In The Next Version

Today at IBM's year end Analyst Connect event, a common theme surfaced in every talk... analytics.
IBM clearly sees analytics as the special ingredient to be mixed into every solution, be it e-commerce, social business/collaboration, health care, financial services and the list goes on.

Perhaps their next ad campaign can be, IBM, It's Better Measured.




IBM does not approach this without a lot of data backing them up. In 2011 they conducted a study (w/ 3,018 companies) that indicated Business Intelligence and Analytics were the top items CIOs believe will help them increase competitiveness over the next 3 to 5 years.



In 2011 IBM acquired Algorithmics, i2 and Q1 Labs all of which helped to fill out their impressive portfolio of BI tools that includes Cognos, Unica, Coremetrics, OpenPages, Clarity Systems and SPSS.




So what does this mean for collaboration/social networking?
Well, you're going to be seeing more analytics features added to/integrated with IBM Connections, leading to things like:

• Sentiment analysis that will help community managers get better insights into their customer's needs
• Data about the interactions in social networks that will help surface the right people and content required for more informed decision making
• Managers being able to get a better sense of how their teams are doing in real-time, instead of waiting for end-of-year reviews

So buckle up, in 2012 you're going to be hearing a lot about crunching numbers.

Woo Hoo! I made it through this whole post without writing Big Data. Doh!