IBM offers cloud-based insight services

While Oracle takes control of San Francisco for the week, IBM’s set up shop in Las Vegas with a stream of cognitive computing announcements at its Insight conference.

One way to achieve this will be with IBM’s new Insight Cloud Services, a collection of data packages, analytics tools and APIs that allow businesses and developers to link internal data with large public datasets, such as weather and social network information, to gain more insight from analytics. The new cloud service is created to provide better insights into complex datasets.

Weather Company data includes historical and forecasted weather data – as an example, IBM says an insurance company could use this to alert their customers to adverse weather conditions, potentially reducing claims and improving customer satisfaction.

The sports giant will use IBM’s customer intelligence system IBM Fan Insight to pool data collected from fan interactions and then crunch those numbers to make sense of attitudes, behaviors and characteristics to help identify individual fan preferences, enabling individual fans to be targeted with specific offers for the likes of season-ticket renewals. The new products are aimed at clients in industries including retail, insurance, and media and entertainment. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that IBM is nearing a deal to acquire Weather Channel’s digital and data assets. The company also redesigned more than 15 core analytics and commerce solutions with Apache®Spark™ – helping to dramatically accelerate their real-time processing capabilities. IBM also announced IBM Behavior Based Fan Insight, a predictive analytics solution which the Ottawa Senators professional hockey club plans to use to better understand fans, increase ticket sales and enhance the in-stadium experience. “Insight Cloud Services help clients create actionable insights from the noisy reality of the world”, said Joel Cawley, general manager of Information and Insights as a Service at IBM, in a statement.

“The combination of IBM’s deep industry knowledge and cognitive computing capabilities with the powerful, real-time data available from Twitter is changing the way business decisions are made”, said Chris Moody, VP of Data Strategy at Twitter.

The availability of IBM’s Spark-as-a-Service offering – IBM Analytics on Apache Spark – on IBM Bluemix which followsa successful 13-week Beta program with more than 3,000 developers using it to build intelligent business and consumer apps fueled by data.