IBM expanded its line of "big data" product offerings Monday, unveiling Hadoop-based software for industry-specific data analysis tasks and a new appliance for marketing analytics based on the recently unveiled PureData System for Analytics.
Business analytics is one of IBM's core initiatives, and the company has aggressively expanded into the market for big data IT spending that Gartner forecasts will grow from $27 billion this year to $55 billion in 2016. The latest announcements came at the vendor's Information On Demand & Business Analytics Forum 2012 taking place this week in Las Vegas.
The IBM Digital Analytics Accelerator is designed to help chief marketing officers and marketing analysts perform "heavy clickstream analysis" to see how consumers respond to marketing campaigns, advertising and promotions, said James Kobielus, IBM's big data evangelist, in an interview.
[Related: Big Data Demands: The Heightened Need For Advanced Data Visualization]
The system is based on the PureData System for Analytics IBM launched earlier this month, as part of the company's PureSystems converged infrastructure servers. That, in turn, is based on technology IBM acquired when it bought Netezza in September 2010.
The IBM Digital Analytics Accelerator incorporates marketing analysis software from Unica -- specifically the Unica NetInsight applications -- another 2010 acquisition by IBM. They have been optimized to run on the PureData server.
IBM has also enhanced its InfoSphere BigInsights software for analyzing structured data in traditional databases combined with unstructured data from Hadoop and other sources. The enhancements include built-in accelerators for analyzing data streams from IT systems in specific industries such as retail, manufacturing, oil and gas, energy and utilities, healthcare, and travel and transportation.
Also new are social media analytics accelerators for building applications for customer acquisition and retention and other marketing tasks. And, BigInsights now offers the InfoSphere Data Explorer feature, based on technology from IBM's April acquisition of Vivisimo, for discovering and navigating through data spread across federated systems.
PUBLISHED OCT. 22, 2012
