IBM extends power of cognitive solutions on cloud to Lankan market

IBM recently announced that IBM’s 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 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 percent 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 t
heir own use.
As 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 supports cognitive workloads, will further help customers to make better operational decisions, understand customer needs better, communicate in real time and optimize 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 Programme for start-ups 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.