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Building on what it learned with Watson and other research projects, IBM is unveiling new software and services to analyze tens of petabytes of data — with subsecond response times.
The company also said it’s investing $100 million into continued research on ways clients can manage and exploit data through “massive scale analytics.”
‘Watson-Like Technologies’
With the new software and services, IBM said, CIOs will be able to “construct specific, fact-based financial and business models for their IT operations.”
The new, patented Infosphere BigInsights software tool took more than 200 IBM Research scientists four years to develop, and it’s based on Apache Hadoop open-source technology. The company said the software uses “Watson-like technologies,” such as unstructured text analytics for indexing and analysis of rapidly changing data formats and types “on the fly.”
BigInsights includes data governance and security, developer tools, and enterprise integration so customers can build their own “big data” analytics applications. The company is also offering a free download of BigInsights Basic Edition for internal testing.
New enhancements to Infosphere Streams allows it to analyze data in real time for new patterns or trends. It can handle tweets, blog posts, video frames, EKGs, GPS and sensor or stock-market data up to 350 percent faster than before.
Mills, senior vice president at IBM software and systems, told news media that the company is “best positioned to help clients not only extract meaningful insight, but enable them to respond at the same rate at which the data arrives.”
‘Bringing It To the Masses’
The company noted four examples of new analytical services to assist the IT infrastructure . A new Cloud Workload Analysis tool maps IT workload characteristics to determine how departments should prioritize cloud deployment and migration efforts, which the company said will identify cloud opportunities 90 percent faster.
New tools for server optimization and analysis can lead to implementation that is as much as 80 percent faster, the company said. A Data Center Lifecycle Cost Analysis Tool assesses total data-center costs over a 10-to-20-year period, including the environmental impact, which IBM said can reduce costs by as much as 30 percent. And Security Analytic services automatically identify and handle critical events, with many as 99 percent of events not requiring human intervention.
Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp, said IBM, which has long been involved in big-data research, is now “bringing it to the masses” — that is, big enterprises. Some of that research has been acquired. The company has been on a buying spree, having invested $14 billion over the last five years in buying analytics companies.
A big feature of the new offerings, she said, is the “lightning-fast response time” when analyzing huge amounts of data in all kinds of formats. DiDio expects the new IBM services and software to be “very popular, given that enterprises are demanding this kind of analytics to slice and dice their data.”
