IBM 4Q 2012 Earnings Rise On Software Sales

IBM announced this afternoon fourth-quarter 2012 diluted earnings of $5.13 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $4.62 per share in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 11 percent.

Fourth-quarter net income was $5.8 billion compared with $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 6 percent. Total revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012 of $29.3 billion decreased 1 percent (flat adjusting for currency) from the fourth quarter of 2011.

“We achieved record profit, earnings per share and free cash flow in 2012. Our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year was driven by our strategic growth initiatives — growth markets, analytics, cloud computing, Smarter Planet solutions — which support our continued shift to higher-value businesses,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer.

“Looking ahead, we continue to invest to deliver innovations for the enterprise in key areas such as big data, mobile solutions, social business and security, while expanding into new markets and reaching new clients. We are well on track toward our long-term roadmap for operating EPS of at least $20 in 2015.”

Following are key details of 4Q 2012 earnings:

Fourth-Quarter 2012

Diluted EPS:

GAAP: $5.13, up 11 percent;

Operating (non-GAAP): $5.39, up 14 percent;

Net income:

GAAP: $5.8 billion, up 6 percent;

Operating (non-GAAP): $6.1 billion, up 10 percent;

Gross profit margin:

GAAP: 51.8 percent, up 1.8 points;

Operating (non-GAAP): 52.3 percent, up 2.1 points;

Revenue of $29.3 billion, down 1 percent, flat adjusting for currency:

Up 1 percent excluding divested RSS business adjusting for currency;

Free cash flow of $9.5 billion, up $0.6 billion;

Software revenue up 3 percent, up 4 percent adjusting for currency;

Services revenue down 2 percent, down 1 percent adjusting for currency;

Services backlog of $140 billion, flat, up $1 billion adjusting for currency;

Systems and Technology revenue down 1 percent, up 4 percent excluding RSS:

System z mainframe up 56 percent.

Full Year 2012

Diluted EPS, up double-digits for 10th consecutive year:

GAAP: $14.37, up 10 percent;

Operating (non-GAAP): $15.25, up 13 percent;

Net income:

GAAP: $16.6 billion, up 5 percent;

Operating (non-GAAP): $17.6 billion, up 8 percent;

Revenue of $104.5 billion, down 2 percent, flat adjusting for currency;

Free cash flow of $18.2 billion, up $1.6 billion;

Growth markets revenue up 4 percent, up 7 percent adjusting for currency:

BRIC countries up 7 percent, up 12 percent adjusting for currency;

Business analytics revenue up 13 percent;

Smarter Planet revenue up more than 25 percent;

Cloud revenue up 80 percent.

Full-Year 2013 Expectation:

GAAP EPS of at least $15.53 and operating (non-GAAP) EPS of at least $16.70.

IBM To Acquire HR And Talent Management Firm Kenexa

IBM today announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Kenexa Corporation, a publicly held company headquartered in Wayne, PA, in a cash transaction at a price of $46 per share, or at a net price of approximately $1.3 billion.

“Every company, across every business operation, is looking to tap into the power of social networking to transform the way they work, collaborate and out innovate their competitors,” says Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM, explaining IBM’s rationale for acquiring HR and talent management provider Kenexa Corporation for $1.3 billion cash earlier today.

The acquisition bolsters IBM’s leadership in helping clients embrace social business capabilities while gaining actionable insights from the massive streams of information generated from social networks every day.

The adoption of social business technology is supporting the growth of big data and the need for analytics in the enterprise. A recent global IBM study revealed that 57 percent of CEOs identified social business as a top priority and more than 73 percent are making significant investments to draw insights into available data.

The survey also reveals that 70 percent cite human capital as the single biggest contributor to sustained economic value. The combined strengths of IBM and Kenexa are key differentiators at a time when organizations of all sizes are looking to increase workforce efficiencies and gain more insight from their business information.

Kenexa: Providing World-Class Social Business Capabilities

Kenexa is a leading provider of recruiting and talent management solutions. They bring to IBM a unique combination of cloud-based technology and consulting services that integrates both people and processes, providing solutions to engage a smarter, more effective workforce across their most critical business functions.

