IT Minds

Machines will learn just like a child, says IBM CEO ORLANDO – Technology is shifting to intelligent machines with a capability to reason, said IBM Chairman and CEO Virginia Rometty. These machines won't replace humans, but will augment them. It is a technology that will transform business, she said. This technology is the basis of  IBM 's work on  Watson , its cognitive or thinking system. Rometty, interviewed Tuesday by Gartner analysts at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo , said cognitive systems understand not only data, but unstructured data, which includes images, songs, video, and then goes a step further: "They reason and they learn." "When I say reason it's like you and I, if there is an issue or question, they take in all the information that they know, they stack up a set of hypotheses, they run it against all that data to decide, what do I have the most confidence in, " Rometty said. The machine "can prove why I do or...

IBM chases Intel with new Power-based Linux servers sold over the Web IBM is gunning for a slice of Intel's x86 server chip business with a new family of Power systems that run Linux and will be sold directly to customers over the Web. The LC family of servers, which went on sale Thursday, is aimed at organizations deploying clustered or cloud environments, particularly for running Hadoop, Spark and other workloads that involve crunching large volumes of data. IBM already sells Power servers running Linux, but these new boxes differ in a number of ways, and mark the latest effort by IBM to expand its Power platform into new markets, said Stephanie Chiras, director and business line executive for scale-out Power systems. For a start, the servers make use of industry standard components, including the memory DIMMs, to keep prices lower, and they don't automatically "call home" to IBM if there's a failure, as other Power systems do. They're also ...