If anyone needed proof that the cloud is the current battleground for the hearts and minds of CIOs, announcement’s made this week at IBM’s Insight conference in Las Vegas should put that to rest.
The company said a wide range of its on-premise analytics platforms — including Cognos Business Intelligence, SPSS predictive analytics and the newly-announced Watson Analytics — will be available through the IBM Cloud marketplace.
The goal is to allow businesses and developers to add data-driven decision making into every business decision, IBM said.
Cognos Business Intelligence on Cloud is currently in beta and will be available in the first quarter of 2015. SPSS Modeler will be available on the IBM Cloud marketplace within 30 days.
No pricing was announced.
IBM also announced five solution accelerators to help data professionals. These are pre-integrated software solutions and industry and technology-specific services expertise.They include
–Customer Insight, which will provide increased insight into customers to support sales, marketing and customer service;
–Operations Insight, which will examine the condition of assets and performance of equipment for predictive maintenance;
–Security and Fraud Insight, which will improve intelligence and early warning of potential anomalies;
–Risk and Compliance Insight , to help better manage financial risk, operational risk and compliance;
–Data Warehouse Modernization Projects – Enabling organizations to capture and maintain a broader set of information and enable increased analytic capabilities at reduced costs; providing quicker access to information generated across the enterprise.
That wasn’t all. IBM [NYSE: IBM]also added a series of data services which it says will allow organizations to simplify and automate the ability to find, refine, prepare and warehouse data in the cloud.
They include
— DataWorks, services that shape, cleanse, match and secure data for analysis and for embedding data services into applications;
— dashDB, a cloud-based data warehousing and analytics service with in-memory technology. A new integration of dashDB with Cloudant, IBM’s NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS), allows Cloudant clients to embed analytics in their applications with a few clicks;
-Cloudant Local, an on-premise edition of the fully managed cloud database-as-a-service that enables a hybrid cloud data layer that spans private data centers, mobile devices and third-party cloud providers. IBM says this ensures customers can easily reconfigure their cloud data platforms over time.
As an example of what these services could do, IBM said a ride sharing service company could take taxi trip information, captured in a mobile application running on Cloudant, directly into dashDB, and then use DataWorks to refine and load additional weather and traffic data to ensure drivers are in the right place at the right time.
DataWorks, dashDB and Cloudant are available on IBM’s Bluemix infrastructure as a service (IaaS) site developers. For more information on DataWorks, go to ibm.biz/ibmdataworks. For more information or to get started using dashDB, go to dashDB.com. Cloudant Local is available on cloudant.com.