IBM has thrown its full weight behind business analytics, placing its bet that it will be the next big enterprise software trend by unveiling new products.
The company's Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas saw it continue its big push into business intelligence and analytics software.
IBM has spent $12 billion creating a new analytics portfolio, including $1.2 billion acquiring analytics company SPSS.
IBM sees business analytics as an extension of business intelligence (BI). Rather than just BI's reporting and slicing and dicing analysis, IBM's business analytics software should allow companies to look into the future by predicting future outcomes using existing data trends.
The company also announced an aggressive expansion of its multi-billion dollar investment in business analytics.
This involved new analytics software for sales, talent management and procurement, as well as content analysis software to analyse emails and blogs, and stream computing technology to make sense of data warehouse information in real time.
In an interview with IT PRO, IBM information management chief technology officer Anant Jhingran said although BI had been very useful, taking it further with business analytics allowed companies to make predictions at the point of contact and transaction.
"We want to predict customer behaviour. If we can do that, we can apply all the analysis in the context of the transactions," he said. "We know that the number of transactions is very, very large, and if we can get just one per cent lift in respect to that, it can make a big difference."
"That is a shift that we want to achieve through prediction," Jhingran added. "That's why we acquired SPSS, whose main capability was to predict in context. Of course you can analyse historic things, but prediction is the thing we're really focusing on."
-
US gov makes $2bn investment in domestic quantum firmsNews The Department of Commerce says it wants to strengthen the country's presence in this critical technology sector
-
Data center industry faces ticking power time bombNews Technical and regulatory hurdles make colocation unscalable for most developers, Wood Mackenzie has warned
-
How AI code is changing software developmentITPro Podcast At firms like OpenAI the majority of code is now generated with AI tools
-
Managing tech costs in a volatile marketITPro Podcast Rising energy prices and sprawling cloud environments make the jobs of CIOs and CFOs harder than ever
-
IBM’s Confluent acquisition will give it a ‘competitive edge’ and supercharge its AI credentialsAnalysis IBM described Confluent as a “natural fit” for its hybrid cloud and AI strategy, enabling “end-to-end integration of applications, analytics, data systems and AI agents”.
-
IBM layoffs loom as ‘single-digit percentage’ of global workforce set for cutsNews Headcount at the cloud giant has been decreasing steadily in recent years
-
‘There is no law of computer science that says that AI must remain expensive and must remain large’: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna bangs the drum for smaller AI modelsNews IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says smaller, more domain-specific AI models have become the most efficient and cost-effective options for enterprises.
-
IBM puts on a brave face as US government cuts hit 15 contractsNews Despite the cuts, IBM remains upbeat after promising quarterly results
-
IBM completes HashiCorp acquisition after regulatory approvalNews IBM has completed its $6.4 billion acquisition of cloud automation and security firm HashiCorp,
-
IBM eyes Oracle expertise gains with latest acquisition
News The deal aims to help IBM address the complexities of public sector cloud transformation
