IBM’s new cloud technology promises ‘analytics for everyone’

• Puts analytics into the hands of more decision-makers across the organisation
• Helps employees visualise, understand and act on insights to improve business

IBM said it is introducing new cloud-based software that puts analytics into the hands of more business users and decision-makers across the organisation.

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 – anywhere and anytime, the company said in a statement.

A sales manager, for example, can now use a PC, smartphone or tablet to manage sales compensation-related activities while collaborating with peers, resulting in faster and more accurate payments to sales reps, IBM said.

Gartner predicts that analytics will reach 50% of company employees by 2014. By 2020, that figure will be 75%.
 
This represents a tremendous opportunity for ROI (return on investment) and organic growth for organisations, IBM said.
 
A 10% increase in data accessibility, for instance, translates into an additional US$65.7 million in net income for a typical Fortune 1000 company, the company said, citing a report by Baseline magazine.

Organisations today are challenged to capture and make sense of data in real time, while enabling better, faster decisions and actions by more users. Today's news helps take analytics out of the IT department and making it accessible to frontline staff through visualisation tools and dashboards, IBM claimed.

“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,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager of Business Analytics at IBM.
 
“But to maximise impact, analytics also needs to be available to all the people making decisions, wherever they are.
 
“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,” he claimed.
 
IBM Concert is now offering new cloud-based analytics software available on the IBM Cloud Marketplace that 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 this technology in the cloud, business users can now easily view, understand and interact with specific performance insights to more easily 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, IBM said.

IBM also recently previewed Project Catalyst Insight, 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 Catalyst Insight, 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, the company claimed.

IBM also announced plans to make its OpenPages enterprise governance risk and compliance family available as a managed service on IBM 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.
 
Project Catalyst Insight and OpenPages on Cloud will join 100-plus IBM software-as-a-service offerings for line of business supported by SoftLayer.
 
SoftLayer is fast becoming the foundation of IBM's cloud portfolio, adding more than 1,000 new clients since IBM acquired the company last year.  

For more information about IBM Big Data & Analytics, visit http://ibm.co/bigdataanalytics.
 
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