Pej Javaheri come on to talk about the use of analytics to “be essential”. Analytics, he said, has arrived across marketing, sales, finance, IT and more. The results from applying analytics are clear and powerful, with research showing very strong ROI. IBM, he says, is focused on putting analytics in the hands of everyone while making it easy to access, refine and use data across the cloud. IBM has been steadily rolling out its analytic tools – Cognos, TM1, Watson and more – on the cloud. A demo of the new Cognos tools – focusing on high performance, rich data access and ease of use – followed.
The key of analytics, of course, is improving decision-making, and the value of predictive analytics is particularly high in these circumstances. IBM’s move to the cloud is continuing with a new cloud-based version of IBM SPSS Modeler Gold. This new version comes with geo-spatial and other algorithms specifically designed to work with big data. The predictive analytics developed using SPSS Modeler can be embedded in many of the other analytic products, such as TM1. Adding Cognos BI and SPSS Modeler Gold on cloud brings some of IBM’s core analytic technologies to their cloud offerings. American Airlines came on to talk about their use of Cognos BI.
Mark Altshuller came on to talk about the role of analytics in being “brilliant”. He re-emphasized how transformative IBM sees Watson Analytics. Even a simple analytics project, he says, involves business, analytic and IT users as well as data acquisition, transformation, analysis and more. It is rarely a straightforward linear process and it is essential that the result is insightful. Watson Analytics wanted to make it easy to shop for data, easy to clean and process that data, easy to understand the insights being generated. And they further really wanted to make sure that Watson Analytics works in multiple ways, not requiring people to work through a specific sequence every time but offering multiple approaches to get value. I blogged about Watson Analytics before – check out this post on Watson Analytics out from the launch as well as the rest of the posts in the same series.
Alistair Rennie came on to wrap it up with a focus on “bold”. His focus was on how this might allow you to drive powerful analytics into the hands of everyone, meeting the “unquenchable” demand for analytics. The use of cloud to make sure that these new tools can be rapidly and widely deployed is also key to meeting the ever growing need for speed.
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