IBM Adds Analytics to Business Processes
Data is at the root of good decision making, but how do you get the right data in the right place to make those decisions?
IBM (NYSE:IBM) is enhancing its software portfolio with new capabilities for analytics and business intelligence. The new software releases span the IBM Rational and Tivoli product groups.
“We want to help our client infuse analytics and intelligence into their infrastructure, to support better decision making and more integrated processes,” Nancy Pearson, vice president of market strategy at IBM WebSphere, told InternetNews.com. “We’re doing an integrated launch that takes the capabilities from Rational and Tivoli and puts them together against some key pain points that clients have.”
Those pain points include dealing with the complexity inherent in rapid rates of change. Enabling business agility is also a key goal of the new IBM push. One of the enhanced solutions is IBM Tivoli Analytics for Service Performance. Pearson explained that Tivoli Analytics enables enterprises to make better decisions throughout the business process. Additionally, the new IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager software release provides the ability to help forecast IT service levels. Pearson said that the new applications enable enterprises to automate the way they gain insight throughout the business process.
Randy Newell, program director at IBM Rational, noted that there are also enhancements being made in the area of application portfolio management.
“What we’re providing there is a view that can look across a combination of data, systems, networks, applications and processes to provide visibility into better decision making,” Newell said.
That visibility can help an organization understand the impact of a change initiative. Newell said the visibility can also deliver insight into which projects an organization should actually initiate.
“Most IT budgets typically fund maintenance activities, so how do you actually fund initiatives that are about innovation?” Newell said. “It’s about making hard decisions about which projects you’re not going to do, as well as identifying redundancies so you can free up funds for an innovation initiative.”
The new Rational Insight 1.1 release is one of the key enhanced products that provides the application development visibility.
“It allows you to look across the application lifecycle and bubble the information up to a dashboard to provide a view of project health,” Newell said.
Another enhanced project is the Rational Automation Framework version 3.0 release, which helps to enable collaborative integration between development and operations. Newell said the framework is an automated deployment tool that helps to provide business agility.
“If you can’t build agility into software delivery, then you haven’t built an agile business yet,” Newell said. “The hand-off from development to operation to speed up application to use is essentially where we reach from the world of development with Rational into the world of operations, which is the Tivoli world.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
