Gaining insights from rapidly expanding volumes of data residing in a variety of sources is challenging enterprises to meet pressing organizational demands, which often include speed and agility. Traditional approaches to deep learning and cognitive computing were complex and reserved for scientific and very large organizations with equally large budgets. Yet advancing innovations in technology are enabling applications to make increasingly complex and contextual decisions that are timely, accurate, and precise. At the foundation of this are modern cloud infrastructures built on accelerated compute processing technologies such as GPUs. The evolution and proliferation of cloud technology have simplified and made more economical delivery of these IT services possible as vendors combine infrastructure and software to enable consumption of cognitive capabilities to far more organizations than ever before.
Organizations within many diverse industries now have the potential to leverage cognitive applications and transform the way they process information to interact with their users. Large volumes of unstructured information are generated every day in the legal and medical fields for instance, and providing rapid insights from this information transforms its value and opens the potential for new revenue streams and business outcomes that promise greater customer satisfaction. Delivering cognitive applications that offer these capabilities as cloud-delivered services reduces the cost and staffing expertise barriers to making these types of capabilities a reality.