IBM Watson Studio is Coming to Your Desktop

Doug Stauber
4 min readOct 18, 2018

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Example of a Modeler Flow running on Watson Studio Desktop

IBM Watson Studio is an incredibly powerful data science offering. If you’re not familiar, Watson Studio is an integrated environment designed to make it easy to develop, train, and manage models. It includes a wide selection of tools used for everything from data prep and blend to image recognition. And now Watson Studio is on its way to your Windows or Mac desktop machine.

Overview of Watson Studio

Watson Studio includes a variety of tools all within one integrated environment. The most popular tools of Watson Studio are:

  • SPSS Modeler for data prep, blend, and modeling without coding
  • Data Refinery, a spreadsheet style tool, that enables fast, self-service data preparation
  • Python, R, and Scala Jupyter Notebooks to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text
  • Neural Network Modeler for designing TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch and Caffe structures without coding
  • Interactive Dashboards to deliver sharable live reports so the end users can discover their own insights

Available Deployment Options

Watson Studio will soon be available as three deployment options:

  • Watson Studio on the IBM Cloud is the easiest way to get started. It offers 3 tiers from a free starter tier with pay-as-you-go compute all the way to an enterprise edition.
  • Watson Studio Local is our behind-the-firewall solution providing a secure way to add Watson Studio capabilities to your enterprise. Includes purchase options for a handful of users or the entire organization.
  • And coming soon: Watson Studio Desktop

Introducing Watson Studio Desktop

Watson Studio Desktop is our new 3rd deployment option within the Watson Studio family. It takes the most popular portions of what is available within Watson Studio on the cloud and ports it to your Windows or Mac machine for offline use, for analysis of data files you don’t want to upload, and for snappy performance. All with a fast and easy desktop installation.

Watson Studio on the desktop will scale from an individual user all the way up to a large team, and will be a great addition to the Watson Studio family along with our cloud and local flavors.

The initial main features of Watson Studio desktop will be a SPSS Modeler canvas together with the data refinery spreadsheet editor. This will include backwards compatibility for SPSS Modeler streams.

Benefits of Watson Studio Desktop

  • It’s fast, especially for local files. Increase individual productivity using a locally installed client.
  • It provides offline use. Want to build a model on a plane without WiFi? Watson Studio Desktop will work without an internet connection for weeks at a time.
  • Adhere to security and governance mandates with your data. Watson Studio Desktop allows all your data to remain on your machine.
  • Unlimited modeling without overages. Using Watson Studio Desktop, you can develop models without any incremental cost. This allows you to build models iteratively on your desktop, then move it to Watson Studio on the Cloud to deploy.
  • It’s one Watson Studio, so no re-learning required. With the same designs as the cloud and local versions, switching between deployment options is seamless with no unique training.
  • And just like the rest of Watson Studio, anyone — coders or non-coders — will be able to prepare, blend, explore, and model their data in just minutes.
Watson Studio Desktop’s powerful graphing capabilities

Join the Beta

The Beta for Watson Studio is starting now with two tools already ported to the desktop: a refreshed version of SPSS Modeler & Data Refinery. It will also include projects to organize your work, data assets organization, and a convenient check for updates feature.

Join the beta to provide feedback on how you like these tools, and recommend which other tools we bring to the desktop. The Beta is a part of the IBM SPSS Modeler Subscription Trial, so once you register for that you’ll have access to both downloads.

After you register, look for the “IBM SPSS Modeler Subscription Trial” card, click Download, then you’ll see the Watson Studio Desktop Beta downloads on the right hand side of the page.

Join the discussion on the beta community

After registering for the beta, join in the discussion on the Watson Studio Desktop beta community. Here you can ask questions about the beta, provide recommendations for future features, get forum support, and participate in valuable surveys to influence product direction. Join the forum here by logging in with your IBMid.

Watch for future announcements here about this exciting addition for the Watson Studio Family.

Watson Studio Desktop project organizer

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