Kenexa complements IBM’s strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department, from sales and marketing to product development and human resources. As a result of this synergy, clients will be able to attract and develop the right skills to build the right teams, for the right projects, the first time.

Social media has pervaded the lives of consumers, helping them connect with each other in new ways. However, a shift is occurring in the enterprise as business leaders look for ways to generate real value through the use of social technologies to evolve their front-line business operations.

According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016.

“Every company, across every business operation, is looking to tap into the power of social networking to transform the way they work, collaborate and out innovate their competitors,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. “IBM is uniquely positioned to help clients generate real returns from their social business investments, while helping them gain intelligence into the data being generated in these networks to be more competitive in their markets.”

Social Business Creating Value In The Enterprise

Today, Kenexa supports more than 8,900 customers across a variety of industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, retail and consumer, including more than half of the Fortune 500.

With Kenexa’s world-class front-office process solutions, IBM will be able to offer strategic consulting, a social technology platform, and expertise on a global scale to help clients enable a smarter workforce and gain a competitive advantage in any market.

By creating a smarter workforce, employees can resolve problems before they arise to improve customer service, drive innovation to bring products and services to market faster, and increase sales by building new skills — linking the right experts to the right clients.

The Kenexa acquisition will complement IBM’s social business and HR business services leadership. More than 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies have licensed IBM’s solutions for social business.

Through its combination of social software, analytics, content management, and deep industry expertise, IBM is uniquely positioned to help organizations capture information, create insights and generate interactions that translate into real business value.

With operations in 21 countries worldwide, Kenexa has approximately 2,800 employees. Consistent with its strategy, IBM plans to continue to support Kenexa clients and enhance Kenexa technologies while allowing these organizations to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio.

IBM expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of 2012, subject to Kenexa shareholder and regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

IBM Business Analytics: Preventing Fraud, Predicting Profits

Scott Laningham and I are starting to think about repacking our suitcases and preparing to head back out on the road, this time across the pond to Madrid for the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit May 22-24.

In Madrid, we expect to hear quite a bit about IBM’s investment in the analytics space, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait to visit the Prado to relate some interesting details about business analytics.

Specifically, predictive analytics that can help companies across the span of industries to prevent fraud.

Here’s a sound byte you may not have yet heard: Did you know that insurance fraud has reached an estimated $80 billion per year in the U.S. alone??

And in South Africa, the rate of short-term insurance fraud is about 15 percent of all premium costs.

And yet, we’ve also found that organizations that effectively apply predictive analytics are 2.2 times more likely to outperform their peers.

One such client of IBM is Santam, South Africa’s leading short term insurance company, which has saved $2.4 million on fraudulent claims in the first four months of using IBM business analytics software.

This new analytics solution has not only enhanced Santam’s fraud detection capabilities, however — it has also enabled faster payouts for legitimate claims.

In partnering with IBM, Santam’s claims division developed a new operating model for processing claims, depending on varying risk levels. IBM’s predictive analytics software has enabled Santam to automatically assess if there is any fraud risk associated with incoming claims and allows the insurer to distribute claims to the appropriate processing channel for immediate settlement or further investigation, which in turn optimizes Santam’s operational efficiency.

In turn, Santam is able to reduce the number of claims that need to be assessed by mobile operatives visiting the customer or claim site, resulting in further considerable cost savings for the company.

IBM: Investing In Analytics, Predicting Results

In the last five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in acquisitions. With investments in SPSS, Clarity, OpenPages, i2 and Algorithmics, and others, IBM is building business analytics solutions providing clients with capabilities for managing fraud, risk and threat. In addition, IBM has assembled almost 9,000 dedicated analytics consultants with industry expertise, and created a network of eight global analytics solution centers.

The Santam project also illustrates IBM’s leadership in analytics in Africa. IBM is also actively laying the foundations for a major presence throughout the African continent, with offices in more than 20 African countries, where the company is assisting businesses and governments in building strategies, expertise, solutions, frameworks and operating procedures to help improve performance.

You can learn more about Santam here, and their new predictive analytics solution in the video below.  You can learn more about IBM business analytics solutions here.

