The challenge with many of the complex modern technologies that are coming into datacenters is making them easy and cheap enough for enterprises to use at a their own scale, which is much more limited than that of hyperscalers and cloud builders, and employing their own skillsets, which are also more limited. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the top of the list of these technologies. What enterprises do have are the same needs to be able to crunch the relatively massive amounts of data that they are generating to find patterns and information that will drive better and faster business decisions, increase revenues, and improve efficiencies. AI, particularly as expressed in machine learning, are the key tools that will let them do all this. They just have to find ways to leverage the technologies with the resources they have.

IBM has been making a lot of noise in the datacenter recently. In December of 2017, the company's POWER9 platforms hit the market with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). In March of this year, Rackspace and Google gave the first public peek at the Zaius and Barreleye 2 Open Compute platform at the Open Compute Summit. At last week's Red Hat summit, IBM and Red Hat announced a partnership to extend IBM Cloud to Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform and Certified Containers. These are all significant, but perhaps the biggest bang of all was the recent announcement that IBM and Nutanix have delivered hyperconverged platforms based on IBM's POWER9 platform.

IBM has been making a lot of noise in the datacenter recently. In December of 2017, the company's POWER9 platforms hit the market with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). In March of this year, Rackspace and Google gave the first public peak at the Zaius and Barreleye 2 Open Compute platform at the Open Compute Summit. At last week's Red Hat summit, IBM and Red Hat announced a partnership to extend IBM Cloud to Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform and Certified Containers. These are all significant, but perhaps the biggest bang of all was the recent announcement that IBM and Nutanix are partnering to deliver hyperconverged platforms based on IBM's POWER9 platform.