OREANDA-NEWS. IBM today announced the first cloud-based development environment for near real-time, high performance analytics, giving data scientists the ability to access and ingest data and deliver insight-driven models to developers. Available on the IBM Cloud Bluemix platform, the Data Science Experience provides 250 curated data sets, open source tools and a collaborative workspace to help data scientists uncover and share meaningful insights with developers, making it easier to rapidly develop applications that are infused with intelligence.

Building on its $300 million investment in developing Apache Spark as a type of “analytics operating system,” IBM created the Data Science Experience to extend the speed and agility of Spark to more than two million members of the R community through new contributions to SparkR, SparkSQL and Apache SparkML. As a result, data scientists who work in R will have faster access to more data, and in turn, more insights delivered from the IBM Cloud.

The Data Science Experience’s open and collaborative environment allows data scientists to accelerate and simplify data ingestion, curation and analysis by bringing together the content, data, models, and open source resources from IBM and others including H2O, RStudio, Jupyter Notebooks on Apache Spark in a single security-rich managed environment.

“With Apache Spark, we see an opportunity to significantly transform the role of the data scientist by providing access to curated data sets, open source tools and a collaborative platform to accelerate innovation,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Analytics. “IBM’s Digital Science Experience is the killer enterprise app for Apache Spark, and gives data scientists new opportunities to deliver insight-driven models to developers, and opens the door for unprecedented innovation from the open source community.”

IBM continues to collaborate with leading data science organizations including Galvanize, H2O.ai, LightBend and RStudio to promote an integrated and unified data science ecosystem. Additionally, IBM is joining the R Consortium to help accelerate data science’s readiness for the enterprise.

IBM is leading the way in the growing Analytics ecosystem having contributed to related projects including Apache Toree, EclairJS, Apache Quarks, Apache Mesos, Apache Tachyon now called Alluxio, and major contributions to Apache Spark sub-projects SparkSQL, SparkR, MLLib, and PySpark with over 3,000 total contributions in the last year.

In addition, IBM has built Spark into the core of its platforms including Watson, Commerce, Analytics, Systems, Cloud as well as more than 30 offerings including IBM BigInsights for Apache Hadoop, IBM Analytics on Apache Spark, Spark with Power Systems, Watson Analytics, SPSS Modeler and IBM Stream Computing. IBM also open-sourced its breakthrough SystemML machine learning technology to advance Spark’s machine learning capabilities in 2015.

“Just as IBM played a critical role in the development of Computer Science, we can see many similarities today. Computer Science went mainstream with the introduction of the PC,” said Picciano. “With Data Science, the major roadblock is having access to large data sets and having the ability to work with so much data. With today’s announcement, clients can have both.”