IBM Analytics Finds Its Home In The Cloud

Meanwhile, IBM customers say they welcome the analytics efforts

Shirley Lady, vice president of Business Informatics/Blue Health Intelligence for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said the two biggest issues in healthcare are controlling the costs of healthcare and maintaining the quality. Analytics can help on both counts, she said.

“We’re looking at various trends, such as utilization trends and prevalence of diseases,” Lady said. “We have an analytics data mart we call ADAM. Since we added analytics capabilities, we have added fraud functionality to the system to determine fraud aspects across the data.”

Melody Playford, a data mining architect and manager of enterprise solutions at the Dillard’s retail department store chain, said Dillard’s has several projects going that require analytics. “In this economy we have to look at closing under-performing stores,” she said. “So we looked at the performance of stores and also looked at our customers to see if they were shopping our others stores” to determine which stores could be closed with the least impact to the company and its customer base, she said.

People are analyzing historic data to be able to discern what to do in the future,” Goyal said.

Regarding the cloud scenario and analytics, Mills said, “We’re spanning the private cloud model where there is sensitive information” that IBM clients will want to keep private. “But there is potential for certain types of mixed scenarios where you can get a hybrid of public and private cloud information.”

“This is about unlocking the business value of information,” Goyal said about the analytics push. “If you’re going to treat information as a strategic asset, you need to do transformation projects. And to do this we needed to build a service line built on consulting,”

IBM launched an analytics consulting services line in April of 2009.

“Our clients understand they’re operating in a competitive environment where more than ever before, in addition to being fast, they have to be right. That requires something beyond the traditional notion of ‘sense and respond,'” said Frank Kern, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, at the launch of the line. “That drives the need to speed business decisions, understand the consequences of any decision and predict outcomes with more certainty—in short, moving to a new level of enterprise intelligence.”

In addition, IBM has been opening a series of IBM advanced analytics centers around the world to promote the use of analytics. Most recently IBM opened an analytics center in Washington, D.C.

IBM said:

“The new IBM Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., will draw on the expertise of more than 400 IBM professionals. These will include IBM researchers, experts in advanced software platforms, and consultants with deep industry knowledge in areas such as transportation, social services, public safety, customs and border management, revenue management, defense, logistics, health care and education. IBM also plans to add an additional 100 professionals, through retraining or new hiring, as demand grows.”

In addition to the Washington IBM Analytics Solution Center, IBM has opened five other analytics solution centers – in New York, Dallas, Berlin, Beijing and Tokyo.