Delivers Social Collaboration and Analytics for Faster Decision Making

LAS VEGAS (October 25, 2010) – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced new software that combines the most sophisticated business analytics and optimization capabilities for today’s evolving workforce. For the first time, the new offerings combine social networking and collaboration capabilities for the burgeoning mobile workforce, expected to reach more than 1.19 billion by 2013.

With today’s news, IBM is bringing business analytics capabilities to the masses with a new look and feel that more closely mirrors people’s every day use of technology including support for new mobile devices and integrated social networking capabilities for faster, more collaborative decision-making.

The new software takes analytics out of the traditional format of reports and charts to a more interactive design and broader analysis and insight making it easier by providing built-in images and videos to guide business users. They can now gain instant insight with analytics in an easy to use format anytime, anywhere on their mobile devices.  These new capabilities will have a profound impact on the way all business users interact with their teams, partners, managers and customers around the globe.

Spurred by the growth of mobile transactions, expected to grow by 40 times by 2015,  the increase in the rate and pace of data is accelerating the IT opportunity around business analytics and optimization.  When combined with the unprecedented growth of the mobile workforce, this presents an opportunity for businesses to embrace the borderless office and extract intelligence to better interact with customers.  A recent IBM study with 1,900 CFOs globally revealed analytics-driven organizations had 33% more revenue growth with 32% more return on capital invested.  

To address these changing market dynamics, IBM is announcing a set of new business analytics and information management offerings:

• Cognos 10: New software that brings together the power of social collaboration and analytics for business users to gain real-time intelligence in a single, user-friendly interface  – online or through mobile devices such as ipad, iphones and blackberries.
• DB2 10:  New database software that helps businesses combine data – from past, present and future, delivering 40% performance improvements.  
• IBM InfoSphere Server: New software that redefines how an organization handles data behind the scenes with faster and more accurate integration of diverse forms of data, and the ability to see the quality of data before it’s used.
• A technology preview of  Hadoop-based big data analytics software running on premise and the IBM Test Development cloud.

New Analytics Software Brings Speed to Insight with Social Collaboration and Mobile

Today, with the launch of Cognos 10, IBM is delivering the most significant analytics offering since the acquisition of Cognos, one of the largest acquisitions in IBM history. For the first time, this new software brings together the power of social collaboration with Lotus Connections software and business analytics with Cognos in one unified experience with intuitive navigation capabilities and simplified user experience.  This removes the frustration of having to interrupt user train of thought resulting from the need to switch between views to get the right information. The software supports the natural path of seamless views from browsing to investigation to decision making.

This new software provides business users with an integrated view of historical information with real-time updates to give users a complete picture of their business. Now, business users can benefit from accessing information with a range of views from simple real-time information to advanced predictive “what if” analysis. The integrated social networking capabilities with analytics allow the employees to interact with each other in real time in communities, wikis and blogs. This combination fuels the exchange of ideas and knowledge that naturally occurs in the decision-making process, but is typically lost in meeting notes, manual processes and emails.  Users can now initiate activities, engage others with their expertise, post messages, files, links, and discuss or review opinions – all in real time for faster, more accurate decision making.

For example, a regional sales manager can spot a spike in sales in a popular pair of shoes with the store manager and marketing team in real time to identify the cause and brainstorm to resolve the issues around managing supply and demand.  Doctors can spot trends for patient treatment of certain diseases, share insight with other doctors, and agree on a preventative course of action and treatment with a team of doctors, all without having to change a single view with this in-depth information. A brand manager sees product sales declining and needs to discuss the issue with the store manager, production department, and marketing team – all at the same time. The manager can instantly set up a decision network to connect the right people and information to share insights and capture annotations.

New Database Software Brings Simplicity of Analyzing Past, Present, Future

Developed out of IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab, IBM is introducing new DB2 database software for System z that simplifies analyzing past, present and future data for faster, more accurate decision making.  Typically, a timely and costly process for database administrators to correlate, access and integrate information from a variety of sources, new DB2 Time Travel Query enables seamless access to all data for faster analytics.  

Because of the explosive growth of data it is more critical now than ever before that businesses have high-performance cost-effective data management systems.  New DB2 10 database software delivers up to 40 percent performance improvements while also providing 10 times more scalability to manage future growth.  This translates into more efficient use of systems resources and cost savings for System z servers, including the recently introduced zEnterprise System.  

As one of the world’s most successful car manufacturers, the BMW Group is at the forefront of automotive innovation. DB2 for z/OS plays a key role in managing the company’s global supply chain from manufacturing to managing third party suppliers and producing custom-ordered parts. BMW has been evaluating DB2 10 on System z and is already seeing significant performance improvements of many of these critical production workloads. According to BMW, they have measured an almost 40% reduction in processing power required for insert-intensive workloads for their data, which translates directly to lower costs for their IT department.  Also, the reduction in time to process critical supply chain data helps BMW deliver automotive parts even more efficiently to its customers.

Fueling the Analytics Engine With Trusted Data

The new version of InfoSphere Information Server 8.5 acts as the data backbone for organizations, integrating all relevant data resources and governing the quality and completeness of information. For instance, new pop-up menus integrate data quality and lineage information directly into business applications so users can monitor the quality of their data before they use it. In addition, new quality capabilities improve how data is standardized and combined, making it easier to integrate diverse sources of information into a single view. For example, a business with operations in multiple countries can now easily integrate customer data across systems in multiple languages and ensure it adheres to consistent name and address standards.

As part of today’s news, IBM is showcasing a technology preview of its InfoSphere BigInsights portfolio running on IBM’s commercial Development & Test Cloud and launching the beta program for the same software in on premise deployments.  Invented by IBM researchers and software developers and powered by Apache Hadoop, an open source technology designed for analysis of big volumes of data, IBM’s Big Insights portfolio helps organizations analyze and visualize petabyte sized quantities of structured and unstructured data.  The preview highlights the benefits of a test cloud development model including simplicity of set up, straight forward cost structure and lack of infrastructure changes. Having this software on the IBM Cloud environment makes it simple for an organization to get started with Big Data analytics and determine how they can best use big data before bringing the actual deployment in house for operations on sensitive data. By simply adding their test data to the cloud they can get started with Big Data analytics and show the long term benefits of enterprise Hadoop deployments.

IBM continues to expand its multi-billion dollar investment in the business analytics and optimization market.  Over the past five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytics acquisitions. Today, more than 7,000 IBM business consultants are dedicated to analytics.

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Source: IBM