Watson Crowdsources Cloud Computing

October 20, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off

Twitter Feed

US Army Cloud Computing Class at Ft. Gordon, GA

By G C Network | June 24, 2011

A few weeks ago I had the distinct pleassue of teaching yet another US Army cloud computing class. This time the venue was Ft. Gordon, GA and the students definitely…

78 Agency Services Identified for Cloud Transition

By G C Network | May 29, 2011

The Office of Management and Budget recently released a list of 78 projects slated for transition to cloud over the next year. The most common application, according to a FierceGovernmentIT,…

NGA Sets GEOINT Strategic Direction with Earth Builder

By G C Network | May 15, 2011

Last month Google and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency started sharing details about their “GEOINT on Demand” collaboration. The project, named Earth Builder, was built specifically to enable NGA to…

Teleology Systems Introduces CloudeFX at DoDIIS

By G C Network | April 27, 2011

Next week at DoDIIS, NJVC will be showcasing a few of our government cloud computing partners. One of the most exciting of these is the Cloud Service Orchestration Framework by…

Cloud Computing Highlighted at DoDIIS 2011

By G C Network | April 27, 2011

Are you going to DoDIIS? Schedule for May 1-5, 2011 in Detroit, Michigan, the conference highlights the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) commitment to developing and maintaining secure and reliable networks for…

Washington DC a Cloud Computing Trendsetter!

By G C Network | April 16, 2011

A TechJournal South article last week named Washington, DC as a leading trendsetter in cloud computing. Citing a Microsoft sponsored survey, conducted by 7th Sense research, D.C. was highlighted as particullarly receptive…

Melvin Greer Cited by IBM for Cloud Computing Innovation

By G C Network | April 5, 2011

Congratulations to my good friend Melvin Greer for being awarded IBM’s first ever ACE Award!! “Melvin Greer, Lockheed Martin Senior Fellow has won IBM’s first ever Awarding Customer Excellence (ACE)…

“GovCloud: The Book” Launched at National Press Club Event

By G C Network | March 30, 2011

As many of you know, today marked the official launch of my first book – GovCloud: Cloud Computing for the Business of Government. Today’s venue was the National Press Club…

“Cloud Musings on Forbes” Launched!!

By G C Network | March 24, 2011

Today I published my first post on Forbes.com!! At the invitation of Bruce Upbin, Forbes.com editor, I will be contributing posts monthly. I see this not only as an honor,…

Tech America and INSA Form Cloud Computing Advisory Groups

By G C Network | March 6, 2011

Last week TechAmerica announced the formation of a “cloud computing commission” to advise the White House on the current plans to steer more than $20B worth of IT services toward…

« Previous
1
…
33
34
35
36
37
…
73
Next »

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.