IBM goes all-out for big data in the cloud

There are two keys to making big data truly useful to any business: one is to find ways of ensuring that users can learn how to ask the right questions, and the other is to make sure the tools needed to provide answers to any sort of question are readily available.

The second part has tended to be difficult, not least because setting up a big data analytics capability has not been cheap. The cloud, over the last six months or so, has started to show signs of providing a solution to this issue as early entrant vendors have started to offer big data capabilities through the cloud. But this week’s appearance of IBM launching a range of cloud-delivered big data analytics services should give the idea far more mindshare amongst business users.

The company has used its global conference for finance, risk management, and sales compensation professionals, Vision 2014, held in Orlando, Florida, to unveil the new services, not least because these market sectors have an obvious affinity with what big data analytics can offer.

The new IBM analytics software brings together task personalised lists, dashboards, analysis, and reporting in the cloud, making it easier for employees to interact with data and understand it to do their work, collaborate with others, and make better business decisions.

The need to make analytics ubiquitous has been identified by research company, Gartner, which has predicted that analytics will reach 50 percent of company employees by 2014. By 2020, it expects to see that figure rise to 75 percent. This is seen as creating a good opportunity for organic growth for organisations as it has been estimated that a 10 percent increase in data accessibility translates into an additional $65.7 million in net income for a typical Fortune 1000 company.  

This can come about when organisations can capture and make sense of data in real time, using it to make better, faster decisions and facilitate more proactive actions by more users.

IBM is previewing new analytic discovery software on cloud at the event, demonstrating how it can let everyday business users visually interact with and apply advanced analytics to big data without needing the specialised skills of a data scientist. As a result, line of business professionals in sales, marketing, finance and other areas can get and easily interpret predictive insights from data in minutes.

“Analytics can improve almost any business process -- what products to make, what risks to take, which customers to target and how to make them stay. But to maximise impact, analytics also needs to be available to all the people making decisions, wherever they are, “said Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Business Analytics, IBM. “By offering these new solutions in the cloud, IBM is helping organisations drive stronger employee engagement and gain real-time insight into how their business is performing.”


The new cloud-based analytics software available onIBM Concert. This provides guided business processes and personalised task lists delivered through a highly graphical user interface, which is claimed to significantly improve the speed and quality of team-based decision-making. Available over the web and through a range of mobile devices, Concert pushes critical metrics and KPIs to decision makers where they need it, when they need it.

It is available on IBM Cloud Marketplace, where it joins a growing roster of services and service providers already on IBM’s cloud. Users can therefore use the new services as part of their own suite of services and specialist service providers. This way, they can manage the increasing volume and complexity of processes and tasks, support an increasingly mobile workforce, and emphasise social collaboration as an integral part of decision making.

By accessing these services in the cloud, business users can now easily view, understand and interact with specific performance insights to determine what actions to take and when. Remote employees can also contribute and update data immediately via mobile devices, improving accuracy and providing real time planning and forecasting.

Project Catalyst Insight is a new analytic discovery solution that makes analytics more automated, approachable and accessible to business users. Catalyst Insight automatically builds predictive models and presents those results as interactive visuals with plain language descriptions.

Using it, a marketing manager could use advanced analytics to better understand the drivers of marketing campaign effectiveness without having to wait for a data scientist to prepare the information, develop predictive models and interpret the results.

IBM also announced plans to make its OpenPages enterprise governance risk and compliance family available as a managed service on SoftLayer. OpenPages allows businesses to develop a comprehensive compliance and risk management strategy across a variety of domains including operational risk, financial controls management, IT risk, compliance and internal audits.

Using OpenPages on Cloud, for example, a compliance manager will be able to quickly identify and analyse the potential effects of a large-scale, serious incident and make recommendations for corrective action to management. This new deployment option will provide a flexible, reliable, enterprise-grade system that can grow as OpenPages expands across the enterprise.  

Project Catalyst Insight and OpenPages on Cloud will join 100-plus IBM software-as-a-service offerings for line of business supported by SoftLayer, which is fast becoming the foundation of IBM's cloud portfolio.  

Underpinning much of this is then IBM’s extensive portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technology, spanning research and development, solutions and software. IBM has invested $24 billion to build its capabilities in Big Data and Analytics, through R&D and more than 30 acquisitions.