IBM Melds Data Science, Business Intelligence on the Cloud

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As enterprises turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to beef up business performance and drive competitive advantage, IBM is working to make analytics, data science and machine learning – the core of AI – more accessible and easy for any organization, large or small, via the cloud.

It’s no surprise that large organizations understand the value of AI. When dealing with and managing massive data volumes that swell with each day, capabilities like data science and machine learning, can provide business insights fast allowing strategies to be confirmed or adjusted. In fact, a new IBM Institute for Business Value study reported that 82 percent of enterprises are considering AI deployments.

But as I talk with clients, I’ve found that data insights often follow the path of least resistance – when discovered, word spreads fast. And whether you’re a multinational corporation or a hungry 10-person startup, if tools can be identified and leveraged by others to unearth even more hidden insights, they will be.

It’s in this spirit that we’re announcing a brand new version of our popular Cognos Analytics solution that integrates business intelligence and data science technologies into an easy to use suite of tools available through lightweight dashboards on the IBM Cloud.

Our most advanced version of Cognos Analytics to date, the new multi-tenancy solution integrates intuitive features, like natural language dialogue, machine learning, and advanced analytics with automatic pattern detection, all of which are designed to make unearthing insights easy to do – and easy to comprehend.

Among its many new features are AI Assistant and pattern detection. Based on natural language generation, the AI Assistant lets users make queries and receive results in natural language. That means it’s easier than ever not only look for answers, but understand those answers when they come in.

Pattern detection is another great capability. It automatically identifies and presents critical relationships within the data. The thing is, many of these patterns may not have been evident or even considered prior. By detecting patterns, the system also helps eliminate analysis “blind spots,” or guesswork and the fruitless searching that it can lead to.

When combined with the foundational governance and trust capabilities built into Cognos Analytics, which provide data policy, relevancy, integrity and security, AI Assistant and pattern detection will give users not only fast access to insights, but added confidence in the results.

Storytelling and More

We’ve packed so much into the new solution that it would be difficult to do them all justice here. But this is a short list of some additional features that are going to help people advance their use of analytics and data science, and begin moving the needle for their organizations:

• Storytelling – enables users to create an interactive narrative by assembling result visualizations into a sequence, and then enhance the sequence with media, web pages, images, shapes, and text. Once created, the “story” will be automatically kept up to date thanks to dynamic connectivity to the underlying data;
• Smart exploration – is designed to help users better understand what’s behind the results by analyzing the selected data using machine learning and pattern detection;
• Automated Visualizations – the system will recommend the most useful visualization for the selected data through a multi-stage recommendation system; it will also provide quick access to alternative ways to visualize the data, along with related visualizations, that provide quick insights to info related to the visualization you’re looking at;
• Reusable Content – the system quickly assembles new content by re-using relevant components from existing dashboards and reports, saving time;
• Advanced Analytics – this includes predictive analytics; the ability to identify data patterns and the key variables driving a particular outcome; smart annotation, which automatically annotates a visualization to draw your attention to key insights the system identifies; and natural language generated-insights of your data.

Analytics, data science and business intelligence, have become table stakes in the business world. They’re part of the fundamental building blocks, or rungs in the Ladder to AI, as we talk about. And we’ve worked hard to make these sophisticated, complicated technologies easy to access, easy to use, and easy to comprehend for just about any – all via the IBM Cloud. We think organizations the world over will see real value in it and begin making even better, more strategic decisions to propel their businesses into the future.

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• Be sure to visit IBM Analytics at ibm.com/analytics, and check out even more details about this cool new technology at https://www.ibm.com/analytics/cognos-analytics.
•  And check out IBM Cloud for even more information on the rising integration of AI on the Cloud.