IBM Big Data Platform Announcements #bigdatamgmt

Next up is Inhi Suh focusing on the Big Data platform announcements. She began by reiterating the various use cases Bob mentioned earlier:

• Enrich your information base by analyzing more data faster
• Improve customer interaction with richer view of customer
• Reduce risk and prevent fraud in security/intelligence
• Optimize infrastructure and monetize data
• Gain IT efficiency and scale with better data infrastructure

For each, she says, there is a role for Big Data whether its call center notes, social media chatter, emails, sensor data etc. The new capabilities enable these different use cases by supporting streaming data, exploration of new data sources, improved governance and integration etc.

Three versions of InfoSphere BigInsights are available:

• Basic Edition, a free download with a web-based management console, support for Jaql etc
• Enterprise Edition with support for accelerators  text analytics, database/warehouse connectivity etc
• The new PureData for Hadoop appliance

Specific improvements in InfoSphere:

• InfoSphere BigInsights 2.1 offers specific support for the new Landing Area concept IBM sees as part of the architecture companies need to leverage data and analytics. This Landing Zone let’s people do analytics against raw data. The new release adds support for Big SQL allowing SQL skills to be used, POSIX compliance and security, and improves support for high availability.
• InfoSphere Streams 3.1 is focused on improving real-time analytics. Improvements here include 2-10x runtime performance, continued improvements in developer experience and simplified large scale deployment for clusters and nodes. Time Series support has also been improved and SPSS models have been integrated into InfoSphere Streams.
• InfoSphere Entity Analytics has been enhanced to improve the ability to detect like and related entities across large, sparse and disparate data.
• New zEnterprise support include BigInsights support for zBladeCenter, DB2 Analytics Accelerator powered by Netezza has been updated plus betas for DB2 support for SQL/NoSQL and IMS enhanced Hadoop support.

IBM is investing in helping companies build skills too, providing the Big Data University online environment as well working with Universities to provide traditional courses.

BTW the full IBM press release is available here.