IBM IOD 2012: IBM taps into CMO cloud clout

IBM has taken the wraps off of a new system aimed at helping CMOs harness the power of Big Data and analytics, which the company claims can analyse petabytes of information in a matter of minutes.

The IBM Digital Analytics Accelerator was announced at Big Blue's Information on Demand (IOD) conference this week in Las Vegas. Its arrival is timely given industry expert predictions around the future of Big Data and CMOs. Gartner believes IT spending on Big Data will swell from $27 billion this year to $55 billion in 2016. It has also predicted that the CMO will spend more on cloud services by 2017 than the CIO does currently.

PureData System for Analytics comprised of technology acquired through the purchase of Netezza, in addition to Unica lies at the heart of the new Accelerator and will help companies large and small to reduce customer churn by more effectively tapping into consumer sentiment, according to IBM.

Dr Phil Anno, chief scientist at energy provider ConocoPhillips, described how his firm is using IBM technology to better predict how arctic conditions will affect its drilling rigs and plan ice management operations accordingly saving money and increasing safety and productivity along the way.

"I'm sure we all have our own arctic.. [Where] assets are frozen out from innovation," Robert Le Blanc, senior vice president, middleware, at IBM's software group, told the assembled delegates before citing IDC research statistics showing just how much IT spend is dedicated to management and administration and how this presents a challenge in the Big Data world.

Back in 1996, just 29 per cent of tech budgets went on management overheads, but this is predicted to hit a whopping 68 per cent by 2013, Le Blanc exclaimed.

Direct response marketing firm Trident Marketing is one company hoping to benefit from the new solution. "Today's marketing professionals can see for the first time how individual consumers respond to campaigns," said Brandon Brown, the firm's CMO.

"Using IBM Big Data analytics to capture social media sentiment along with other relevant sales and supply chain data, we can help our clients move away from marketing to the masses and to marketing to masses of individuals in a personalised way. Without Big Data analytics, businesses will quickly lose out to competitors who get to know consumers better than they do."

IBM also used IOD as an opportunity to further outline what companies can expect from then newest faces in its PureData line-up, all of which fall under its Pure Systems umbrella. PureFlex and PureApplication were unveiled back in April and are now joined by PureData for Transactions, PureData for Analytics and PureData for Operational Analytics. The common themes are integration and reusable patterns of expertise, according to Inhi Cho Suh, vice president of product management and strategy at IBM.

"The emergence of Big Data, cloud, mobile... These trends are placing tremendous pressure on data systems that aren't truly equipped to handle them," she said.

"Quite honestly, organisations are spending a lot of time, money and resources trying to tune and optimise these systems for data requirements when in fact they really should be spending the time delivering new value for the business. So we have designed PureData essentially to handle these challenges and to deliver greater speed, efficiency and simplicity."