IBM announced data services on the IBM Cloud that are designed to ensure trusted information can be applied more readily across an organization.
The company said with figures showing analytics pays back $13.01 for every dollar spent – 1.2 times more than it did three years ago, studies show data cleaning and preparation takes approximately 80 percent of the total data engineering effort.
The cloud-based services will enable organizations to: Simplify and automate the ability to find, refine and prepare data; Warehouse data in the cloud, making it instantly available for analytics; Curate unstructured data services to increase the confidence in analytics; Enhance mobile and web applications with embedded analytics
"All the data in the world is useless if you can’t put it to work. The new cloud-born services from IBM provide data professionals the ability to deliver data with speed and confidence as the fuel for applications and analytics," said Beth Smith, general manager, Big Data, IBM. "The ability to source and manage the right data will help organizations keep data management streamlined, while adhering to increasingly stringent regulatory demands, and produce results and analysis of real value to the business."
The services include:
IBM’s Watson Curator, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that increases confidence in the delivery of quality content collections and governance for IBM Watson Solutions. For example, an individual insurance risk analyst can quickly review and add context to documents so that many underwriters across the enterprise can get higher quality responses on risk assessments from Watson Engagement Advisor. IBM Watson Curator actively guides subject matter experts — in this case the risk expert — through the entire curation process in order to minimize the time and effort required. This capability improves the relevance and quality of the information used for analytics.
IBM DataWorks is a set of cloud-based data refinery services that shape, cleanse, match and secure data.
IBM dashDB is a cloud-based data warehousing and analytics service with in-memory technology built-in to deliver answers faster. dashDB keeps infrastructure concerns out of the way of critical and time sensitive analytics. A new integration of dashDB with Cloudant, IBM’s NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS), allows Cloudant clients to embed analytics in their applications with a few clicks.
IBM is extending its portfolio with Cloudant Local, an on-premise edition of the fully managed cloud database-as-a-service that enables a fluid hybrid cloud data layer that spans private data centers, mobile devices and third-party cloud providers.
The power of these capabilities could enable, for example, a ride sharing service company to improve their customers’ experience by ensuring their drivers are in the right place at the right time.
The company can take taxi trip information, captured in a mobile application running on Cloudant, directly into dashDB, and then use DataWorks to refine and load additional weather and traffic data to provide more insight. With dashDB, Cloudant and DataWorks working together, new insights can be leveraged to improve customer experience and grow revenue.
