IBM's Big Bet On Cloud AI Will Pay Off

Gaining an advantage in the global high-tech market is often the result of research and development (R&D) combined with execution and incremental improvement. Today's emerging cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) platforms are a perfect example of R&D-fueled competition. With the cloud giants and many governments investing heavily in AI R&D, what's a mere multinational corporation to do? IBM spent the past few years restructuring to address the combination of "cognitive services" (AI-based services) and cloud platforms. During that time, IBM continued to invest in R&D, but focused their efforts on AI software, "as-a-service" initiatives and scale-out systems designed for delivering cloud-based analytics and AI services. As part of this transition, IBM opened its cloud infrastructure development to a much broader community and also partnered with other AI leaders like NVIDIA to provide high-performance AI systems.