Category Archives: Analytics

Analytics, BlueMix, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, smart cities, Vendor

IBM to pour £2bn into Internet of Things business unit

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM announced it plans to spend up to £2bn over the next four years to consolidate and revamp its Internet of Things technologies and services into a standalone business unit. The move seems aimed at broadening its appeal beyond proto-IoT segments it traditionally caters to.

Through its Smart Cities and Smarter Planet programmes the company has effectively been offering what many today refer to as Internet of Things technologies, but the renewed investment will see IBM mobilise and train a massive fleet of consultants (over 2,000) on its consolidated IoT services portfolio, and offer a cloud-based platform for companies to help them marry data real time IoT data streams with other data sets and services.

The company also plans to carve out a section in Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, for specialist IoT services, and expand IoT-focused partnerships with a range of technology and service providers.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. “This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters.  Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”

The move is part of a broader reorganisation effort currently underway at IBM, which is seeing the company realign internally (and trim headcount) to more effectively support service and technology development around cloud, mobile, security, and data analytics. Its Internet of Things offerings are both increasingly drawing from those other segments, and broadening beyond traditional smart cities or intelligent manufacturing segments use cases – areas where IBM has traditionally played.

In February for example ARM and IBM jointly announced an Internet of Things starter kit to enable developers to rapidly prototype mbed-based IoT applications using Bluemix, which ships with a development board from Freescale, powered by an ARM Cortex-M4 processor. The companies are aiming the kit at startups, which hasn’t traditionally been IBM’s nor ARM’s target demographic.

Analytics, Artificial intelligence, Cloud & IT Management, Machine learning, Partnerships, Prelert, Splunk

Anomaly Detective Adds Predictive Analytics to Splunk

Prelert today announced Anomaly Detective, an advanced machine intelligence solution for Splunk Enterprise environments. The introduction of Anomaly Detective expands Prelert’s line of diagnostic predictive analytics products that integrate with a customer’s existing IT management tools and quickly provide value by finding problematic behavior changes hidden in huge volumes of operations data.

Anomaly Detective’s self-learning predictive analytics with machine intelligence assistance recognize both normal and abnormal machine behavior. Using highly advanced pattern recognition algorithms, Anomaly Detective identifies developing issues and provides detailed diagnostic data, enabling IT experts to avoid problems or diagnose them as much as 90 percent faster than previously possible. IT personnel who utilize Splunk Enterprise software in infrastructure, applications performance and security can now additionally benefit from machine learning to automatically spot anomalies and isolate their root causes in minutes, saving time and resolving problems before the business is impacted.

Anomaly Detective is  downloadable software that installs as a tightly integrated application for Splunk Enterprise. Because it leverages recent advances in machine intelligence, Anomaly Detective is 100 percent self-learning and requires minimal configuration. Anomaly Detective augments existing IT expertise, empowering IT staff to spend less time mining data, reduce troubleshooting costs and improve compliance with service-level agreements — all of which contribute to a rapid return on investment.

“Prelert Anomaly Detective is like a machine intelligence assistant, using advanced machine learning analytics to analyze the massive amounts of IT operations management data produced by today’s online applications and services,” said Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert. “We’ve packaged the power of big data analytics, normally focused on solving business problems, in easy-to-use machine intelligence solutions that are greatly needed in the real world of IT operations.”

Prelert Anomaly Detective is now available and easily downloadable from the Prelert website and from Prelert resellers. Pricing is based on the amount of data analyzed per day, starting at $1,200 for environments indexing more than 500MB of data per day. For information on pricing for Splunk Enterprise, go to http://www.splunk.com/view/how-to-get-splunk/SP-CAAADFV.

Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data visualization, HardMetrics, IQor, M&A Activity

iQor Acquires HardMetrics

iQor, a provider of intelligent customer interaction and outsourcing solutions, today announced that it has acquired HardMetrics, a provider of cloud-based visual business intelligence, business analytics and reporting solutions. HardMetrics enables organizations to integrate disparate data from any part of the enterprise, then structures and translates that data into actionable insight, including user-friendly info-graphics, scorecards, charts, and dashboards.

With its customer and transactional databases, iQor’s industry-leading Big Data analytics engine QuantuMatch® helps clients uncover insights into their customer base. This agreement extends iQor’s analytics and self-service reporting capabilities by enabling on-demand, interactive drill-down reporting for more targeted customer interaction campaigns and faster recognition of, and response to, emerging trends.

“We are excited about the acquisition for our customers,” said Brian Turley, outgoing CEO of HardMetrics, Inc. “iQor brings resources, technology prowess, and market muscle that we simply could not match on our own.”

HardMetrics will continue to serve its existing customer base and operate as a standalone company. In addition, iQor will incorporate and market the HardMetrics Performance Manager product in a new offering called QeyMetricsSM for its broad base of customers.

“With iQor, HardMetrics clients now have the weight and ambition of an acknowledged technology and analytics innovator driving the product and the business,” said Bryce Engelbrecht, iQor Vice President and General Manager of HardMetrics. “We look forward to expanding HardMetrics’ proven, innovative platform for delivering operational metrics to business end users.”

“iQor has led the way in developing the digital network, tools and processes to capture, analyze, and act upon the Big Data generated with every customer interaction,” said Norm Merritt, President and CEO, iQor. “iQor’s analytics engine, coupled with HardMetrics’ leading data visualization tools, provides an unparalleled analytics toolset for both existing and new clients to help them generate value adding insight.”