Big Blue launches Big Data boot camp

IBM announces worldwide skills boot camp

IBM is running free skills boot camps for IT professionals as part of a global push to educate clients, business partners and college students in how to use its business analytics and information management software.

The company will provide IT professionals with access to 1,200 on-site boot camps worldwide, free of charge. Some 16 will be based in the UK. The camps will run at IBM's client and partner locations, universities, 38 IBM Innovation Centres and online at DB2University.com.

The boot camps will provide education to these communities on topics such as "Big Data", a technology the company provides to derive insight from information that businesses have in-house, as well as data that is freely available on the internet.

The company used its Big Data technology for its Watson machine, which it recently showcased to demonstrate the ability to derive useful information from the web, in order to defeat two Jeopardy! champions.

"Big Data is all about gleaning insights from the data that is out there; whether it's information from Twitter or specific information from inside their datacentre," Rod Smith, vice president of emerging internet technologies at IBM, told Computing.

"It is those connections that IT professionals have not been able to get to before; it's the process of finding a needle in the haystack, and seeing information in a total aspect - not distinguishing between data inside and outside the company."

He added that making sense of Big Data requires a new set of skills that many IT professionals do not possess today.

The skills boot camps will also provide education on topics such as analytics, data management and open source technologies including Hadoop and Eclipse tools.

Interested parties can find out more about the boot camps here.