IBM Sends Big Data to the Front Lines

IBM is throwing a “Big Data Event” on April 30, and the effort to promote it is already in full force. The company has taken a special interest in big data over the last couple of years, summarizing their efforts in a video on next week’s event.

In the video, IBM sees big data as a resource like water and minerals. “Like other natural resources, big data needs to be successfully mined, refined, and delivered in order to create value.” Creating that value through IBM’s processes is a three-step affair involving exploration, performance, and consumability. Those three steps line up with the analogous ‘mining, refining, and delivering’ mentioned in the video.

Connecting the concept of data collection to resource mining is only natural—more and more, enterprises need to employ big data processing and analytics or risk irrelevancy. Exploration, or mining, involves picking out which data institutions need to collect and sifting out the noisy and unnecessary information. Once collected, IBM noted that the time to process and analyze that information has gone from days to minutes in the last few years. After analysis, the data can be visualized. All of this is generally done through a few different big data vendors, some focusing on storage and processing, others centering on visualization, etc.

While the video, like most promotional videos, speaks somewhat in platitudes, they also get into the various big data problems they have worked out. For example, Big Blue is making headway regarding several big data use cases, especially with regard to analytics, from healthcare and government management to tracking social sentiment in fashion and at major tennis tournaments.

IBM is the second major company in as many months to promote what they consider a major big data announcement, following up on HP’s Moonshot launch last month. Indeed, it is possible IBM is announcing a renewed and overarching big data initiative similar to that of HP’s.

What is most intriguing is determining what exactly IBM is slated to announce next week. It’s possible that they’re simply reaffirming the work they’re doing in the big data space, although that seems too run-of-the-mill for such an event. Per the video, their goal is to “bring together an interlocking system of capabilities—delivering remarkable insights and better results at the speed of business.” This points toward connecting their current big data capabilities into one marketable, likely real time, platform.

Either way, the video sets the stage for next week’s IBM big data announcement.

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