News & Views

August 20, 2009 from InfoWorld – “IBM’s recently announced plans to buy SPSS, maker of specialized analytics software, will result in a wave of further consolidation in the space, according to a new Forrester Research report. “IBM’s acquisition of SPSS marks an industry tipping point. In the advanced analytics segment, the deal is having the same impact that IBM’s Cognos buy had on the BI market,” Forrester said.

Advanced analytics software goes beyond the reports and dashboard capabilities of traditional BI (business intelligence) tools, helping users answer questions about future events and explore “what-if” scenarios, as well as pull together and analyze unstructured information from a variety of sources, the report said.

While Oracle, SAP, and other platform companies already have some of these capabilities in their portfolios, IBM’s SPSS bid has competitors scrambling for a response, according to Forrester…”

180 View – This article is interesting as it distinguished between business intelligence and analytics. If you are confused by all these terms, you’re not alone. Many vendors might call analytics as described above to be found in a forecasting tool. Others would include it in Business Intelligence and others in Corporate Performance Management. We define Business Intelligence as the transformation of data into information useful to make decisions so we would not distinguish between them. Marketing people are always coming up with new terms to take existing technology and rebranding it to make it sound like they have got something new.

Analyzing unstructured information is mentioned as part of analytics. We think that organizations have enough trouble making sense of structured data and have trouble imagining much business intelligence in unstructured data other than being easily able to find data based on keywords.

Finally we wonder how IBM will be able to incorporate SPSS into their product line. They already have 4 different (but integrated) products. It will be a challenge for IBM to pitch their 5 systems against one unified solution.