International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) is seeking new means of revenue sources for its data analytics business as the current business model isn’t going well for the firm. Now the company is eyeing on the most-trending technology, free software product segment, so as to make a mark in this domain.
The IBM executive Rob Thomas said that the firm has developed a Technology Center in San Francisco, particularly to focus on a free open-source software program called Spark. The firm has appointed 20 people for this project last month, based on Thomson video post on June 3.
“We’re going to be scaling this up to hundreds of people that are just focused on Spark open source and how we evolve that for the enterprise,” Thomas said.
University of California was the first to introduced Spark at Berkeley. A framework that assists companies to analyze large amounts of data rapidly, as the Spark is built on a high processing technology. Spark attracted many companies of Silicon Valley replacing the Hadoop, a free Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment, which gave birth to a variety of firms including Cloudera Inc., MapR Technologies Inc. and Hortonworks Inc.
“This is a much more significant bet than even what we have done on Hadoop to be frank,” Thomas said. “We think Spark is going to be enormous and change the face of enterprise IT.”
IBM is seeking revenue sources for its cloud computing business as the sales of its older software and services have dipped. The Armonk, New York-based company has struggled to develop attractive products using its own tools through the aid of acquired startups.
IBM is due Monday to give a presentation at a San Francisco conference called “Accelerating Innovation with Spark,” according to the schedule posted online.
