IBM at the time said it has spent a decade been developing cognitive systems to make sense of the content of photos and videos, and said the Merge acquisition complements those image-processing skills with a platform for sharing medical images across clinical environments.
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Several executives from IBM’s analytics division outlined products and objectives in a press briefing at IBM Insight in Las Vegas, created to carry out actionable analytics with an ecosystem of products across industries and businesses. Two additional APIs allow developers to integrate Twitter content into third party apps.
With the redesign of Cognos Analytics, business users and IT professionals are now able to author and distribute reports and access self-service dashboards about things that matter to their business, like monthly financial reports, weekly sales pipeline trends, daily production yields, hourly inventory levels – and do so on any device anywhere. An example cited was metal roofing products manufacturer Mueller, which is using Watson Analytics to allow execs to get insight from their data by simply asking questions using natural language.
This means that firms using the services can see what variables they should be tracking in what IBM presents as the widest possible (well, IBM does have breadth) scope of operations for that particular industry vertical. Delivered as a managed service through IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform, the combination of IBM analytics tools with Apache Spark integration allows developers to inject real-time analytics powered by Spark’s in-memory framework. This follows a 13-week Beta program with more than 4,600 developers. Partnerships with Twitter and The Weather Company provide this “Insight Cloud” with a mass of real-time data.
One way IBM will look to achieve this is with a new IBM Analytics on Spark service. Octo Telematics, a leading insurance telematics services provider, is using IBM Insight Data Packages for Weather as a critical input to its driver behavior scoring app, which offer personalized pay-how-you-drive – or usage-based-insurance – quotes based on driver behavior.
Away from the tech pimping, one high profile use case that was thrown into the mix was the Ottawa Sentators ice hockey team which is tapping into behavior-based, predictive analytics technologies in search of deeper understanding of its fan base, specifically their actions and thinking as individual consumers.
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IBM’s tech will provide visual analysis of fan interactions, track initiatives and campaigns to gauge success, and collect and store Senators Sports & Entertainment data. Insight Cloud Services can help find the signals within complex data sets, connect them and delivers insights that businesses can apply directly into their business applications and processes.
