IOD event highlights smarter ways to analyse

IBM Cognos users can confidently look forward to exciting and innovative technology to further enhance their business analytics and information management capabilities.

This is the feedback from one of Synergy Business Intelligence's senior consultants, Dennis Chu, who recently returned from IBM's centennial - and largest to date - Information on Demand (IOD) event for 12 000 attendees, in Las Vegas, where he delved into the latest business analytics offerings.

Commenting on the event, Synergy MD, Christo Bredenkamp, said the company placed high value on keeping its team and customers up to speed with groundbreaking technology and developments. “That is why, for the past nine years, we have made sure Synergy representatives have been at annual events such as the one in Las Vegas, and this year was certainly no exception.”

Chu shared the following highlights from the IOD event:

“One of the largest current challenges in business analytics is the problem of ever-growing data,” said Chu, explaining the volume of data that can be analysed and stored was fast being outpaced by the volume of information that can be tracked, with the problem being further compounded by unstructured data.

However, Chu said that with the ability to understand contextual spoken and written language, delegates saw big data providing the means to “open up the world to unstructured data that people generate every day, bridging the divide between world data and business data”.

Chu said applications of IBM Watson were trialled across the world to help organisations focus on real-time operational analytics that not only improved efficiencies, but also reduced risks. “Concepts from IBM's big data project are already being implemented around the world, using readily available hardware and systems,” he added.

Observing that predictive analytics had made a significant entry into the business analytics arena, Chu said that by extending analysis into the future, organisations have been able to improve marketing initiative efficiencies and reduce fraud by leveraging their existing data.

“IBM SPSS has been one of the pioneers in the area of operational analytics and its integration into business analytics platforms (Cognos 10). IBM's strategy with predictive analytics is still in its starting stages, and we will continue to see marked improvements and further integration into IBM's analytics stack, allowing further analytics across all time horizons,” he added.

“The emergence of cloud computing has made a significant impact on the way we think about systems today. Currently, there are many IBM analytic products available to organisations, which allow the flexibility of analytic applications without the burden of extensive hardware and maintenance,” Chu noted.

“Appliances are making a return in the IBM offerings in the form of a Netezza and Smart Analytic Systems range, to name but two. Netezza's recent successes as a data warehouse appliance have turned it into one of the key offerings within the range, enforcing the concept of simplicity and performance.”

Chu said Smart Analytics Systems was a new initiative to bundle and offer a broader range of information management and analytics applications to mid-level organisations. “This approach allows for a significantly simplified methodology for an end-to-end analytics implementation,” he added.

With the inception of social media as the communication choice of millions, Chu said organisations have been trying to uncover ways to use the data stored in messages and posts.

“Natural language recognition, sentiment and natural language awareness has now made it possible to trawl through undiscovered data stored in social media sites, and leverage the results to make better business decisions.”

He said, to this end, Cognos Consumer Insight provided a simple end-user interface to manage and model online social media analytics. “The results can be explored and identified to the scope of the individual's comment, which allows for results that can be instantly actioned.

“With the integration into IBM SPSS and Cognos 10, social media data can also be used to drive predicative modelling and traditional business analytics projects,” he explained.

Chu said that with the acquisition of Applix in 2007, IBM had included the ICAS in-memory engine into its analytics suite. “This has proved highly successful, with future growth in further integration into consumer-driven, desktop-style and data-discovery modelling and analysis.”

In conclusion, Chu said another promising technology was Dynamic Query Mode. “This is a hybrid in-memory OLAP solution that allows for improved performance across a number of different platforms,” he explained. “This complementary technology can take advantage of the performance improvements from data warehouse appliances and high performance databases, allowing for flexible analysis and reporting over traditionally slower relational sources.”