IBM ImpactTV 2012 Instant Replay: IBM’s Mike Rhodin On Big Data, Smarter Commerce, And The Emerging LOB Tech Buyer

Our first interview at IBM Impact 2012 this year was with IBM senior vice president, IBM Software Solutions Group, Mike Rhodin.  This was also our first ever opportunity to interview Mike, so we were especially excited about this particular interview.

Mike leads an organization which focuses on delivering integrated offerings that target high-growth opportunities, including business analytics, collaboration, and industry solutions.  As a senior vice president, Mike is responsible for a $5 billion business portfolio which represents one of the fastest growing and most acquisitive.

In our interview, Mike explained that his business is reaching more of a non-traditional technology buyer, the senior “line of business” executives who have played a much more dominant role in tech acquisition through the economic downturn, and who are looking for solutions that can help their organizations differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and and even more readily empower front-line executives and decision makers.

He also brought us up to date on what IBM’s Watson has been up to over the past year, explaining that Watson finally got a “real” job — actually, a couple of them!

In his former IBM lives, Mike has served as the general manager of IBM’s Northeast Europe organization, as well as the GM of IBM’s Lotus Software division, a stint in which he led a team to create the “human side” of IBM’s software strategy by developing IBM’s collaborative technology and solutions which integrate people, data, and business processes.

IBM ImpactTV 2012 Instant Replay: IBM’s Steve Mills On Big Data Analytics, PureSystems, And The Continued Importance Of Transaction Processing

At last week’s IBM Impact 2012 event at the Venetian in Las Vegas, my collaborator and fellow blogger Scott Laningham and I spent much of our week interviewing thought leaders from IBM, our Business Partners, our clients, and even our keynoters, and to help spread the word, we’ll be incorporating some of those interviews in our respective blogs over the next days and weeks.

First up, the big man himself, IBM senior vice president and group executive, Software and Systems, Steve Mills.

If you’ve been in or around the software or IT industry for any length of time, it’s very likely you’ve heard from Steve.  And, as you well know, Steve always delivers — to customers, and to audiences.

This time around, Steve reminded us about the importance of transaction processing, explained the economic drivers that led to the development of IBM’s new PureSystems line of technology, and debriefed us on two recent IBM Software acquisitions in the big data analytics realm.

IBM To Acquire Mobile Analytics Provider TeaLeaf Technology

IBM yesterday announced a definitive agreement to acquire Tealeaf Technology, Inc., a leading provider of customer experience analytics software that helps organizations to gain intelligence and react more swiftly to consumer trends in today’s digitally transformed marketplace.

Financial details were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory clearance and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2012.

The need to deliver a seamless mobile experience has become increasingly critical to CMOs with global online commerce expected to hit $1 trillion by 2014 and mobile commerce $200 billion by 2015.  Organizations today are struggling to meet the demands created by the rapidly shifting buying patterns of their customers, who increasingly turn to online, social and mobile channels to gather information, make purchases and receive services.

This new digital marketplace requires companies to be highly responsive to their customers’ behaviors in order to both compete and grow. The opportunity to better understand a customer’s experience on websites and mobile devices presents a major competitive advantage for businesses.

Mobile Analytics On The Go

With this agreement, IBM extends its Smarter Commerce initiative by adding qualitative analytics capabilities that provide chief marketing officers (CMOs), e-commerce and customer service professionals with real-time and automated insights into online customer buying experiences across online and mobile devices.

As a result, organizations can gain actionable insight that allows them to improve customer support, transform site usability, tailor marketing campaigns and increase online conversion rates.

Tealeaf provides a full suite of customer experience management software, which records and analyzes a customer’s website and mobile interactions. As a result, marketers can spot patterns and address issues in website and mobile application design and provide a more streamlined online customer experience that leads to improved revenue, customer satisfaction, customer service productivity, and profitability.

TeaLeaf: Over 450 Customers Worldwide

Tealeaf has over 450 customers worldwide including 30 of the Fortune 100 companies. These customers are predominantly in financial services, travel, retail and communications services. Current clients include: Dell, Wells Fargo, Air Canada, GEICO, Orbitz, Crate & Barrel, Neiman Marcus, Expedia, Zappos, ING Direct, Best Buy, DirecTV, McKesson and StubHub.

