IBM unveils Quarks for small enterprises

As part of its effort to further boost its data analytics capability, New York-based  $81.741 billion technology and consulting behemoth IBM has announced the launch of  new open-source development toolkit Quarks to analyse Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data for small enterprises.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, IBM Fellow and Director Streams Nagui Halim informed that the product will help companies and programmers accelerate development of applications that can more efficiently take advantage of the increasing volume of data being produced by the IoT.

“Quarks has been developed as an open source project to build a community that enables analytics at the edge. Quarks provides the ability to react not just locally to events but also works in combination with central streaming analytic systems such as Storm and IBM Streams to provide a hierarchy of analytic processing across devices,” said Halim.

He said IBM Streams is the leading platform for real time streaming analytics in the enterprise either on premise or on cloud. “It has a large suite of analytic toolkit, including geo-spatial, text and machine learning and many more,” he said.

Halim said Quarks on the other hand is lightweight and designed for operation at the edge where computing resources are typically more limited than in the enterprise.

“Quarks allows devices to react locally to events and help reduce communication costs by sending data to central systems when an event of interest occurs. This allows all relevant data to be delivered the moment an event of interest occurs — rather than just relying on a periodic heartbeat of information,” he said.