Cloudian Teams with Skymind for AI/ML Solutions

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In a step-by-step approach, Cloudian, the enterprise object storage systems vendor, is putting together the pieces – technology and partner program – to enable partners to deliver end-to-end enterprise grade artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions that are pre-vetted, pretested and easy for partners to explain, sell and deploy.

The latest step down this path is Tuesday’s announcement of Cloudian’s collaboration with Skymind, an AI company.

Cloudian’s Michael Tso

Skymind, the creator of the Deeplearning4j open source deep-learning library, and Cloudian are set to create data-management solutions for the hyper-scalable data sets necessary for AI and ML use cases, that target vertical industries such as medical, fraud detection for financial services, security and robotics, to name a handful.

“We’ve taken a different approach from other companies in this space who focus more on a single vertical integration. Our approach is more horizontal, where we do the data management and data distribution really well and we’ll partner with the best-of-breed application providers and make sure that they get tested before we package it and roll it out,” Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian, explained to us.

Cloudian will combine its scalable, on-premises storage systems for hyperscale technology in the data center with Skymind’s Deeplearning4j ability to recognize patterns in massive amounts of data. This will give users actionable intelligence.

So, for example, the two vendors have put together their first demo solution — a security monitoring tool. This monitoring tool predicts intrusions looking for specific data patterns.

“Cloudian and Skymind help organizations extract actionable information from vast pools of unstructured data,” said Tso. “Training data is the foundation of AI and ML. More training data and better metadata tagging result in quicker, more effective learning, making data the dynamic asset that is the key to unlocking AI and ML’s business impact,” he added.

According to IDC, spending on cognitive-related servers and storage will total $1.9 billion in 2017. Global spending on cognitive and AI solutions will continue to see significant corporate investment over the next several years, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 54 percent, according to IDC.

Cloudian manages huge amounts of enterprise data on premises, and in hybrid and multicloud situations. Late last month, Cloudian launched its Data Management Partners Program to help technology partners address current and future unstructured data growth challenges. The program initially included backup and NAS hierarchical storage vendors, and digital-assets management.

Just a week prior to the launch of the Data Management Partners Program, Cloudian announced the Cloudian Hyperforce Partner Program to make partners more effective at understanding and selling the vendor’s products and technology.

“We’re on premise[s] in the data center where enterprise resellers are already operating. So if they’ve been selling storage products, security products, server products, data protection … this is a very natural extension to their line because we’re selling to the same people in the same environment,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian.

Key to Cloudian’s plug-and-play strategy is that the vender is 100-percent native, fully compatible with Amazon S3 API, for scalable object storage. S3 is becoming the de facto standard for large scale data storage.

“We guarantee that if your application works with Amazon cloud it will work with our storage system in your data center,” said Tso. “That API is what allows us to plug in all the different data management partners and now the AI,” he added.

Cloudian has a number of customer engagements, the company said.