by Angela Guess
According to a new article, “Sensing a greater need in big-data analysis tools, IBM will invest US$100 million to research advanced large-scale analytics, the company announced Friday. IBM also said it will have 20 new service offerings to help customers quickly analyze petabytes of data.” Rod Smith, vice president of emerging technologies added, “We think it’s a good time from a research perspective to double down on how we think about big data and how people can get actionable insights from it.”
The article continues, “The money will be used to investigate ways of advancing software, systems and services to better analyze data. ‘Analytics are terrific, but if you can combine analytics with specific problems and expertise around certain problems, then you can define outcomes in unique ways,’ Smith said. While the IT industry already has plenty of business intelligence and analytics software, tools are still lacking for analyzing large amounts of unstructured data, Smith said. About 80 percent of the data in an enterprise is unstructured, meaning it is not easily categorized in databases.”
It goes on, “Smith said many IBM customers are collecting large amounts of data through sensors, either software- or hardware-based, but do not have ways of analyzing the results… IBM will use existing locations for the research rather than open new centers. ‘Projects will be evaluated across the globe,’ Smith said. The service offerings being developed will include a range of analysis capabilities, said Steve Sams, IBM Global Technologies Services’ vice present of site and facilities services. One new tool, called Cloud Workload Analysis, will allow organizations to summarize their IT workload characteristics and identify which jobs could be moved to the cloud. Another tool will allow users to provision their own storage, rather than go through a storage administrator, reducing the time storage administrators spend managing resources.”
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