IBM Analytics Products Have a Strong Focus
There’s a lot to the analytics software topic, so it helps to understand it using tools like IBM’s analytics products model
This week, I’ll explore analytics thorough the lens of specific IBM analytics products. Last week, I got started on analytics with a discussion of the main ideas and market size followed by a general discussion of products, solutions and services. There’s a lot to the analytics software topic, so it helps to understand it using tools like IBM’s model that I discussed last week.
IBM’s Analytics Product Model
IBM has a useful model that applies to its different analytics products that will help to frame my product discussion. It has five areas of focus.
- Modernize: products that make data ready for AI, hybrid cloud or both
- Collect: products that make data simple and accessible, especially with AI and cloud support
- Organize: products used to create a business-ready analytics foundation
- Analyze: products that help scale AI everywhere with trust and transparency
- Infuse: products that help operationalize AI throughout the business
It makes sense, right? Let’s use these focus areas and start to explore specific products for modernize and collect—the first two categories.
IBM Modernize Products for Analytics
Let’s discuss two products in this category that focus on modernization. With IBM Cloud Pak® for Data, the main idea is to collect, organize and analyze data. This IBM product is an integrated data and AI platform that modernizes how organizations collect, organize and analyze data with the goal to permeate AI throughout their organizations. The product’s scope includes data management, DataOps, governance, business analytics and automated AI. IBM Cloud Pak for Data is important because it helps save money by eliminating the need for costly point solutions. Just as important, it provides the information architecture needed to implement AI successfully.
IBM Cloud Pak for Data System is an all-in-one hybrid cloud platform. Think of it as a cloud in a box. The product provides a preconfigured, governed and security-rich high-performance environment that is installed on-premise. The system is built on the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform and designed to collect, organize and analyze data to impart AI throughout a business. The system combines storage, compute, networking and software into plug-and-play nodes. This lets organizations expand the system’s footprint to meet business needs.
Analytics Products That Collect Data
There are nine IBM products that focus on data collection. IBM Db2® on Cloud is a fully managed SQL cloud database that offers a dedicated operations team, point-in-time recovery and high availability disaster recovery (HA/DR) technology. It has multizone region support and independent scaling to protect enterprise applications. Another cloud offering is IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud, which, like the previous product, is a fully managed offering. It’s an elastic cloud data warehouse that provides independent scaling of storage and compute. Its dashboard interface makes it easy to see and manage data.
IBM Db2 Big SQL is an enterprise-grade, hybrid ANSI-compliant SQL-on-Hadoop engine that delivers massively parallel processing and advanced data query. Db2 Big SQL offers a single database connection for different sources such as Hadoop HDFS and WebHDFS, RDMS, NoSQL databases and object stores. What are its main benefits? It provides low latency, high performance, security, SQL compatibility and federation capabilities to do ad hoc and complex queries. IBM Db2 Database is an AI-infused, cost-effective data management system with proven performance and scalability. The product is available both on-premise and on the cloud. What should I use it for? Use the product’s advanced data management and analytics capabilities for transactional and warehousing workloads. IBM Db2 Event Store is a memory-optimized database designed to rapidly absorb and analyze streamed data for event-driven applications. Additionally, IBM Watson® Studio is built into IBM Db2 Event Store, providing an integrated, collaborative development experience with support for creating machine learning models.
IBM Db2 Warehouse is a software-defined data warehouse for private and virtual clouds that’s optimized for rapid and flexible deployment. What’s the main idea behind the product? It’s an AI-ready data warehouse for operational analytics. It provides a flexible and simple way to support client-managed containers. It also supports easy portability across platforms. It also has built-in machine learning, SMP and MPP processing, as well as in-database analytics combined with IBM BLU Acceleration®. IBM Integrated Analytics System is a unified hybrid data management analytics product that provides massively parallel processing. It consists of a high performance hardware platform and optimized database query engine software. This hardware and software works together to support a variety of data analysis and business-reporting capabilities. This is a high performance analytics appliance with seamless cloud integration that comes with IBM Watson Studio embedded for machine learning.
IBM Informix® is designed to be fast and flexible with the ability to seamlessly integrate SQL, NoSQL/JSON, and time series and spatial data. Informix is a favored solution for a wide range of environments, from enterprise data warehouses to individual application development. Informix has a small footprint and self-managing capabilities that make it well suited for embedded data management solutions. IBM Data Management Platform for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced is a document store database that is now part of an integrated data management environment from IBM. The product leverages MongoDB, “a general purpose, document-based, distributed database built for modern application developers and for the cloud era.”
Next Week
Next week, I’ll continue to explore specific IBM analytics products. The focus will be products that support organize, analyze and infuse capabilities.