IBM extends power of cognitive solutions on Cloud to Sri Lanka market

From left: Managing Director, IBM India Ltd. Vanitha Narayanan, CEO, Talview Sanjoe Joseph, CEO, Co-Founder, Academy of Design, Linda Speldewinde, Chief Process Officer, Hemas Holding Plc - Sri Lanka Chandima Cooray and‎ Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, ‎Janalakshmi Financial Services  Santanu Mukherjee during the panel discussion 

From left: Visually challenged Ultra Marathoner Simon Wheatcroft, Ultra Cyclist Dave Hasse, Former Captain, Sri Lankan Cricket team Mahela  Jayawardene and CMO, IBM ISA  Vasantha Kumar during the discussion about  ‘Disrupt Sport with Digital’.

IBM has announced that its integrated portfolio of cognitive solutions on Cloud is now available to the large and small enterprises, developers and entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. 

The announcement was made as a part of the IBM Business Connect event in Colombo, focused on how cognitive systems are transforming businesses and customer outcomes, and ways in which Sri Lanka is well poised to usher in this next wave of technology innovation.

In today’s digital era, the world produces over 25 quintillion bytes of data every day and 80% of it is unstructured which is essentially invisible to computers. Cognitive computing represents a new class of systems that understands unstructured data. IBM Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing that can sift through vast volumes of disparate data at remarkable speeds, learn at scale and provide comprehensive insights and value over time to professionals working across every industry.

IBM will now deliver Watson APIs and services on the IBM Cloud Platform, allowing a growing ecosystem of developers, students, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts in Sri Lanka to easily tap into the most advanced and diverse cognitive computing platform available today. Watson APIs enable applications to derive insights from social media, enterprise data, or other digital communications. The service uses linguistic analytics to infer personality and social characteristics. The Watson Developer Cloud offers a variety of services for building cognitive apps which encompasses development, training, testing, and configuration environment to enterprises to create Watson-enabled applications for their own use.

As a part of the Watson technology showcase at the event, IBM revealed interesting insights into the Sri-Lanka vs Australia one day series such as top player, top moments from the game etc. by using Watson APIs like visual recognition, dialog, personality insights, retrieve and rank, speech-to-text and text-to-speech. 

“Sri-Lanka is an integral part of IBM’s growth strategy. With a strong presence in the country, IBM is committed to the success of its clients and continues to support transformation of Sri Lanka’s high growth sectors such as BFSI, telecom and many more. IBM’s integrated portfolio of Cognitive solutions like Watson on Cloud platform that support cognitive workloads, will further help customers to make better operational decisions, understand customer needs better, communicate in real time, and optimise business processes – thus helping them stay ahead of the completion,” said IBM Sri Lanka Country General Manager Chrishan M. Fernando. 

The company also launched the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for startups that will help them to harness the power of IBM Cloud, as well as deeply connect and embed them into IBM’s vast global network of enterprise clients, consultants, partners, innovation centres and more to rapidly build innovations, scale quickly and accelerate growth.

Through the global program, qualifying startups will receive up to $ 120,000 worth of credits to put towards IBM Cloud usage, giving them the instant infrastructure needed to quickly launch their businesses and focus resources on coding, building, scaling and bringing innovations to market. Entrepreneurs will be given access to the IBM Cloud portfolio built on cloud infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company. This portfolio includes Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for app development with more than 75 runtimes and services including Watson on Bluemix, all of which will help startups to capture and leverage rising volumes of data from growing mobile and social networks, IoT devices and more.