IBM Helps Organizations Tackle Industry Specific Big Data Challenges

New offerings from IBM are meant to tackle the most pressing big data challenges facing organizations -- accessing and gaining intelligence into an enormous stream of data generated from mobile, social and digital networks. The offerings, part of IBM's big data platform, analyze petabytes of industry specific and social media data in sub-second response times, and continuously analyze geospatial, financial services and telecommunications data in motion. 

According to Gartner, worldwide big data IT spending will grow from $27 billion in 2012 to $55 billion in 2016. Enterprises across all industries are under increasing pressure to extract new insights from an explosion of available data. In communications, six billion global mobile phone subscribers are demanding unique and personalized offerings that match their individual lifestyles.

As part of today's news, IBM is also bolstering its cloud analytics offerings across industries. The first of its kind portfolio of cloud-hosted applications deliver predictive analytics directly to a company's line of business employees. Financial services, retail, and education industry clients can use the new software to develop personalized insurance renewals, conduct retail purchase analysis, and tailor new programs for student retention through the IBM SmartCloud. 

The emergence of big data technologies is driving the transformation of marketing for every channel. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are now responsible for analyzing consumer demands from social media, mobile devices, and traditional channels and align these demands with product development and sales.

The new IBM Digital Analytics Accelerator helps CMOs tap into consumer sentiment to create targeted advertising and promotions, avoid customer churn, and perform advanced Web analytics that predict customer needs. Now, CMOs can bring advanced analytics to all their social media, web traffic, and customer communication behind their own firewall. The industry's first big data solution in the digital marketing arena is powered by Netezza and Unica technologies.

With this integrated offering that includes the recently announced PureData System for Analytics, clients can run complex analytics on petabytes of data in minutes, and arm marketing professionals with instant insights. CMOs can use new insights to accelerate marketing campaigns and better meet consumer needs based on the broadest range of data. 

"Today's marketing professionals can see for the first time how individual consumers respond to campaigns," said Brandon Brown, Trident Marketing Chief Information Officer. "Using IBM big data analytics to capture social media sentiment along with other relevant sales and supply chain data, we can help our clients move away from marketing to the masses and to marketing to masses of individuals in a personalized way. Without big data analytics, businesses will quickly lose out to competitors who get to know consumers better than they do."

According to a recent report from the United Nations Telecom Agency, there are now 6 billion mobile phone subscribers globally. Communications Services Providers (CSPs) are under increased pressure to analyze big data coming from their networks to improve service, detect fraud and reduce customer churn. 

Developed by IBM Research, InfoSphere Streams software can analyze and share data in motion, allowing for sub-millisecond decision making in environments where millions of decisions can be made every second. The software continuously analyzes massive volumes of data at rates up to petabytes per day. 

Initially tested on financial markets data, the new features include built-in accelerators to help CSPs continuously ingest and analyze data in motion from their networks. As a result, they can better understand how customers are using services and what their preferences are, making it easier to provide personalized products and billing reduce to churn and retain customers. The software also comes with built-in social media analytics to help marketers fine tune promotions in support of customer loyalty and retention initiatives.   

InfoSphere Streams also provides the ability to drag and drop data sources to instantly and intuitively create new analytics applications. From a simple GUI interface, developers can visually design complex process flows instead of traditional programming. Data Scientists can take advantage of new toolkits that automate analysis of geospatial, financial markets, and machine data such as network event logs, call detail records and financial trades.