The IBM “endorsement effect” has often shaped the computer industry over the years. In 1981, when IBM entered the personal computer business, the company decisively pushed an upstart technology into the mainstream.
In 2000, the open-source operating system Linux was viewed askance in many corporations as an oddball creation and even legally risky to use, since the open-source ethos prefers sharing ideas rather than owning them, but IBM endorsed Linux and poured money and people into accelerating the adoption of the open-source operating system.
APACHE SPARK
IBM was yesterday scheduled to announce a broadly similar move in big data software. The company is placing a large investment — contributing software developers, technology and education programs — behind an open-source project for real-time data analysis, called Apache Spark.
The commitment, according to Robert Picciano, senior vice president for IBM’s data analytics business, will amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars” a year.
In the big data software market, much of the attention and investment so far has been focused on Apache Hadoop and the companies distributing that open-source software, including Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.
Hadoop, put simply, is the software that makes it possible to handle and analyze vast volumes of all kinds of data. The technology came out of the pure Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, and is increasingly being used by mainstream companies, which want to do similar big data analysis in their businesses.
SPEED
However, if Hadoop opens the door to probing vast volumes of data, Spark promises speed. Real-time processing is essential for many applications, from analyzing sensor data streaming from machines to sales transactions on online marketplaces.
The Spark technology was developed at the Algorithms, Machines and People Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. A group from the Berkeley lab founded a company two years ago, Databricks, which offers Spark software as a cloud service.
Spark, Picciano said, is crucial technology that will make it possible to “really deliver on the promise of big data.”
That promise, he said, is to quickly gain insights from data to save time and costs, and to spot opportunities in fields like sales and new product development.
IBM said it will put more than 3,500 of its developers and researchers to work on Spark-related projects. It will contribute machine-learning technology to the open-source project, and embed Spark in IBM’s data analysis and commerce software. IBM will also offer Spark as a service on its programming platform for cloud software development, Bluemix. The company will open a Spark technology center in San Francisco to pursue Spark-based innovations.
PARTNERSHIPS
IBM also plans to partner with academic and private education organizations, including UC Berkeley’s AMPLab, DataCamp, Galvanize and Big Data University to teach Spark to as many as 1 million data engineers and data scientists.
By aligning itself with a popular open-source project, IBM, they said, hopes to attract more software engineers to use its big data software tools, too.
“It’s first and foremost a play for the minds — and hearts — of developers,” IDC analyst Dan Vesset said.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
RESHAPING COMMERCE: Major industrialized economies accepted 15 percent duties on their products, while charges on items from Mexico, Canada and China are even bigger US President Donald Trump has unveiled a slew of new tariffs that boosted the average US rate on goods from across the world, forging ahead with his turbulent effort to reshape international commerce. The baseline rates for many trading partners remain unchanged at 10 percent from the duties Trump imposed in April, easing the worst fears of investors after the president had previously said they could double. Yet his move to raise tariffs on some Canadian goods to 35 percent threatens to inject fresh tensions into an already strained relationship, while nations such as Switzerland and New Zealand also saw increased
RSS