IBM Adds More European Data Analytics Centres

IBM opened three new analytics centres in Europe, strengthening its offerings in the growing business analytics market.

The announcement follows just days after IBM’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza, a data warehousing and analytics appliance vendor. Last week, IBM also acquired OpenPages, another company with an analytics package designed to help companies identify and manage risk.

An IBM Growth Area

“Today business leaders need to move beyond intuition to a more predictive decision making capability and more certainty about business outcomes,” said Adam Klaber, general manager of IBM Global Business Services, in a statement.

The new centres, in Zurich, Budapest and Vienna, will focus on a variety of markets, including logistics, financial services, public safety, telecommunications, and transportation. All the centres are expected to open by the end of 2010.

Zurich will focus on financial services and public sector analytics and will be located on the campus of IBM’s current research laboratory there, in close proximity with IBM scientists specialising in business optimisation and data analytics.

The centre will initially work on risk and fraud analytics, financial analytics, brand and reputation analytics, marketing optimisation, enterprise business analytics strategy, and traffic management. It will also partner with local governments as part of the company’s Smarter Cities programme to improve city infrastructure.

Budapest will focus on green infrastructure and transportation, as well as to function as a career recruitment centre for students interested in business optimisation and operations research. Housed at ELTE University, the Centre for Applied Mathematics will focus on infrastructure, transportation, telecommunications, and logistics.

Vienna will focus on energy grids, supply chain optimisation, strategy management, planning optimisation and Smarter Cities.

IBM has seven other advanced analytics solution centres worldwide, two of which are also in Europe. Located in Berlin, London, Beijing, Tokyo, and in New York, Dallas and Washington in the US. The global network has more than 6,000 IBM consultants dedicated to data analytics.

“These new centres will allow our clients to collaborate with IBM on systems that see patterns in vast amounts of data, extract critical insights and deliver a new level of enterprise intelligence,” said Klaber.

IBM predicts it will report $16 billion in business analytics and optimisation revenue by 2015. While the number sounds lofty, IBM has been throwing a lot of money at its analytics business over the past four years to meet that goal.

In addition to investing $12 billion and opening up analytics centres worldwide, the company has completed 23 analytics-related acquisitions, including Web analytics software and services provider Coremetrics, business intelligence software provider Cognos, statistical software giant SPSS, and the most recent Netezza.

The company is already seeing growth in the area as its software and service analytics revenue grew 14 percent in the second quarter of this year.

Oracle is the biggest competitor in this market but the company has not invested in the same kind of spending spree in the analytics sector as IBM.