Tealeaf will extend IBM’s leadership in Smarter Commerce by giving companies qualitative web and digital analytics capabilities, allowing them to capture and replay a customer’s web and mobile interactions to provide a more granular and richer view of a customer’s experience.

This insightful view helps marketers answer the question of “why” customers interact as they do and thus provide a more optimized online customer experience leading to improved revenue, customer satisfaction, customer service productivity and profitability.

Tealeaf is based in San Francisco, California with additional offices in Europe.

Impact 2012: Steve Mills On How Transaction Processing Rules

Transaction processing.

Transactions aren’t sexy.  They’re not cool.  You don’t get points for racking them up. You can’t put them on your bookshelf and show them off.

IBM senior vice president, software and systems, Steve Mills warns the Impact 2012 audience “Nothing will get you in more trouble than if there’s a problem with your critical transactions.”

But all of that doesn’t matter, because transactions run the world — and, therefore, they rule.

They rule banking.  They rule retail operations.  They rule medical systems.  Transactions are everything.

And transactions are us.

That seemed to be the key message behind IBM senior vice president Steve Mills’ message to the gathered Impact 2012 audience for the day 2 general session.

Mills actually keynoted second, but I wanted to deliver his message first, because it’s a critically important one: IBM is thriving in an era of ubiquitous transactions, Mills explained.  “We’ve been investing in transactions for as long as there was programmable computing.  How do you do effective transaction processing?  How do you have true control over a unit of work, and do that at scale, especially in a world of increasingly bigger data?”

That’s where IBM Software lives and breathes.  Mills mentioned a typical panoply of daily transaction sizes: 9.9 billion proximity mobile transactions by 2016, 18.7 million web transactions last Cyber Monday, 864 million payment card transactions per day, 1 million transactions per second in the Amazon cloud.

Again, transactions make the world go ‘round — until they don’t.

Transactions are like oxygen — you don’t notice them until they go wrong, and then you do notice, bigtime. IBM’s role has been to not only to make sure you don’t notice, but to increasingly evolve our technology so that the systems stack works both horizontally and vertically, enabling your business partners and others to enter your transaction ecosystem.

“Nothing will get you in more trouble,” explained Mills, “than if there’s a problem with those critical transactions.”

Of course, we’re in Vegas, so I can think of a few things, but his point remains well taken.

“Millions of transactions go through IBM mainframes a day, fundamental financial activity using CICS and MQ…these are responsibilities we take very seriously,” Mills continued.

The proof’s always in the pudding, so Mills related some key customer stories: Marriott, whose reservation booking engine does 1,500 transactions per second.

Or China Mobile, operating at a scale many businesses couldn’t even fathom: 600 million customers, 148 million transactions per day — and by implementing an IBM service-oriented architecture they’ve reduced their new application go-to-market time by 50 percent!

Now, let’s flashback to our first speaker, Johan Gerber, head of processing products at MasterCard, who was introduced by the spirited Katie Linendoll, CBS Early Morning show’s “Chic Geek,” making her much welcomed return engagement to Impact.

“We needed this platform so we could innovate,” payments processing lead for MasterCard Johan Gerber summarizes for the Impact 2012 audience in this morning's opening general session. “Innovation is what provides differentiation. To stay ahead of the competition is key.”

MasterCard was more proof in the pudding, with a company that supports more than 32 million merchants and an average of 43,000 transactions every minute, each lasting a mind-boggling 130 milliseconds.

Can you say lightning fast transactions?!!

MasterCard’s business is transactions, and Gerber explained the MasterCard network can handle about 14 billion instructions per second, and has multiple layers of protection and redundancy.

“The last thing we can afford,” Gerber explained “is for that network to go down.

“And,” he quipped. “Not even Lady Gaga has this much security.”

Being the world’s most advanced payments technology, MasterCard has been investing in IBM WebSphere technology to help them continue to innovate, and Gerber explained they “needed a technology partner they could trust.”

Trust being an explicit conditions for most successful transactions, in the network or otherwise.

MasterCard launched their new transaction platform in February of this year and have already moved two key applications there, and were able to do so in hours, instead of weeks.

“We needed this platform so we could innovate,” Gerber summarized. “Innovation is what provides differentiation. To stay ahead of the competition is key.”

