SCIENCE

IBM announced a broad portfolio of software that uses analytics to provide greater visibility and integration between the applications that run on an IT infrastructure and key business processes. By applying analytics expertise to the data center in this way, the new software will enable clients to make more intelligent, automated business decisions and help them embrace cloud computing.

The software enhances business decision management, predictive business service management and integration. In addition, IBM is debuting new products to help organizations drive smarter application development and deployment.

With IBM software, Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago, a large stock exchange in Chile, is now able to process high-volume trading in microseconds, increasing their transaction capacity by 900 percent. By improving the speed that its system operates and applying analytics, the company significantly improved order routing, giving its traders visibility into business activity in real time.

The Chilean stock exchange system can do all the detective work of analyzing current and past transactions and market information, learning and adapting to market trends and connecting its traders to business information in real time. Ultra-fast throughput in combination with analytics now allows traders to make more accurate, predictive decisions. As a result, the company is more competitive in the financial services industry.

The shift to IT analytics is transforming decision-making for IT and business operations.  By using predictive analytics, which harness the vast quantities of data a business creates, organizations can respond more quickly and accurately to customer needs, better anticipate and prevent outages and deliver fact-driven metrics to drive better business outcomes. Analytics can also make improvements across the software development and delivery lifecycle, further reducing cost, risk and time to market.

"Predictive analytics can tame IT infrastructure in much the same way it's taming big data," said Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president, middleware software. "This new software adds intelligence to IT and business processes by basically creating a road map showing the fastest connection between a business and its IT infrastructure. It automatically avoids potholes to ensure the best outcome, which is critical as the market continues to embrace cloud computing."

Customers Demand Greater Insight and Visibility into IT Operations and Infrastructure

A recent Tech CEO Council Report highlighted that Fortune 500 companies waste $480 billion every year on inefficient business processes(1), while an IBM study of more than 3,000 CIOs showed more than 80 percent of respondents plan to lead projects to simplify internal processes.(2) In today's rapidly changing economic environment, clients are struggling to integrate thousands of siloed global applications, while aligning them to business operations. To remain competitive, they must be able to analyze and adapt their business processes quickly, efficiently and without disruption.

This is also the case in the data center, where complex IT environments are generating enormous amounts of performance data that, when analyzed, can dramatically improve business decision-making. According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study of 225 global business leaders, three out of four respondents confirmed that predictive information can drive better decision making.(3)

While many IT departments run their servers, software and networks by relying on the instinct and intuition of their IT professionals to react to disruptions in service, it is not possible for staff to review and visualize all relationships and performance issues that exist across thousands of service and infrastructure metrics.  As organizations move to cloud computing, a smarter infrastructure which ensures that IT processes are analyzed, automated and integrated is key to fulfilling orders, managing client and partner relationships, resource planning and more.

Applying Predictive Analytics to Improves Business Processes

The new software creates a single view for an organization to gain visibility into all of its physical and digital assets and services, including business processes:  

• Decision Management automates business decisions, ensuring an organization is able to make the right decision at the right time.  IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management enables business users to capture the decision logic of experts and apply it to accurately detect and react in real time to critical situations. This also helps eliminate delays in hand-offs between business experts and IT staff.
• Predictive Business Service Management reduces service disruptions and prevents impending issues before they become a problem in the IT and network infrastructure. By applying analytics to gain greater visibility, control and automation in their data centers, organizations will be able to better manage the health of their businesses. IBM Tivoli Analytics for Service Performance, along with a new version of Tivoli Business Service Management is being previewed as part of today's announcements.
• Connectivity and Integration provides greater insight into existing assets, freeing up capital to invest in new growth opportunities.  By easily and securely bringing together an organization's disparate data sources and applications, this technology ensures users can access and incorporate vital information regardless of platform, device or data format. As a result, it becomes easier to apply analytics toward business initiatives. Enhanced versions of IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere MQ allow users to more effectively integrate and disseminate secure information across business processes.  

New Products Enable Smarter Application Development and Deployment

Among the new products IBM is announcing are several that make multi-platform application delivery more efficient and less costly.  

• Collaborative Development and Operations accelerates software delivery and reduces down time by automating application deployment.  The new offering also streamlines development and operations that are often the bottleneck to customer delivery.  IBM Rational Automation Framework includes newly simplified pricing and packaging that minimize the cost of entry.
• Multi-platform Development boosts developer productivity and cuts application maintenance costs by leveraging common tooling for building multi-platform applications for System z, Power Systems and distributed environments. IBM Rational Developer Family features new automated quality reporting tools enabling developers to detect problems earlier. This lowers overall development cost, and gives managers real time access to data to help them make smarter decisions.
• Cloud and Virtualization enables organizations to respond rapidly to changing business needs and deliver new services quickly, securely and cost-effectively. By delivering pre-configured, integrated patterns, new enhancements from IBM Workload Deployer can help users save time and resources when working in a private cloud environment.