Watson Crowdsources Cloud Computing

October 20, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off

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GovCloud Founder and Veteran’s 360 Showcased in US Veteran’s Magazine

By G C Network | June 13, 2014

Kevin L. Jackson, CEO and Founder of GovCloud Network, LLC, was showcased in US Veteran’s Magazine for his work with Veteran’s 360, a San Diego, California non-profit. With more than…

Cloud Environment Can Enable Fast, Secure Collaboration among Industries, Nations

By G C Network | June 4, 2014

NCOIC’s Kevin Jackson to present new process for creating interoperability via a cyber-secure multi-cloud environment at cloud computing conferences in the U.S. and China WASHINGTON—June 4, 2014—Cyber-secure cloud computing can…

The Federal Government Journey to Cloud Computing: Lessons Learned

By G C Network | June 3, 2014

[Republished from”On The FrontLines” magazine “Cloud Computing in Government: Lesson’s Learned” issue. Download the full 20 page issue online at https://digital.onthefrontlines.net/i/319551 ) In February 2011, Vivek Kundra announced the “Cloud…

Cloud Computing In Government Lesson’s Learned From On The FrontLines Magazine

By G C Network | May 29, 2014

Congratulations to my friends at “On The FrontLines Magazine” for an EXCELLENT presentation of important operational and managerial cloud computing transition lessons. This issues showcases cloud computing leaders from government…

From “Boots on the Ground” To “Heads in the Cloud,” Non-Profit aims to offer Cloud Training & business services to Corporate IT and HR teams.

By G C Network | May 28, 2014

From “military dedication” to “civilian success,”Veterans 360 Services is approaching the challenging transition of military service to civilian life with an innovative, focused and all-inclusive, 360 degree, process of education…

ICH Agile Cloud Consortium Completes Successful Event

By G C Network | May 22, 2014

Thank you to all that participated in yesterday’s ICH Agile Cloud Service Catalog event. ICH Agile Cloud is an industry-wide effort targeted at developing an open and inclusive cloud service…

ICH Releases Agenda for Agile Cloud Service Catalog Session

By G C Network | May 20, 2014

The Agile Cloud consortium’s second event will occur on May 21, 2014 at TIA Headquarters in Arlington, VA. This event will focus on development of the Agile Cloud Environment Service…

PDNS Offers “Anchor” Cloud Services to Agile Cloud Consortium

By G C Network | May 14, 2014

Private Digital Network Services (PDNS) and partners will provide its national, Private Digital Network (PDN) core and a suite of highly sought after services to the Interoperability Clearinghouse Agile Cloud effort. Its…

ICH/ITAAC Announces Second Agile Cloud Environment Event

By G C Network | May 7, 2014

The 2nd Agile Cloud Environment event will be held on May 21, 2014 at TIA Headquarters. This event will focus on development of the Agile Cloud Environment Service Catalog. The…

Interoperability Clearinghouse Launches “Agile Cloud” Collaboration

By G C Network | April 28, 2014

Last Wednesday, Maj Gen, USAF (Ret) John T. Brennan, Interoperability Clearinghouse (ICH) Executive Director, kicked off the Agile Cloud collaboration. This industry-wide effort is targeted at developing an open and…

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Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of analysis work using the IBM Watson cognitive business platform. The really exciting thing about this opportunity is the way data can seem to have a conversation with you. This got me wondering if social media data could carry on a conversation as well. Given my almost unhealthy interest in cloud computing, we ran a one week experiment to “crowdsource the internet” in order to see if it held any interesting cloud computing insights . To narrow the volume of documents down to a reasonable number, I limited providers to those on the most recent Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant:

Microsoft
Amazon Web Services
Google
VMware
IBM
Rackspace
Verizon
CSC
Interoute
CenturyLink
Dimension Data
Fujitsu
Joyent
NTT Communications
Virtustream

Leveraging Watson, I gathered cloud computing related social media documents. According to Watson, in one 24-hr period, there were 46,869 documents that mentioned these Cloud Service Providers (CSP) a total of 57,997 times. Google was totally dominating the online conversation with 73% of all mentions. Microsoft was a poor second at 17%.

Figure 1- Social media cloud computing “Share of Voice”

At this this point I took a look at overall industry sentiment. From this vantage point, Interoute outshines all rivals for positive sentiment. Of particular note, however, was that Dimension Data simultaneously held the crown for largest percentage of negative and lowest percentage of positive sentiment (which seems to be centered mostly around the dropout of a rider from its Tour de France team and a recent internal restructuring). The Dell/EMC cloud provider Virtustream doesn’t even seem to be present in social media conversations.

Figure 2– Customer Sentiment Regarding Cloud Service Providers

Figure 3 – Cloud Service Model “Share of Voice”

Microsoft dominated that segment of the conversation that specifically addressed the three standard cloud computing service models (Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS], Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS], Software-as-a-Service [SaaS]). Over 53% of the working set referenced Microsoft with second place AWS coming in at 13.5%. Software-as-a-service is the unsurprising overall service model leader but Microsoft seems to be edging out AWS for Infrastructure-as-a-Service mentions. Platform-as-a-Service is a distant laggard with only three providers (Microsoft, AWS and VMware) represented in social media exchanges.

Figure 4– Industry Vertical Cloud Computing “Share of Voice

In order to glean some business value, the documents were binned across thirteen industry verticals and analyzed for share of voice and author sentiment. The initial industry bins were:

Construction

Manufacturing

Wholesale trade

Information technology

Retail trade

Utilities

Financial services

Educational services

Transportation and warehousing

Entertainment, accommodation, and food services

Healthcare and social services

Public administration

Across this set, entertainment, government, education and healthcare industries seem to be most interested in the cloud. Surprising to me is that the construction industry interest surpasses that of financial services. Google seems to be driving industry related social media conversations with Microsoft and IBM rounding out the top three.

Although I wouldn’t use this non-scientific experiment to make any big bets, it does demonstrate how actionable data can be gleaned from the social media stream. It may also shed a little light on the power of cognitive computing in the business world.

One especially intriguing capability that I didn’t use in this experiment is the use of Watson Explorer technologies with Semantic Analytics. This solution is currently being used by IBM GTS to deliver “built to purpose” cognitive systems for the information technology industry vertical.

Figure 5– Cloud Service Provider Industry “Share of Voice

A key differentiator of this approach is its ability to extract meaning from the fragmented sentences normally found in unstructured IT service ticket description fields. Due to the global nature of GTS Services, this unstructured text is typically in multiple languages. Additionally, due to the different language skill levels of the globally sourced pool of agents, the grammar quality varies. This solution is used by GTS to uncover patterns and trends in the identification of contributing incident causes in order to prescribe appropriate preventative actions.

The digital transformation couple with cognitive computing is accelerating almost every industry. In the IT world, at least, cognitive computing promises to deliver the ability to bridge the gap between unstructured language data and effective maintenance action by correlating social media chatter and customer sentiments with the root causes of operational IT issues.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.