IBM has announced new software to deliver "big data" analytics to users on a variety of devices and platforms.
At its Information on Demand (IoD) 2011 conference in Las Vegas on Oct. 24, IBM unveiled new offerings that span a wide variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM’s SmartCloud. Now employees from any department inside an organization can explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, and make sense of it on the fly as part of their everyday work experience, Rod Smith, IBM s vice president of emerging Internet technologies, said in an interview with eWEEK.
Also, as part of its announcements, IBM is placing the power of mobile analytics into the hands of iPad users with a free software download at the Apple’s iTunes Store. Moreover, the new software is designed to help employees in key industries, such as financial services, health care, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation, use and benefit from business analytics on the go, IBM said.
Organizations of all sizes are struggling to keep up with the rate and pace of big data and use it in a meaningful way to improve products, services or the customer experience, Smith said. Every day, people create the equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions and social networks; in fact, 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. Every month, people send 1 billion Tweets and post 30 billion messages on Facebook. Meanwhile, more than 1 trillion mobile devices are in use today, and mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016.
A 2010 IBM/MIT Sloan Management Review survey of 3,000 executives across 30 industries from 100 countries reveals that 60 percent of respondents said they have more data than they can effectively use, IBM said in a press release on its new offerings. A new IBM study of 1,700 chief marketing officers from 19 industries and 64 countries further exposes this issue, with 71 percent of the respondents saying their organizations are unprepared to handle the explosion of big data.
To address these challenges, IBM is delivering new analytics and information management offerings, and skills resources to make it easier to explore and capitalize on big data. The new offerings include:
New Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud that can be up and running in less than 30 minutes. The new software helps employees tap into massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources, including social networks, mobile devices and sensors.
-
New Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud that can be up and running in less than 30 minutes. The new software helps employees tap into massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources, including social networks, mobile devices and sensors.
- New mobile analytics software for iPad users that makes it easy to explore any type of data on the go with location-aware analytics. Clients can download the free app here.
- New predictive-analytics software with a mapping feature that can be used across industries for marketing campaigns, retail store allocation, crime prevention and academic assessment.
- New software that sifts through all types of data behind the scenes and ranks its quality, makes it secure and ensures business decisions are based on trusted data.
IBM InfoSphere BigInsights on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise makes big data analytics accessible for any user inside an organization. Like the on-premise version, BigInsights on the cloud analyzes traditional structured data found in databases along with unstructured data such as text, video, audio, images, social media, click streams, log files and weather data allowing decision makers to act on it quickly. Bringing big data analytics to the cloud means clients can capture and analyze any data without the need for Hadoop skills or having to install, run, or maintain hardware and software.
IBM said BigInsights on the cloud is available in both basic and enterprise editions with the options of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. The basic edition is an entry-level offering available at no charge that helps organizations learn how to do big data analytics. Clients can seamlessly move to the enterprise edition when ready and set up Hadoop clusters in under 30 minutes to start analyzing data with low usage rates starting at $0.60 per cluster per hour. Both versions include a developer sandbox where clients can develop a new generation of business analytics applications, complete with tools, and a test and development environment.
