Today, IBM trotted out the first of these specialized systems, which it calls the Smart Analytics System. It also provided a technology preview of an add-on appliance for its System z mainframes, called the Smart Analytics Optimizer, that Big Blue said will substantially speed up queries on those mainframes, thereby not severely impacting the performance of the applications and batch jobs that run on mainframes.
That the Smart Analytics machinery was previewed today, at the same time that IBM announced its $1.2bn acquisition of predictive analytics software maker SPSS, was a coincidence. But IBM needed the predictive analytics software created by SPSS to round out its BAO boxes, which had real-time information culled from data warehouses but which will now be able to predict business – presumably about as well as we now predict the weather or deals like IBM taking over SPSS, which was on no one’s radar.
But forget those cynical thoughts for now.
IBM is excited about the BAO opportunity and market that it is largely defining by putting ERP, CRM, SCM, and other transaction-processing systems on one side of the data center and putting data marts, data warehousing, and analytics on the other.
The Smarter Planet tumblelog is an outgrowth of IBM’s strategic initiative to help a world of smart systems emerge.
