Deepak Advani kicked off the first day’s analytics keynote by noting the number of different analytics communities that are now part of IBM – Cognos, SPSS, Algorithmics and more. Analytics, he says, is a broad change that is just beginning and will impact everyone. Rob Ashe followed and made the point that the opening keynote of IOD was focused on analytics almost to the exclusion of anything else. Analytics, he says, is moving from a vendor-push to a customer-pull phase, with demand for analytics growing rapidly in customers of every type as business becomes increasingly information-based. Analytics is driving change in companies of every size even though, in some ways, the analytics industry is just getting started. Rob identified three areas he sees as core focus areas:
- Demand for agile analytics
Complementing large enterprise deployments with flexible tools for knowledge workers and managers so they can quickly access and analyze data. - Broad spectrum of analytics
IBM’s focus is on platforms so they want to make sure that everything they do comes together in a scalable enterprise-suitable platform. - Wild west of big data
As more data explodes into companies it cannot be ignored but it is real-time, personal/social, high volume and unstructured making it a governance and integration channel.
He presented 3+3: 3 focus areas of Big Data analytics, Decision Management and personal analytics across three areas – customer analytics, finance analytics and risk analytics. Great to see Decision Management get such a strong focus and to see both customer and risk analytics showing strongly.
Eric Yau came up to present the details. IBM divides analytics into a platform, capabilities and solutions:
- Platform – access all your data sources, model against this data, manage everything and deploy it. IBM handles meta data, in-memory and other technical issues of analytics at this level
- Capabilities – reporting, dashboards, scorecards, predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, planning and forecasting
- Solutions – around customers, finance, risk and industry verticals
Eric was joined by Cincinnati Zoo on stage who have a great story of using business intelligence to understand and then improve the operations of the zoo.
Going forward IBM say they are making a series of investments. In the platform layer this includes Cognos 10 on the cloud, integration with content management, in-memory optimization and real-time decisioning (SPSS Decision Management). Capability investments include mobility with a new iPad application, business insight workspace with a unified environment for BI, in-memory analytic server and predictive analytics where SPSS Modeler can be easily connected to the same data sources used by Cognos.
