IBM promises a one-stop analytics shop with AI-powered big data platform

Big data is in many ways still a wild frontier, requiring wily smarts and road-tested persistence on the part of those hoping to find insight in all the petabytes. On Tuesday, IBM announced a new platform it hopes will make things easier.

Dubbed Project DataWorks, the new cloud-based platform is the first to integrate all types of data and bring AI to the table for analytics, IBM said.

Project DataWorks is available on IBM's Bluemix cloud platform and aims to foster collaboration among the many types of people who need to work with data. Tapping technologies including Apache Spark, IBM Watson Analytics and the IBM Data Science Experience launched in June, the new offering is designed to give users self-service access to data and models while ensuring governance and rapid-iteration capabilities.

Project DataWorks can ingest data faster than any other data platform, from 50 to hundreds of Gbps, deriving from sources including enterprise databases, the internet of things (IoT) and social media, according to IBM.  What the company calls "cognitive" capabilities such as those found in its Watson artificial intelligence software, meanwhile, can help pave a speedier path to new insights, it says.

"Analytics is no longer something in isolation for IT to solve," said Derek Schoettle, general manager of cloud data services for IBM Analytics, in an interview. "In the world we're entering, it's a team sport where data professionals all want to be able to operate on a platform that lets them collaborate securely in a governed manner.