News

IBM Targets Specific Industries with Prebuilt Analytics

• By David Ramel
• June 1, 2015

Narrowing the focus of its predictive analytics efforts, IBM announced new prebuilt solutions targeting different industries.

The specially tailored solutions provide modeling patterns for predictive analytics -- basing business decisions on Big Data gathered from different sources -- and customized interfaces and dashboards so users can focus on industry-specific use cases. Data preparation capabilities are also specialized to handle unique industry-related data, collecting the information and massaging it for analytic investigations.

Among the 20 industries targeted are banking, government, insurance, retail, telecommunications and so on.

IBM said it used expertise garnered from more than 50,000 "client engagements" to develop the industry-specific solutions, consulting with prominent customers in each industry who have demonstrated the use of innovative analytics to further fine-tune them.

The new initiative further shows how the Big Data landscape is changing as it matures, with more specifically targeted products and a democratization of the technology to put it within reach of more ordinary business users in addition to highly skilled data scientists and developers.

For example, Oracle Corp. just a couple weeks ago announced its own spatial and graph Big Data product "that includes 35 prebuilt analytics functions that help discover patterns and glean information from related data points."

And, like many other similar efforts, the new industry-specific IBM solutions also play on the democratization angle. "IBM is putting powerful analytics in the hands of every business user to help them see patterns, pursue ideas and improve all types of decisions impacting their industry," company exec Alistair Rennie said in a news release last week.

Retailers, for example, could be helped to "understand the potential overall revenue impact of individual products and product lines to make smarter decisions about what products to carry and how to best promote them," IBM said.

The innovative partners that IBM said it worked with to develop the new solutions include: Urban Outfitters, National Grid, Deloitte, Bolsa de Santiago, Interactive Data Managed Solutions, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and others.

"With interactive and role-specific dashboards, business users can share predictive insights across teams and organizations that can give them a deeper understanding of their customers, assets and operations to help them make better decisions and act with greater speed and fewer resources," the company said.

No pricing information was provided, as IBM said interested users can register for a free workshop about the new offerings and be guided by company consultants in further steps.