Seconds Out for IBM's Heavyweight Analysis Tools

IBM has announced new services and products to help companies analyze what it calls 'Big Data'. Grouped under the brand name of 'BigInsights' and part of the IBM Info Sphere offering, the services use open source technology Apache Hadoop to tackle datasets too large for normal analysis.

Announcing the launch at its Information on Demand 2010 conference this week, IBM said clients with petabytes* of data - structured and unstructured - find that conventional database management tools struggle with the sheer scale of it and fall short in capture, storage, search, sharing, visualization and analytics.

Powered by Java technology Apache Hadoop, BigInsights includes a number of elements for handling large data volumes: BigInsights Core, which helps enterprises to build and deploy customized analytics; BigSheets, which extracts, annotates and visualizes data; Analytics solutions for the finance, risk management, media and entertainment sectors; and Analytic models to help banks and insurance companies with compliance regulation.

The computer giant also announced two related products, InfoSphere Warehouse Pack for Market and Campaign Insight, which provides templates and tables to assist in understanding metrics such as purchasing behavior, conversion rates and marketing campaign success; and Advanced Case Management, which brings together elements of content management, BPM, analytics and social software.

In the last five years IBM has spent $10bn on making 14 acquisitions in the business analytics space and developing seven business analytics centers of excellence.

It bought BI provider Cognos in 2007 and completed the acquisition of MR software leader SPSS in October last year. Since then it has BPM solutions firm Lombardi in December 2009 and public sector specialist NISC in January this year. The buys leave it in second place in the advanced analytics market, some distance behond leader SAS Institute Inc.

Web site: www.ibm.com .


* A petabyte is equal to one quadrillion bytes (1 x 1012), or 1000 terabytes.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.