IBM Adds Predictive Analysis To BI Software Line

IBM said that it is adding predictive analytics capabilities to its lineup of enterprise business intelligence software, which studies business process and IT operations to see where changes should be made to improve the business. With these new offerings, IBM seeks to maintain its leading role in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market, where, according to research from Gartner, it is among the top five BI software vendors in the space, although behind SAP, Oracle and SAS Institute.

Overall, IBM's BI portfolio monitors three areas of an enterprise, says Scott Hebner, VP of marketing and strategy for IBM Tivoli software. First is at the business process layer, where IBM’s WebSphere Operational Decision Management helps an enterprise define business rules and how a process operates. In addition, when rules or processes are changed, the software gives the business a better sense of what's going to happen, therefore enabling better decision-making.

The second BI and analytics focus is at the IT infrastructure layer, where the software monitors the performance of servers, storage and networking and, based on past performance, can predict where problems might occur, Hebner says. "There is a degree of predictive analytics where it actually learns from previous history how it should operate and what has gone wrong in the past ... and actually take preemptive action,” he says.

The third layer addresses connectivity and integration issues by aggregating an organization’s disparate data sources and applications in order for end users to access and integrate data regardless of platform, device or data format, Hebner says. IBM is now offering enhanced versions of WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere MQ for message queuing.

"WebSphere MQ allows application A to exchange a message with application B and to understand each other," he explains. "WebSphere MQ allows the messages to be passed. Message Broker allows you to infuse intelligence on what those messages really mean." The message intelligence is unique to the industry vertical, he adds. For example, messages within an electricity grid would different from those on a bank's or a retailer’s network.

While these announcements, made in early October, are for on-premise networks, last week the company introduced IBM SmartCloud Monitoring, which provides some of the same IT resource monitoring in both physical and virtual environments, he says. IBM touted a Tech CEO Council report, which indicated that Fortune 500 companies waste $480 billion every year on inefficient business processes.

The BI and analytics market has been active in recent months with companies launching new products and services--sometimes for monitoring IT performance, other times for monitoring business performance and sometimes both.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2011 earlier this month, company CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the Exalytics appliance, which combines Oracle software and hardware to optimize business analytics. In September, Quantivo, which has roots in IBM, emerged to provide analytics to companies that may not be the biggest businesses but still have "big data" needs. And last week, Narus said it is adding analytics tools to not only to identify network trouble but to provide intelligence on the source of the trouble.

Gartner’s study from April reported that the software market for BI, analytics and corporate performance management grew by 13.4% in 2010 to $10.5 billion. The top five vendors and their market share in 2010 are: SAP (23%); Oracle (16%); SAS Institute (13%); IBM (12%); and Microsoft (9%). The companies' rankings were unchanged from 2009.

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