IBM Leads New Forrester Wave For Web Analytics

Yesterday I wrote a detailed post about the recent IBM 2011 Global CMO study, which offered a variety of interesting findings.

The first of the four key challenges mentioned that CMOs believe they will be facing moving forward was the massive explosion of data, and how they as CMOs reckon with that.

As the study mentioned, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day — so much that 90 percent of the world’s data today has been created in the last two years alone.

Put your head around that piece of data.

Hence, the increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges.

The challenge, of course, is how to analyze these vast quantities of data to extract meaningful insights and then use them to improve products, services or the customer experience.

Web Analytics Leads To Market Intelligence

One way to help with corporate Web sites is through Web analytics.  IBM has invested in this space through its acquisitions of both Coremetrics and Unica (which had an enterprise Web metrics solution entitled “NetInsights”).

Forrester Research recently placed IBM at the head of the Web Analytics pack in its most recent Wave report on the subject.

Forrester Research recently published their Wave report for Web Analytics, and in so doing named IBM has one of the Leaders and, in fact, putting IBM in the lead position on its Wave chart.

Not to say that IBM didn’t have some solid competition. Forrester noted four vendors lead the market, including Adobe, comScore and Webtrends.

Yet while the other three vendors had their own unique attributes, it was IBM which “viewed web analytics as a key component of its enterprise marketing management portfolio.”

In the Wave, IBM had perfect scores in corporate strategy and a top rating on current offering. This validation comes at less than 12 months following the acquisition of Coremetrics and Unica (forming the Enterprise Marketing Management portfolio), and provides further market recognition of IBM’s  Smarter Commerce initiative.

The Digital Marketing Optimization Suite is a key solution supporting this initiative.  While this Wave focused specifically on web analytics, IBM’s real strategic commitment is in helping organizations respond to shifting consumer and business trends.

In this way, IBM’s web analytics offerings are considered a critical component of the Smarter Commerce initiative, designed to transform how companies manage and adapt to customer and industry trends such as online, social and mobile shopping.

Leadership ratings for IBM’s Digital Marketing Optimization Suite come as a tribute to the powerful combination of capabilities from Coremetrics and Unica NetInsight, now a single on-demand offering that fuses customer profiles, web analytics, and digital marketing execution to enable marketers to turn site visitors into repeat customers and loyal advocates by orchestrating a compelling experience throughout each customer’s digital lifecycle.

Here’s what Forrester had to say about IBM’s enterprise marketing management capability:

IBM. Since our previous evaluation, IBM acquired both Coremetrics and Unica in 2010. IBM has consolidated these companies into its Enterprise Marketing Management software division, and product portfolio integration is under way. IBM is incorporating the complementary and notable features of Unica NetInsight into a merged web analytics solution based on the Coremetrics platform. To stay ahead, IBM must execute on its vision for enterprise marketing by completing the product integrations in progress, gaining market traction for major initiatives such as Smarter Commerce, and creating synergies between web analytics and other IBM assets such as eCommerce, business intelligence, and predictive modeling.

Go here if you’d like to learn more about this report and to learn more about IBM’s enterprise marketing management strategy.

New IBM Smart Analytics Systems

IBM today announced new systems highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks.

These new optimized systems support all environments in a data center, enabling clients to handle higher volumes of transactions and analyze data where it resides.

As part of today’s news, IBM is announcing IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology and Smart Analytics Systems for x86 and mainframe environments.

Each is integrated at every level — from microprocessors to hardware and software, highly-tuned for analyzing enormous amounts of data and in real-time handling data intensive transactions.

Analyzing data where it resides in the data center is very important as clients seek to shorten the cycle time between processing and results, and want to avoid the costs of migrating data from one system to another.

Wall Street firms, for example, are paying hefty rental fees to exchanges to allow their hardware to be located next to the servers that house market and trading data, mainly to shave critical milliseconds from the time it takes them to order and execute a trade.

With IBM’s new analytics systems, clients can now more effectively manage analytics and transactional workloads and extract data insight up to twenty times faster compared to competitive piece parts, for improved business outcomes.

These systems can also reduce storage space for structured and unstructured data by up to eighty percent with deep compression capabilities that shrink the data on disk, translating into significant energy-related cost savings for clients.

According to recent analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated at 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data will be unstructured, generated from a variety of sources such as blogs, web content, email, etc.

In fact, seventy percent of this unstructured data is stale after ninety days.

With this ongoing shift in the market, companies and governments need to be able to analyze and extract intelligence from information, irrespective of where data resides, in real time — without being bound by a particular system or platform.

IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology
The new IBM pureScale Application System combines POWER7-based servers with WebSphere Application Server and DB2 pureScale software  to handle  heavy transactional workloads, such as smart utility grids.

As the amount of data continues to grow, organizations in all industry segments are poised to take advantage of IBM’s economical and efficient approach to scaling capacity — without forcing clients to overspend on excess hardware and software.

For utility companies, a smart electrical grid requires up-to-the-minute data to deliver electricity in real-time, where it is needed most. It helps customers monitor their energy consumption to avoid or reduce usage during the most expensive peak times.

To handle the volume of data and transactions generated by this workload, companies require an application system that ensures continuous availability and virtually unlimited computing power required to meet changing business demands.

IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x
The new IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x, join the Power Systems based 7600 with attractively-priced integrated server, storage, software and services.

These analytics workload optimized systems include pre-tuned components to speed deployment of  powerful business analytics solutions in days.

Integrated Cognos and InfoSphere Warehouse software capabilities include reporting, analysis and dashboarding; ability to analyze multiple business variables to uncover unseen relationships; and ability to mine both structured data and unstructured information such as email, websites and blogs, to uncover hidden opportunities or provide customer behavioral analysis.

You can read about a number of IBM clients already adopting these new technologies in the full press release.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5600 (with System x) is immediately available.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 (with System z) and the IBM pureScale Application System will be available later this quarter

Cloudy With A Chance Of Prosperity

Reuters has a story this morning that has IBM launching a new cloud computing service that is “aiming to take on companies such as Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Salesforce.com Inc.”

The “Smart Analytics Cloud” is allegedly IBM’s biggest cloud computing service yet and would be the first to adopted internally.

That’s a grand idea.

If we IBMers can’t beat on that cloud and make it weep, then it stands a pretty good chance of helping you run your critical business applications.

When it comes to internal testing on our intranet, we’re like a collection of Formula One race car drivers in a demolition derby: Lead, follow, or crash (in a good way…you know, the kind that helps you learn.)

As Reuters observes, business interest in cloud computing has picked up since Amazon started offering storage and computing services over the Web .

As I surfed looking for more info on this announcement, I stumbled upon this TechCrunch post, which provides a bit more detail.

It explains that the new “IBM Smart Analytics Cloud” will be unveiled internally with more than a petabyte of info, and will provide 200K of IBM sales and development folks with actionable business intelligence.

Called “Blue Insight,” the service will gather information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores.

Anything to help those of us inside the blue cloud to find information mo’ faster and mo’ better is a good thing.

Not that we don’t have a lot of great IT and information resources already, but like any business, we can always get better and we can certainly get faster.