IBM Launches New Cloud for Data Science and Engineering

IBM today unveiled a new cloud offering called Cloud Private Data that's designed to help organizations utilize data science and machine learning techniques to generate insight from data, and then engineer AI products that put those insights into use. Separately, Big Blue announced the creation of a new consulting group dubbed the Data Science Elite Team. IBM describes its new Cloud Private for Data offering as an "integrated data science, data engineering, and app building platform" that will eventually be available across all clouds. The offering is designed to help users with a broad swath of data science activities, from collecting, cleaning, and cataloging data, to using machine learning algorithms to build models, and finally to putting them into production. The Cloud Private for Data borrows technology from various other IBM products, most prominently Data Science Experience, the Apache-Spark-based offering it launched in 2016 that allows data scientists to develop and iterate on models using R, Python, and Scale within a Jupyter notebook environment.