IBM recently announced new business analytics offerings designed to help clients better manage and control their unstructured and structured data in a unified manner, while providing valuable insight into their content across the enterprise. The volume of unstructured data found on websites and social networking sites, in digital files, portals, databases and customer comments, is increasing exponentially. Typically, organizations manage this unstructured information separately from their structured data found in applications and databases. By compiling and analyzing both structured and unstructured information, organizations can garner business insights from unlimited volumes of text from emails, documents, blogs, wikis and websites and change the way they do business.
IBM's new Cognos Content Analytics offering allows organizations to discover, refine and deliver new insights by analyzing unstructured enterprise content alongside structured data. Through focused navigation, users can identify trends and patterns and proactively detect anomalies for improved decision making. The analytic offering allows business users to find and gain insight from virtually any type of content-in any format-by extracting, sorting, filtering and categorizing key information and making the content relevant so organizations can more effectively make market-driven business decisions.
"Unstructured content search and analysis involves three layers which are indexing, annotating, and visualizing," Ken Bisconti, vice president of products and strategy for IBM Enterprise Content Management, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The first layer, indexing, is accomplished by many text search crawlers and does not actually provide context-related insight. The higher levels of annotating and visualizing are what the Cognos Content Analytics offering brings to the market. With this new software, companies can extract key business insight from their unstructured content, add taxonomies to this content, and visualize trends, anomalies, or events that can help them act to optimize their business."
IBM plans to expand the IBM Cognos Content Analytics family to include new solutions targeted at specific industries and business requirements. One solution currently being previewed centers around insight into consumer sentiment. This solution will be designed to help packaged goods companies gain a better understanding of what the market is saying about their brands on the "cloud" in blogs, wikis and media websites.
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