The big trend these days are in Big Data and how you can analyze large amounts of information in order to gain important insights, and from those insights be able to take the right action. This trend was a hot topic at the IBM Information On Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. IBM has a very strong position in this field, it’s hard to have missed how their computer system Watson challenged the top players of all time in Jeopardy recently, and won! Read more about Watson

Now IBM has taken the technology behind Watson and started to apply it in their different analytics products, where one specific area that is being targeted is healthcare. For this area IBM released a new product during IOD called IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare, which can for example be used as a tool for physicians to support them in their diagnosis of patients.

In April this year IBM merged two of their products, their search engine OmniFind and their product for analyzing large amounts of unstructured information, Content Analytics. The new product is called IBM Content analytics with Enterprise search and it too is based on much of the same technology that is used in Watson, more specifically it utilizes the same Natural Language Processing techniques. This means that it has the ability to understand text on a level just as sophisticated as that of Watson.

Content Analytics with enterprise search scales very well to many millions of documents. However, when there is a need for analyzing really enormous data sets, in the magnitude of petabytes or even exabytes, IBM has developed what they call their BigData platform. This platform mainly revolves around two products, InfoSphere Streams and InfoSphere BigInsights, and it builds on a foundation of open source software, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Lucene. InfoSphere Streams is used for real time analysis of information in motion. This helps you understand what’s happening right at this moment in your organization and supports you in taking appropriate action as things are happening. InfoSphere BigInsights on the other hand lets you analyze and draw insight from massive amounts of already existing data.

Studies have shown how organizations that fall short in this area are overtaken by those who understand how to use the power of analytics.

IBM has surely chosen an interesting path when merging Analytics with Findability.