IBM has announced the Watson Analytics, a service that uses technology and cognitive recognition of natural language. This service provides immediate access to visual analytic tools with an extraordinary capacity for analysis. Its will be available from November at IBM Cloud Marketplace and include a free version.
According to IDC analysts, only a small percentage of directors uses nowadays business analytics in the process of decision making. To counteract this trend, offering Watson Analytics was designed so anyone can benefit from advanced and predictive analytics, whatever your area of business.
Starting in November you can use the free version of this new service on both PCs and mobile devices, having access to a full range of analytical services in “self-service” mode in the IBM Softlayer platform, including easy access to data refining and date warehousing, so that users can access and process data, going further than a spreadsheet and having the capacity to act and interact with that data.
The IBM Watson Analytics enables users to interact through a natural language responding to critical issues to the business, such as: “what are the factors that increase my sales?”, “what benefits do more motivate employees” or even “With which customers we’re one step closer to closing a deal?”, by the user to hit what you want to know.
The tool then creates results that explain why and what is likely to occur, and this information is the terminology that is normally used in the business world, allowing professionals to interact with the results and post new questions.
So that is understandable to all users, the IBM Watson Analytics automates some phases of analysis as data preparation, predictive analytics and visualization. Thus, it can be used intuitively by professional sales, marketing, finance or human resources, for example.
One of the innovations promised by IBM over other solutions on the market is the fact that Watson Analytics provide a unified experience where the user can find the data they need, validate them and refine them, discover patterns that repeat themselves, predict results, create reports, and share them easily.
The user will also have the advantage of being guided by the platform in the sense that this leads to patterns and outcomes data that traditionally would not follow, which can lead to the placement of new questions resulting in a greater understanding of your business area.
In short, Watson Analytics assumes that the user has, a priori, the available data and the outline of the analysis and thus automates the steps of research and validation (which typically represent more than 50% of the work of a analytical project) helping the user get faster to the answers they seek.