IBM Releases New Bluemix Services Including First Commercial Watson Service

IBM has released new Bluemix services that enable developers to connect apps, data and services across an open and flexible environment of traditional systems, cloud platforms and any device, weaving data and services with APIs to compose new apps and services. These new services include:

- Secure Passport Gateway: Allows self-service to developers to securely connect data and services to Bluemix in minutes through a simple Passport service that keeps IT in control.

- API Harmony: Find a perfect API match for a client’s application using the world’s largest knowledge base of APIs; easily expose and manage APIs.

- Bluemix Local: Extends Bluemix into a company’s data center with borderless visibility and management across Bluemix environments (public, dedicated, and local)

IBM also has launched the Watson Zone, a new resource center on Bluemix that brings together Watson APIs, sample code, training resources and use cases to help inspire and guide users to build a new class of hybrid cloud applications infused with cognitive computing capabilities.

IBM also announced the general availability of the Watson Personality Insights service, the first commercial Watson Service, which allows developers to integrate new capabilities to analyze trends and patterns in diverse, high volume social media and other public data streams. Based on years of IBM research in linguistic analytics, the service can recognize not only key words and phrases, but understand the overall context of a social conversation to unlock a much more complete customer portrait.  

It can help clients in the retail, banking, entertainment and other industries engage customers with more personalized offers, promotions and services based on individual preferences and social characteristics.

The commercial launch of Watson Personality Insights follows the addition of five new betas Watson services to Bluemix including Speech to Text, Text to Speech, Visual Recognition, Concept Insights and Tradeoff Analytics. These services are available free of charge to help developers explore potential use cases.

To make much of this possible, many of these new services rely on open technologies. As a contributor to a number of open foundations including Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, IBM has dedicated hundreds developers to advancing open technologies for the hybrid cloud market. This has led to using OpenStack services to provide companies with the means to deploy and manage cloud workloads, package them in Linux based Docker containers that ensure an open, extensible approach to portability.