segmentation helps identify unique cohorts of clients by behaviors, account profile information and demographic
  • Client attrition: The ability to predict client attrition at configurable points in the future to protect revenue and share-of-wallet
  • Life event and financial event prediction: Predict life and financial events impacting client’s financial lives to help advisors proactively service a client’s needs
• Multi-tenancy support: Cloud Pak for Data now supports a multi-tenancy architecture where different areas of your organization can share the same cluster yet operate independently in their own dedicated instances. Each instance has its own isolated users, data, quotas, namespace and ports.
• Terraform support for AWS and Azure : You can now automatically install a standalone version of Cloud Pak for Data in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure using Terraform.

With all the new enhancements in Cloud Pak for Data v2.1, there’s plenty to help our users continue to unlock the value of their data for better business insights.

Feel free to test out the Cloud Pak for Data platform today through our complimentary 7-day trial. Or, take some time to learn more about the platform before you give it a spin.