There are some things money can’t buy.  For everything else there’s MasterCard…and its whopping 43,000 transactions per minute.

IBM To Acquire Big Data Software Provider Vivisimo

IBM continues to romp and stomp its way through the Big Data space.

IBM announced its intent to acquire enterprise discovery software provider Vivisimo earlier today. Vivisimo has recently positioned itself as the "independent provider of enterprise search solutions" which helps "organizations unlock and optimize the true business value of all their information, regardless of application or source, in order to drive innovation, real-time decisions and actionable insight."

Today, it announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a leading provider of federated discovery and navigation software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise.

Vivisimo is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Financial terms were not disclosed.  Of course.

IBM estimates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day from a variety of sources including sensors, social media, and billions of mobile devices around the world, making it difficult for businesses to navigate and analyze it to improve competitiveness, efficiency, and profitability.

IDC estimates the market for big data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40 percent to reach $16.9 billion by 2015

That’s where Vivisimo software comes into play. Vivisimo excels in capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides.

It automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise, providing valuable insights that drive better decision-making for solving all operational challenges.

Today’s news accelerates IBM’s big data analytics initiatives with advanced federated capabilities allowing organizations to access, navigate, and analyze the full variety, velocity and volume of structured and unstructured data without having to move it.

The combination of IBM’s big data analytics capabilities with Vivisimo software will further IBM’s efforts to automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time, and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns.

“Businesses need a faster and more accurate way to discover and navigate big data for analysis” said John Kealey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivisimo. “As part of IBM, we can bring clients the quickest and most accurate access to information necessary to drive growth initiatives that increase customer satisfaction, streamline processes, and boost sales.”

Vivisimo brings over a decade of experience and innovation in data navigation and visualization technologies for both structured and unstructured data, making it easier for business users to get value from all of their data and content. Vivisimo’s ability to index and search data across multiple repositories is a distinguishing capability, applicable to all industries and clients.

Vivisimo has more than 140 customers in industries such as government, life sciences, manufacturing, electronics, consumer goods and financial services. Clients include Airbus, U.S. Air Force, Social Security Administration, Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy, Procter & Gamble, Bupa, and LexisNexis among others.

Upon the closing of the acquisition, approximately 120 Vivisimo employees will join IBM’s Software Group. IBM will incorporate Vivisimo technology into its big data platform.

Visit here for more information on IBM’s big data platform or here for more information on Vivisimo.

There’s some early coverage here from TechCrunch.

IBM Acquires Sales Performance Management Solutions Provider, Varicent Software

IBM announced its intent to acquire Varicent Software Inc. earlier today, a recognized leader in sales performance management software. Varicent Software strengthens IBM's "smarter analytics" solutions and addesses a growing opportunity in sales performance management. IBM's performance management solutions help customers outperform by seeing, predicting, and shaping business outcomes across finance, operations, customer relations and now sales organizations.

IBM just announced a definitive agreement to acquire Varicent Software Incorporated, a leading provider of analytics software for compensation and sales performance management.

Varicent is a privately held company, with headquarters in Toronto, Canada. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Varicent software automates and analyzes the collection and reporting of sales data across finance, sales, human resources and IT departments to gain efficiencies, uncover trends andimprove sales performance.

This acquisition accelerates IBM’s “smarter analytics” capabilities across line of business operations in all industries, and will be combined with IBM’s existing software offerings that are delivered to clients through on-premise or cloud computing models.

With growing volumes of data, companies are increasingly looking for ways to automate and gain faster, more accurate intelligence on sales and financial management data in order to increase competitiveness.

According to Gartner, organizations that adopt compensation management solutions can expect to reduce errors by more than 90 percent and reduce processing times by more than 40 percent.

Varicent’s software automates and integrates all aspects of sales, client and financial performance management across the enterprise, which is traditionally a labor intensive process. Unlike traditional tools, Varicent provides a single management system that relies on a sophisticated calculation engine to model and analyze the effectiveness of incentive spend.

The software allows clients such as banks, insurance companies, retailers, information technology and telecommunications providers to more accurately determine compensation, streamline territory assignments, manage quotas, and report and analyze sales activities.  The software also strengthens audit and compliance readiness and provides transparency for all aspects of incentive compensation.

