IBM Details Business Intelligence (BI) Initiative
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Newsbytes has reported that top officials of IBM have elaborated on a major business intelligence (BI) initiative, telling reporters in a press conference that the initiative incorporates software and hardware products from throughout IBM, along with extensive worldwide consulting and partnership programs.
"We're delivering 'complete solutions' unmatched by competitors," asserted Ben Barnes, general manager, IBM Global Business Intelligence Solutions, speaking during the teleconference, which was attended by Newsbytes.
As previously reported in Newsbytes, IBM's BI product announcements today included new editions of Visual Warehouse and Intelligent Miner, along with new offerings such as Intelligent Miner for Text; Intelligent Miner for Data; DB2 OLAP (online analytical processing) Server, co-developed with Arbor; SurfAid, a data mining application for analyzing Web site usage; and a new set of vertical applications, known as Discovery Series, for analyzing customer retention.
Barnes told journalists during the teleconference that BI will become " the biggest single source" of differentiation for companies in the future, by allowing for development of new applications in customer relationship management.
Businesses can create custom products and services for customers by analyzing customer profiles versus buying behaviors, according to the GM.
Barnes also cited a number of related areas as showing promise for BI, including inventory management and prevention of "fraud and abuse" in applications ranging from cellular phones to retail cash registers.
P.J. Mitchell, VP of customer relationship solutions, told the journalists that BI applications are being driven by two main factors: customer demand for self-service and customization; and proliferation in the numbers of channels, or points of contact, available to customers. These channels now range from retail stores to the telephone, kiosks, e-mail, and even ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) machines, Mitchell pointed out.
Users of BI applications already include big names like Sears, Citibank, Toys R Us, and Aetna Insurance, and analysts project the market will grow to as much as $70 billion by the turn of the century, according to Barnes.
Telecom providers can use BI to "understand churn and how to deal with it," he illustrated. Other vertical markets being pursued by IBM include utilities; finance; and enterprise resource planning (ERP), through new products that include Business Analysis Suite for SAP and Business Analysis Suite for JD Edwards.
Also today, Barnes issued a statement of intent to target the insurance industry. BI applications are becoming "mission-critical" today, asserted Janet Perna, general manager, data management, in IBM's Software Solutions division. But it is also important to recognize that most buyers of BI products today are at the departmental level, where ease of use is a key element, she said during the teleconference.
With its BI products, partnerships and services, IBM will support departmental users all the way up to enterprises deploying multiterabyte data warehouses, according to the GM.
At the low end, for example, IBM's Visual Warehouse will now be available for under $40,000, packaged with a choice of tools from Business Objects or Cognos, she observed. And at the high end, Visual Warehouse will be available with tools from partners Vality and ETI, for data cleansing and transformation, respectively.
The new edition also automates management of meta data, or "data about the data," the GM noted during the press conference. Perna said that Visual Warehouse will be ported from Windows NT to Unix, OS/400, and OS/390 in the forthcoming new release.
Speaking with Newsbytes after the teleconference, Paul Hill, VP of strategic partnerships for Cognos, said that IBM plans to bundle two of his company's products: Impromptu, an enterprise reporting tool for RDMBS (relational database management systems) such as IBM's DB2; and Power Play, an analysis tool that also performs reporting from MDDS (multidimensional database systems) like IBM's new OLAP Server.
"Our two products will complement two of IBM's products," Hill told Newsbytes. Also during the teleconference, Perna announced the establishment of a new BI partnership program, with 150 members, ranging from ISVs (independent software vendors) to SIs (systems integrators).
Bill Zeitler, general manager, IBM Server Brand, spoke of how IBM is supporting BI applications on the hardware side, from servers to storage products like Magstar and Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM). On the server side, IBM is supporting BI on platforms that run the gamut from Netfinity server to RS6000, S/390, AS/400, and SP, according to Zeitler.
IBM is "the number one vendor in servers," and all of the company's servers have been "refreshed and revitalized," according to the exec.
The AS/400 platform now has more than 150 referenceable customers for BI, he told the press. Last year, over 50 percent of all SP placements were for BI applications, Zeitler continued. And from 1996 to 1997, IBM's DB2 for OS/390 business grew 8 percent. "We're convinced that over half of that was BI."
Also during the press teleconference, the IBM officials announced a new BI consulting practice from IBM, featuring 2,500 consultants specializing in BI strategy, planning, and methodology as well as in IBM's targeted vertical markets.
"I'm impressed with how many pieces of IBM are involved in this," commented Richard Hackathorne, an analyst at Boulder Technology, Inc. "It isn't easy to get a large company behind a major initiative like this in such an organized way," the analyst told Newsbytes after the teleconference.
Additional information is available at http://www.ibm.com/bi on the World Wide Web.