The IBM Fast Track Your Data event in Munich this year might have been more aptly named: “Drive your data at the speed limit, and make sure to brake at yellow lights.”

And this is not simply alluding to the General Data Protection Regulation panel at the conference. The three tracks at the conference were data governance; the general state of big data in Europe; and cloud-native data applications.

“Each of them is individually important, but none of them is a game changer,” said James Kobielus (@jameskobielus) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. IBM’s announcements were a bit underwhelming, Kobielus told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (right), his co-host at the show. (* Disclosure below.)

“… I was a little bit disappointed because there wasn’t any significant new announcements related to IBM evolving their machine learning portfolio into deep learning or artificial intelligence. … I would like to hear more going forward about IBM investments in these areas,” Kobielus said.

That said, IBM is directionally correct in its attention to GDPR and the stringent governance it will demand when it goes live next year in May, Kobielus said.

With the almost Draconian 4 percent revenue penalty GDPR breaches could cost companies, they’d be wise to start amassing all the governance tools available, Vellante stated. Previously, he noted, “You could just sort of fluff it off and say, ‘Ah, just pay the fine.’ I think you’re going to see a lot of, ‘Well, pay the lawyers to delay this thing and battle it.'”

IBM’s InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog and the company’s participation in a consortium with Hortonworks Inc. to build governance on Apache Atlas metadata framework both got nods from Kobielus and Vellante.

Startup envy

On the less-than-exciting end of IBM Corp.’s announcements were machine learning and artificial intelligence application development. This is worrisome since direct competitors like Google and Microsoft are investing so much there, Kobielus explained.

Perhaps IBM will deliver more later this year, since it has shown a healthy interest in this area already.

“IBM has startup envy. They’re a big, old company; been around more than a hundred years. And they’re trying to very much bootstrap and restart their brand in this new context, in the 21st century,” Kobielus said. “I think they’re making a good effort at doing it. In terms of community engagement, they have a really good community engagement program, all around the world, in terms of hackathons and developer days — you know meetups here and there. And they get lots of turnout and very loyal customers. And IBM’s got to broadest portfolio.”

There were upgrades to IBM DB2 Direct Community Editions, a multi-workload database for developers, but IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform was left out in the cold, according to Kobielus.

“I’d like to see IBM, going forward, turn Watson data platform into a true DevOps platform in terms of continuous integration of machine learning and deep learning,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the IBM Fast Track Your Data event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Fast Track Your Data. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE