IBM announced new software that combines sophisticated information management and analytics with social networking and collaboration capabilities for mobile workforces. The company's newly released Cognos 10 integrates collaboration with Lotus Connections software and business analytics with Cognos.
"Our new Cognos 10 offering delivers social collaboration capabilities, mobile capabilities, and a brand new user experience to really elevate the whole business intelligence interaction across a broader set of business users," Bernie Spang, director of marketing at IBM, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The new solution combines social collaboration and analytics for business users to gain real-time intelligence in a single interface, online or through mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone and BlackBerry.
In addition, new DB2 software helps businesses combine data - from past, present and future. DB2 10 software provides business users with an integrated view of historical information with real-time updates to give users a complete picture of their business. "We call it 'time travel query capability' - it adds temporal data capabilities directly in the database system," says Spang. "This greatly simplifies the development and maintenance of applications that need to deal with data that may exist in different timeframes. This has been an interesting problem for clients the shift of time for auditing purposes, for looking in the past."
IBM also unveiled new DB2 database software for System z, which provides up to 40% performance improvements, while also providing 10 times more scalability to manage future growth, IBM says.
IBM is also releasing a new version of InfoSphere Information Server, which includes new pop-up menus integrate data quality and lineage information directly into business applications, so users can monitor the quality of their data before they use it. In addition, new quality capabilities improve how data is standardized and combined, making it easier to integrate diverse sources of information into a single view. Having access to advanced analytics and collaboration capabilities "isn't any good unless you trust the data you're analyzing," Spang says. "The whole focus on establishing trusted information is where our InfoSphere portfolio comes into play. InfoSphere information server that again is focused on enhancing the collaborative nature on developing, monitoring and governing information integration projects. How information gets integrated and cleansed and delivered into the analytic system as trusted information."
IBM also announced a technology preview of its InfoSphere Big Insights portfolio running on IBM's commercial development and test cloud and launching the beta program for the same software in on-premise deployments. Invented by IBM researchers and powered by Apache Hadoop, an open source technology designed for analysis of big volumes of data, Big Insights helps organizations analyze and visualize petabyte sized quantities structured and unstructured data.
IBM says it has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytic-related acquisitions over the past five years.
For more information about Cognos 10, go here.