IBM Unveils Software Capabilities to Exploit Big Data
As companies seek to gain real-time insight from diverse types of data, IBM South Africa today unveiled its software and services capabilities offering to help clients more effectively gain competitive insight, optimise infrastructure and better manage resources to address Internet-scale data.
Ravi Bhat, Executive for Software for IBM South Africa says that according to recent IT industry analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated to increase by more than 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data is expected to be unstructured.
The new analytics capabilities pioneered by IBM Research will enable chief information officers (CIOs) to construct specific, fact-based financial and business models for their IT operations. Traditionally, CIOs have had to make decisions about their IT operations without the benefit of tools that can help interpret and model data.
The capabilities are geared to IBM is helping organisations of all sizes tackle their most important business needs including:
- Turning information into insights
- Drive business integration and optimisation
- Connect and collaborate
- Enable product and service innovation
- Optimise the impact of business infrastructures and services
- Manage risk, compliance and security
The 2011 IBM Global CIO Study reflects these capabilities are key to business and CIO’s. The study found that 83 percent of 3,000 CIOs surveyed felt that applying analytics and business intelligence to their IT operations is the most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years.
Over the past five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytics acquisitions. Today, more than 8,000 IBM business consultants are dedicated to analytics and over 200 mathematicians are developing breakthrough algorithms inside IBM Research. IBM holds more than 22,000 active U.S. patents related to data and information management.
