IBM and SAP Stand Out as Leaders in the Market for Cloud-Based Enterprise AI Platforms

IBM and SAP stand out as leaders in the market for cloud-based enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

The company’s new report: ‘Cloud-based Enterprise AI Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment’ states that IBM and SAP offer a full suite of AI capabilities and features, function- and industry-specific tools, and portfolios that include complementary offers, such as professional services to help customers identify and implement use cases.

Rena Bhattacharyya, Research Director at GlobalData, says: “AI deployments range in complexity depending on the details of a particular project or use case.  Cloud-based enterprise AI platforms consist of tools and resources that allow enterprises to incorporate cognitive functions into their applications and business processes more easily and quickly.”

Potential use cases are vast, and include deployments that improve efficiency and productivity, facilitate better and faster decision-making, uncover relationships in large data sets, and provide more personal, contextualized customer interactions. In addition to horizontal applications, such as those that manage sentiment, monitor security or perform sales related projections, AI is also making its way into industry-specific applications. It is being used by pharmaceutical companies to speed drug development, by the financial community to review loan documentation, and by retailers to suggest product purchases.

The market is flooded with companies that offer AI-infused solutions or provide AI-centric tools, but few competitors provide a complete platform that includes API’s, operationalized services, toolkits, libraries and processing power. In addition to IBM and SAP, GlobalData’s report includes profiles on platforms from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, and will expand to include other vendors in the future. The assessments will help enterprises select vendors to assist them with leveraging AI technology, whether they are looking for pre-built solutions for non-AI specialists or integrated toolkits and libraries for data scientists.

Bhattacharyya adds: “Companies of all sizes are exploring options for incorporating artificial intelligence into their business processes. AI platforms allow non-data scientists to incorporate AI features into their solutions quickly, and streamline deployment and management of custom machine learning or deep learning models.

“Enterprise AI platforms provide an integrated environment that facilitates the development of AI solutions for a range of audiences. Pre-built solutions are more readily accessible to non-AI specialists, and integrated toolkits, libraries, and resources help streamline deployments for data scientists.”