IBM is bringing the Python data science platform Anaconda to the company’s LinuxONE and IBM Z customers.
Anaconda is the world’s most popular Python distribution platform and boasts over 25 million users worldwide. This announcement is the latest part of IBM’s effort to bring popular data science frameworks and libraries to its enterprise platforms.
Barry Baker, VP of Product Management for IBM Z & LinuxONE, wrote in a blog post:
“Data scientists who already know and love Anaconda can now expand their open-source data science experience to include IBM Z & LinuxONE, while continuing to work with their favorite tools and frameworks like conda, XGBoost and SciKit-Learn.
This expands and enables choice in AI frameworks and tooling for end-to-end data science directly on the platform, including development, training, testing and production.
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Data scientists can benefit from the security capabilities, high availability and scalability of the IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms when implementing AI deployments targeting time-sensitive workloads or transactions when they are taking place.”
A recent study commissioned by IBM from Morning Consult found that 90 per cent of respondents want to build and run AI where their data already resides. Anaconda for IBM Z and LinuxONE enables organisations to do just that while addressing latency.
Anaconda runs natively on IBM Z. Through z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) on z/OS, the solution brings open-source data science tools close to key workloads, leveraging the data gravity of the Z and LinuxONE platforms.
Last year, IBM Watson and Anaconda announced a collaboration to help drive the enterprise adoption of open-source AI technologies.
IBM integrated Anaconda’s Team Edition repository with Watson Studio. Anaconda, for its part, featured Watson Studio’s no-charge plan to its community of 20 million data scientists.
