IBM BigInsights (IBM Hadoop) vs IBM Watson

Question

What is the difference between IBM Watson and IBM Inforsphere BigInsights (IBM Hadoop)/Streams? What Watson brings to the table that BigInsights wouldn't?

Answer 1

IBM Watson is an AI system capable of answering questions posed in natural language

BigInsights is IBM's distribution of hadoop with value-adds. This distribution is based on the Open Data Platform. BigInsights build value-add capabilities on top of the open data platform. For example, BI provides capabilities on text analytics where you can analyze unstructured text. BI also provides GPFS support, and allow you to use GPFS as the distributed file system. BigInsight is for you to perform analysis for data at rest.

IBM Streams is a separate product from BigInsight. It is an analytic platform capable of processing data in motion in real time. As data passes through the system, the data is processed in memory one at a time, without having to save this data on a file system, or persistent store. Streams also provide a set of toolkits (e.g. text, odm, spss, time series), to help facilitate real-time data analysis.

The main difference between Watson and BI is that Watson is an AI system. It is capable of learning new information and can understand natural language. BI is a hadoop system. It is for batch processing data at rest. You can use text analytics to extract information from unstructured text data. But it is not an AI system. Streams is for analyzing data in motion, allowing you to gain insight of your data in real-time, without having to store it anywhere.