IBM isn't exactly renowned for its swiftness and flexibility, but it's making a big move into the “cloud” market with several products. Now it's revealing a new product, which it bills as a cloud service, though Big Blue's definition of the “cloud” is as vague as everyone else's. The service, dubbed Blue Insights, is being used internally as a powerful tool for business analysis and is now being rolled out to external customers as well.
Along with cloud technology, the company is also betting big on analytics and has been investing significant amounts of money in sector. It has recently paid $1.2 billion for analytics company SPSS and has also acquired RedPill which handles business analytics. But its this latest project that may prove one of the biggest moves in the sector. For now though, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, as it's officially known, is available to some 200,000 IBM employees in the sales or development departments.
Blue Insights pulls from a huge pool of data acquired by IBM over the years. It will aggregate information from some 100 different internal sources adding up to 1 petabyte (that's 1 million gigabytes) of data. The system will make it easier for employees to get access to the accumulated knowledge and use the info in real-world scenarios such as revenue forecasts, inventory levels, and the likes. Not only is IBM using the service internally, Blue Insights is built using IBM tools and technologies and run on an IBM System Z10 mainframe computer, the latest entry in the company's mainframe series.
IBM will now start offering the product to customers who will be able to deploy it in a private cloud. The service is scalable and can be adapted to the customers’ needs and capabilities. The company also wants the service to be more user-friendly so it will be accessible via a web browser-based dashboard. The Smart Analytics Cloud service offered to the customers will be powered by IBM's private cloud technology Cognos.