December 15, 2009
You can download two business analytics and optimization studies and find how, driven by intelligence rather than intuition, organizations can gain speed, agility and timing to execute winning maneuvers.
In our first study, “Business Analytics and Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise,” business leaders told us they frequently lacked information needed to make critical decisions. One-half said they didn’t have access to information required to do their jobs, or the ability to close information gaps to support business objectives.
In our second study, “Breaking Away with Business Analytics and Optimization: Enterprise Operations Meet New Intelligence,” we surveyed business leaders worldwide about their use of information and the application of business intelligence. We found that twice as many top performing companies as lower performers display three basic characteristics that support enterprise intelligence:
- Aware. Able to gather and use information from inside and outside the enterprise.
- Precise. Able to sort through and extract the most relevant aspects of information.
- Linked. Able to align information with business objectives across functions.
Further, those with breakaway capabilities exhibited three additional differentiating characteristics:
- Challenging. Able to disrupt the status quo in their organization, creating an environment more receptive to innovation, and bolder in its application of new insights and intelligence.
- Anticipating. Able to predict and prepare in advance of anticipated events by evaluating business outcomes and trade-offs proactively to optimize their organizations in pursuit of new objectives.
- Empowering. Able to give employees authority to use information, make decisions and act on their insights to drive change.
December 15, 2009
Watch IBM Global Business Services: The Video Studio clips, Breakaway Breakout Dialog, Dec. 9 from IBM Global Business Services: The Video Studio on Livestream
Top-performing companies were 15 times more likely to apply analytics to strategic decisions than their underperforming peers, according to a new IBM study of the role information-based decision making is playing in successful business strategies during the current economic cycle.
Overall, IBM also found that relatively few organizations have supported business analytics and optimization at this level. IBM’s consultants have determined a number of key areas where organizations looking to position themselves to break away from the competition need to focus:
- Advanced Toolsets – including predictive analytics, information visualization and content management tools.
- Actionable Information – identifying actionable and relevant insights from the structured and unstructured information residing in and outside their enterprise.
- Putting Data to Use – connecting information to business objectives and across business functions.
- Driving business change – focusing on the people and process change, governance and organizational alignment needed to implement new analytics projects.
IBM announced the world’s largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics, which will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. The cloud will launch initially with more than a petabyte of data, the equivalent of more than 300 billion ATM transactions.
IBM also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, for clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same Cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally.
Fordham University and IBM are collaborating on a new business analytics curriculum to help prepare college students for careers in key industries such as energy and utilities, healthcare, education, transportation and public service that are expected to benefit from $1.8 trillion in global stimulus investments.
December 15, 2009
Getting started with IBM Data Studio couldn’t be easier. Read this free ebook to:
- Find out what IBM Data Studio can do for you
- Learn everyday data management tasks
- Back up and recover DB2 databases
- Write and debug SQL stored procedures and routines
- Convert existing SQL or procedures to Web services
- Learn more about integrated data management
- Practice using hands-on exercises
December 14, 2009
Retailers have large repositories of point-of-sales transactions and data derived from those transactions, and their primary use of that data has been in query/reporting of past sales. Hectic Mondays with category and operational managers trying to access weekend sales data to plan for their upcoming week and weekend are legend in the industry.
Two of the world’s largest mass merchandisers are beginning to look forward instead of backwards to plan their sales, using the analytics in InfoSphere Warehouse to create a truly dynamic warehousing environment.
Target Stores led the way in enabling buyers to forecast future sales rather than just examine reports of past sales. The same data that buyers have for years examined to find hints about customer preferences is now being used by InfoSphere Warehouse to automatically forecast trends and make suggestions on how stores should be stocked. The system is so simple that the buyers don’t realize they’re doing data mining, and believe they are still simply pulling reports. These reports, however, are about the future instead of the past.
Speakers:
Robert J. Abate, CBIP, CDMP
Richard Hale, Business Intelligence Executive, IBM Worldwide
REGISTER HERE!
December 4, 2009
This IBM Redbooks publication (still in draft) positions WebSphere Commerce V7 in today’s marketplace and discusses its enhanced features to enable business users to achieve their vision for Precision Marketing.
This publication will help you to tailor and configure marketing tools in IBM Management Center to create and manage various promotion campaigns as needed by your business. It provides several business scenarios which can be implemented through simple customizations. Each scenario addresses a unique requirement which can be mapped with similar business scenarios.
December 4, 2009
Batch processing is a fundamental part of the workloads that run on the mainframe. A large portion of the workload on IBM z/OS systems is processed in batch mode. This IBM Redbooks publication specifically addresses batch processing in detail.
Many different technologies are available in a batch environment on z/OS systems. This book demonstrates these technologies and shows how the z/OS system offers a sophisticated environment for batch. In this practical book, we discuss a variety of themes that are of importance for batch workloads on z/OS systems and offer examples that you can try on your own system.
December 4, 2009
The IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale product provides a powerful, elastic, high-performance, and scalable in-memory data grid. This paper (in draft right now) will help IT architects understand how this data grid can be used to enhance application performance and scalability. It introduces the concepts behind eXtreme Scale and shows how it addresses the challenges of scalability and throughput found in today’s business applications.
One quote from the updated draft:
WebSphere eXtreme Scale has been proven to run smoothly with more than 1500 Java virtual machines (JVMs) with 2Gb heap participating in a data grid managing almost 2 terrabyte of data. The scale out was only limited by available hardware.
November 3, 2009
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management monitors and helps manage energy usage of IT and facility resources for efficient data center operations
- Gain insight into energy and thermal information for IT equipment, data center infrastructure and facilities equipment and enable the optimization of the monitored environment from a centralized point of control
- Store real-time, historic, and trending energy and thermal metrics in a common repository to aid in decision making and for use by other IBM service management solutions
- Use enhanced reporting capabilities to estimate the potential power and cost savings of proposed energy optimization recommendations
- Leverage enhanced workspaces, views, situations, and reports for third party power meters
- Leverage integration with Tivoli Business Service Manager to understand the business service impact of energy optimization decisions
- Pull energy usage information into Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to enable energy-related consumption and chargeback capabilities
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management monitors and helps manage energy usage of IT and facility resources for efficient data center operations. Download this trial version today!