Varicent was founded in 2003 and has more than 180 customers using its software, including Starwood Hotels, Covidien, Dex One, Manpower, Hertz, Office Depot and Farmers, among many others.

IBM will combine Varicent with its R&D and prior acquisitions including Algorithmics, Clarity Systems, OpenPages, Cognos and SPSS, to expand IBM capabilities in business analytics and optimization across finance, sales, and customer service operations.

These acquisitions are part of IBM’s larger focus on analytics, which spans hardware, software, services and research. IBM has established the world’s deepest portfolio of analytics solutions, business and industry expertise.

This includes almost 9,000 dedicated business analytics and optimization consultants and 400 researchers. IBM secures hundreds of patents a year in analytics, and continues to expand its ecosystem, which consists of more than 27,000 IBM business partners. IBM has also created eight global analytics solution centers in Berlin, Beijing, Dallas, London, New York, Tokyo, Washington and Zurich.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2012. With the closing of this acquisition, it is expected that all of Varicent’s employees will join IBM’s Software Group.

Big Data, Bigger Business Opportunity

IBM today is making some significant announcements in the business analytics realm that builds on the already $16+ billion the company has already invested in smarter intelligence over the last half decade.

Smarter business analytics and intelligence is an idea whose time has come. Even as the global economy strengthens organizations are faced with difficult choices: Many are still being asked to do more work with less — less people, less investment, less of everything — and so we find ourselves at a crossroads.

Do we continue to do business the way we’ve done so for the past half century, one that was generally based upon a presumption of generous abundance?

Or, do we begin to acknowledge instead an abundance of scarcity — in natural resources, in human talent, in financial capital —  and instead start to work “smarter,” to use technology to help us better understand and make — or as may often be the case, “remake” — the world around us?

Big data is the digital convergence of structured data found inside databases, and unstructured data flowing from new sources like social networks, mobile devices, sensors, RFID, smart meters and financial systems. Today in NYC and London, IBM announced new consulting services and software that takes the power of predictive analytics to new levels of impact against C-suite decision makers' highest priority issues.

The Coming Information Gusher

As IBM CEO Ginny Rometty outlined in our recent annual report, “the world is uniquely positioned to deliver the benefits of a vast new natural resource — a gusher of data from both man-made and natural systems that can now be tapped to help businesses and institutions succeed in an increasingly complex and dynamic global economy.”

This “gusher” is one of the most exciting and game-changing phenomena to arrive on the scene since the advent of the microprocessor. But it’s arrival will be both opportunity and disruptor, and how organizations choose to take advantage of this new natural resource may well be the determining factor in shaping their destiny.

What problem in the world, you may be asking, are we trying to solve?  The much better question may be, what problem in the world are we not trying to solve?

Why Are We Spending So Much To Get So Little?

The healthcare industry spends $250-300 billion on healthcare fraud, per year, some $650 million per day in the U.S. alone? Is that a gap that we can really afford to ignore in such a resource-constrained world?

Or how about the retail business, where, according to the IHL Group, we see $165 billion in missed sales each year due to company supplies being mismatched with the needs of customer demand. Is that money the retailing industry can really afford to leave on the storeroom table?

In a world where natural resources become increasingly scarce, even as the often unstructured data generated about the use and consumption of those resources is delivered in abundance, the ability to act and act quickly upon those insights will itself become a scarcity.

Those organizations  are able to act on such information quickly and efficiently will find themselves in increasingly circumscribed company, and will soon be putting distance between themselves and their competition.

This is why today, in New York City at the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit, IBM is convening 100 business leaders to talk about the next big bets and emerging categories being driven into front office operations of global organizations.

As part of the forum, IBM is announcing new consulting services and software that marry the latest advances in predictive analytics with the power of big data.  Specifically, we’re working to help address the highest-priority issues of C-suite decision makers — managing financial operations, decreasing fraud and improving customer relationships.

These new solutions will be delivered by IBM consultants, supported by applications management services  as well as cloud offerings.

Our customers are the biggest proponents of this new direction.  Check out the video below to hear how the University of California has reduced its cost of risk and saved nearly half a billion dollars over six years using IBM Smarter Analytics.