The Race Is On: IBM, Google, Microsoft And AWS Aim To Deliver Machine Learning As A Cloud Service

Ever since the late 1950s, when pioneering IBM researcher Arthur Samuel trained the world's first self-learning computer to play a mean game of checkers, the future has promised a widespread emergence of intelligent machines. Machine learning, the computing methodology Samuel introduced to the world, is now seen as mature, effective and -- thanks to a variety of new offerings -- readily accessible to the channel. "For consulting companies like ours, this is the opportunity of a lifetime," said Dj Das, CEO of Third Eye Consulting Services and Solutions, a big data and analytics solution provider in Santa Clara, Calif., that partners with four major hyper-scale cloud providers: IBM, Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services. That opportunity has presented itself in a diverse spectrum of use cases, from optimizing supply chains, predicting customer buying patterns, diagnosing illnesses, detecting fraud, recognizing text and images, and improving IT performance and security. "The clients I talk to, the partners I talk to, they understand that this is going to be a disrupter," Ed Harbour, IBM's vice president for implementations for Watson, Big Blue's cloud-based cognitive computing platform, told CRN. "And whether they choose to embrace it to their advantage or whether they don't is probably going to determine the outcome of how their businesses go forward." IBM is staking much of its future on cognitive computing, an analytic approach that mimics human thought processes of which machine learning is an essential component.