Power > Business Strategy > BI and Analytics

The Power of Analytics

Business solutions optimized for Power Systems bring big benefits

IBM has acquired many leading software companies in the analytics niche. This collection has formed a comprehensive, integrated business analytics and optimization portfolio offering enterprises a wealth of options for turning information into insights, which lead to better business decisions and outcomes. It’s common for businesses to prioritize their biggest challenges, and then select the right analytics products to solve those problems. IBM has invested heavily in producing complete analytics solutions optimized on IBM platforms.

Two foundational analytics solutions provide great advantages when run as optimized solutions on Power Systems* technology—IBM Cognos* Business Intelligence (BI) and SPSS* Collaboration and Deployment Services (C&DS). Power Systems capabilities match the key requirements for client analytics production environments, provide superior performance and minimize the total cost of acquisition over the competition. Recent benchmark tests performed at IBM provide specific performance and cost benefits.

 

Key Business Analytics Solutions

Some industries have unique challenges requiring special forms of analytics. For example, financial services companies can use specific analytics products that specialize in financial risk and compliance. Most analytics products, however, can help solve problems in any industry.

Two foundational analytics capabil-ities are key to analytics deployments, regardless of the industries they serve. The first is the capability to analyze data and view information, and the second is to predict future events based on that information. The IBM Cognos BI platform analyzes data and makes it viewable to business users in the form of reports and dashboards. In addition, it allows dynamic interactions with the information through ad hoc queries and integrated collaboration with coworkers who view the same dashboards. Cognos BI offers many other useful features, including real-time monitoring.

SPSS predictive analytics software provides tools for creating and deploying statistical models. The SPSS deployment portfolio enables predictive models to be used within business processes, aligning insight with decision making. One key feature of SPSS C&DS is real-time scoring, which is critical for deploying predictive insight into operational business processes.

IBM Power Systems servers provide features that enable anaytics environments to adapt to changes rapidly.

Key considerations for Clients

As these core analytics products are incorporated into critical business processes, the analytics deployment model and underlying IT infrastructure become especially important. Clients who deploy business analytics have identified four key requirements in analytics production environments:

• Performance must be top-notch and consistent to meet real-time needs.
• A flexible deployment model is essential to easily accommodate growth and agility.
• Analytics is an integral part of business-critical components, and the complete solution needs to be available 24-7.
• Infrastructure costs must be minimized while meeting the other requirements.

Examining these areas in more detail will show how running Cognos and SPSS on IBM Power Systems servers can help meet these challenges.

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