FEATURE : MACHINE LEARNING
Garnering enterprise momentum
With Machine Learning seeing an increase in enterprise wide adoption in the MEA , pundits say CIOs and C-level executives need to be flexible when deploying new technology . Adam Pantanowitz , Co-Founder and Chief of Innovation at AURA , said there is no doubt that there is greater accessibility to and democratisation of Machine Learning , an upsurge and excitement around the technology .
Pantanowitz added that the big cloud players have embraced it and made their tooling more accessible .
“ The open source community are very active and are providing accessible toolkits . In addition , the scientific community have made some great advancements which allows one to leverage knowledge gained in another domain by another researcher and their resources and move it to your problem domain .”
He said that computation has certainly advanced , enabling more cost-effective access to the requisite processing power
Tony Bartlett , Director : Data Centre Compute , Dell Technologies South Africa
( GPUs and CPUs ) to enable these applications . Pat Gelsinger , CEO , said Machine Learning is the most important new workload to emerge in the IT enterprise space in the last 10 years .
Today , said Gelsinger , Machine Learning is seen as being the way of the future by many enterprises as it is deemed an effective and automated means to provide companies with a competitive advantage , driving innovation and ultimately increase profitability .
“ The main sectors utilising Machine Leaning are healthcare , travel and hospitality , retail , finance and manufacturing . By using Machine Learning , a business can prevent fraud , provide dynamic pricing , effect predictive maintenance , leverage alerts and diagnostics as well as use real-time information to drive business decision making . This may be achieved by intelligent operations management , from applications to infrastructure , all by using dynamic threshold and capacity planning ,” he said .
Secret sauce
With vendors often claiming to have some Machine Learning ‘ secret sauce ’ in their wares that will revolutionise an enterprise ’ s business how should CIOs and their IT teams go about selecting the right tools and systems ?
Dr Nicola J . Millard , Principal Innovation Partner , BT , reiterated that no amount of secret sauce will revolutionise a business unless its data is in order and of high quality .
According to Millard , Machine Learning does not work by magic as it depends on data and if that data is unstable , inconsistent and spread among multiple legacy systems , it becomes more difficult and far more expensive to do . “ Aside from data , enterprises also need to step back www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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