Main News Desk

IBM helps organisations accelerate innovation with business analytics

October 27, 2009

Las Vegas, Oct. 27, 2009 -- At its annual Information on Demand Global Conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a broad expansion of its business analytics portfolio with new capabilities that enable clients to drive business analytics and optimisation using trusted information for faster, more accurate and smarter business decisions.

In the recent IBM Global CIO Study, 83 percent of respondents identified business intelligence and analytics -- the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights -- as the way they will enhance their organisations’ competitiveness.

To help clients use business analytics, IBM is aggressively expanding its multi-billion dollar investment in this area. The offerings include:

New analytics software for sales, talent management and procurement. These pre-configured applications help organisations improve business performance by providing ready-made reporting and analysis capabilities so they can gain faster insight from information more cost effectively than if they were to build it themselves.

New Content Analytics software that will help employees more easily access and analyse structured and unstructured data, such as email and blogs, to drive smarter decisions based on external and internal insights.

Enhanced stream computing technology that enables organisations to make sense of structured and unstructured information stored in data warehouses and process it in real time.

New Master Information Hub software that makes it easy for clients to go beyond the pre-configured data categories offered by traditional master data management products.

Today, IBM also announced new offerings that support IBM’s Smart Archive strategy that enables clients to effectively manage structured and unstructured information. Businesses can apply analytics to stored information, extracting key content as business needs arise, regardless of the storage location.

Last year, IBM introduced 18 industry-specific workshops and services to help clients establish a cross-enterprise strategy called Information Agenda for using information as a strategic asset. In the past 12 months nearly 500 companies, including Lufthansa Cargo, have participated in these workshops with IBM vertical industry experts. Formed in 1994, Lufthansa Cargo is one of the largest freight carriers in international aviation, handling over 1.76 million tons of cargo and mail each year across a network spanning more than 500 destinations worldwide. Part of Lufthansa's objective is to maintain a competitive edge in a highly contested market. With business analytics technology using IBM Cognos BI, Lufthansa is now able to carefully manage their global delivery chain, accurately monitoring transportation times, measuring quality of service, identifying and correcting trouble spots, and tracking overall performance trends.

Gaining Faster, Deeper Insights
New Content Analytics applications from IBM can be applied in any industry to combine the internal view of the organisation based on transactions with the external view of the organisation based on customer correspondence or market trend reports. The result is an integrated view of all the information that is relevant for a business in one place regardless of where it is being stored.

Using content analytics, an organisation can take a deeper look at data obtained from external sources such as email, forms, documents, blogs and websites. For example, with this new information, businesses can better manage and control their data, while providing valuable insight into their content across the enterprise.

IBM Cognos analytic applications for sales, supply chain procurement and talent management provide reporting and analytics technologies that give line of business professionals faster insight into their department’s performance, with the ability to quickly adapt content to meet changing business conditions. The new offerings work with existing transaction systems helping businesses avoid costly vendor lock-in while making it easy for people to access the insights they need to make faster decisions. New offerings include:

IBM Cognos Customer Performance Sales Analytics provides business executives and sales managers with faster insight on sales performance that extends across sales reps and customers to the actual order. This detailed visibility helps businesses recognise and anticipate emerging market trends, create an integrated view of performance that extends beyond the sales department to other areas of the organisation and respond more quickly to existing and emerging revenue opportunities and threats.

IBM Cognos Workforce Performance Talent Analytics provides capabilities for organisations to fully assess recruitment and learning performance. It is designed to help human resource departments evaluate the effectiveness of recruitment, training and succession planning and evolves with the changing talent management requirements of the organisation.

IBM Cognos Supply Chain Performance Procurement Analytics provides procurement professionals with the ability to assess the performance of suppliers’ capacity to provide products and services in accordance with the contractual obligations and the business goals of the organisation. As a result, organisations can gain greater insight into overall spending and supplier performance through a ready-made package that services the unique information needs of procurement professionals, enabling them to make smarter decisions on spending and sourcing.

Innovating with Streaming Data

Designed for perpetual analytics, InfoSphere Streams helps organisations analyse information from any source to narrow down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refine the answer in real-time. Now, with the InfoSphere Streams Mining Toolkit demo organisations can re-use existing scoring models such as PMML, an open-standards-based language used in data warehousing, in InfoSphere Streams to obtain real-time insights from data in-motion.

Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) are using InfoSphere Streams to analyse smoke patterns during wildfires. The goal of the research is to provide fire and public safety officials with a real-time assessment of smoke patterns during a fire, allowing them to make more informed decisions on public evacuations and health warnings. Current analysis of smoke patterns is limited to weather forecasting data that is updated every six hours, observations from front line workers and low resolution satellite imagery. With InfoSphere Streams, the UMBC team will be able to instantly process the massive amounts of data available from drone aircrafts, high resolution satellite imagery and air quality sensors to develop more effective models for smoke dissipation.

Expanding the Single View to Cover New Types of Information
To achieve better business outcomes, organisations must have access to a single version of truth among the data spread across their systems. IBM is introducing Master Information Hub, an optional component of the newly released InfoSphere Master Data Management Server 9.0. Master Information Hub was created for clients seeking to build a master data management system that includes custom-built data domains instead of or along with pre-built domains for customer, product and account. These clients can use Master Information Hub to customise their MDM Server to establish a trusted view of any type information -- including reference data such as state and country abbreviations. For example, a retailer could add a calendar of store events and relate it to participating suppliers; a food manufacturer could use a list of GPS locations to track the provenance of the ingredients it buys; or a hospital could see government codes for infectious diseases together with patient records.

Today’s announcements are part of IBM’s ongoing focus on helping customers use their information as a strategic asset through Business Analytics and Optimisation. IBM recently created a new Business Analytics & Optimisation services organisation, with 4,000 consultants who can help clients get up and running with deep analytics capabilities and made significant acquisitions in the analytics space such as the recent $1.2 billion acquisition of SPSS.

Customer quote

"To maintain a lead in this market, it is crucial that we be able to quickly access accurate critical information about our delivery chain,” said Kerstin Hofmann, Manager of Business Intelligence and Planning at Lufthansa Cargo AG. “IBM business analytics gives us the real-time performance insights we need to confidently make the right decisions that will deliver optimal services worldwide and significantly improve the customer experience."

About the company

For further information visit: www.ibm.com

For information on the IBM IOD Global Conference visit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/conf/

On Twitter #IOD2009

For more information on IBM Information Management and IBM Business Analytics, visit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/

Contact details

For further information about IBM Cognos software, please contact:
Steven George at LEWIS
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7802 2626
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7802 2627
IBMcognos@lewispr.com

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IBM helps organisations accelerate innovation with business analytics

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