IBM announced Watson Analytics, a natural language-based cognitive service that can provide instant access to predictive and visual analytic tools for businesses.
Watson Analytics is designed to make advanced and predictive analytics easy to acquire and use for anyone.
The first release of Watson Analytics will include a freemium version of its cloud-based service designed to run on desktop and mobile devices. Watson Analytics offers self-service analytics, including access to easy to use data refinement and data warehousing services that make it easier for business users to acquire and prepare data, beyond simple spreadsheets for analysis and visualisation.
Unlike analytics offerings designed primarily for data scientists and analysts predominantly focused on visualisation, IBM Watson Analytics automates steps like data preparation, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling for business professionals across data intensive disciplines like marketing, sales, operations, finance and human resources.
Three key innovations can greatly reduce the skills required to engage in advanced analytics:
Single Business Analytics Experience – Watson Analytics brings together a set of self-service enterprise data and analytics capabilities on the cloud. Business professionals identify their problem, and Watson Analytics can help them source the data, cleanse and refine it, discover insights, predict outcomes, visualise results, create reports or dashboards, and collaborate with others.
Guided Predictive Analytics – Watson Analytics features the use of predictive analytics to surface key relevant facts and uncover unforeseen patterns and relationships.
Natural Language Dialogue – Watson Analytics speaks the language of business and people by enabling someone to simply type in what they would like to see; Watson Analytics produces results that explain why things happened and what’s likely to happen, all in familiar business terms.
“Watson Analytics is designed to help all business people – from sales reps on the road to company CEOs – see patterns, pursue ideas and improve all types of decisions,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, Information and Analytics Group, IBM.
Like other IBM Cloud solutions, it will be hosted on SoftLayer and available through the IBM Cloud marketplace.
