At this week’s IBM Insight conference in Las Vegas, IBM brought out the big guns to demonstrate their chops in the data analytics space. Insight is IBM’s conference dedicated to their solutions around data management and analytics. While there are some highlights, other areas are still evolving.
Setting the stage and connecting the dots
Things kicked off with IBM SVP of the Information and Analytics group, Bob Picciano, talking about the important interconnection between data, cloud and engagement.
- Data is the ‘What’
- Cloud is the ‘How’
- Engagement is the ‘Why’
Bob’s messaging paints a good picture of how the technology and data play a central role to the ever-changing IT organization. Engagement is the key to business relationships with customers. The CIO and IT organization need to fully understand how they engage with customers today and how that will evolve over time. Where are the opportunities? How can IT help create deeper relationships with customers? Data and cloud will play a leading role.
Relationships comes in all sizes
The way companies connect with their customers will vary greatly. To that point, there are some core themes here at Insight that mirrors the varied ways. Two of the key areas are social engagement and mobile. Ironically, traffic at the mobile booth seems anemic compared with the social engagement area, which saw constant traffic. In order for IBM to truly capitalize on the changing marketplace mobile will need to take a stronger position.
Getting social, but still a ways to go
Social media plays a central role in customer engagement for many organizations. The impressive thing is that the #IBMInsight hashtag was trending high on Twitter’s list for much of the day. As a data geek, one is always thinking about the value of those metrics. Trending at the top of Twitter is pretty impressive until you start to look at the finer details.
Running data through Tweet Binder provides a bit of clarity (report). Almost 50% of tweeters used Twitter clients for iPhone, iPad or Android speaking to the importance of mobile in social media. Looking a bit further, 61% of tweeters only tweeted a single tweet while 77.51% of tweeters tweeted only one or two times. That is not a good showing for attendees that should be well versed on the impact of social media and demonstrates there is still a ways to go.
Building an ecosystem
Walking the expansive show floor, it is apparent that IBM has worked to build their ecosystem. There are plenty of vendors that provide complementary products based on IBM technology along with plenty of consulting shops too. The interesting point here is that there are not many larger technology companies other than IBM exhibiting. This could be a side effect to IBM’s wide portfolio of services and solutions and a feeling of competitiveness among vendors. Unfortunately, it does not represent the varied needs of the average enterprise customer.
Summary in a nutshell
Putting it all together, IBM is making good waves to support the enterprise around data and analytics. They have made a good start, but still have a ways to go. The solutions still have a traditional IBM ‘feel’ and with rare exceptions span into the newer territories. There was a showing of IBM’s BlueMix platform, but not too much beyond the large enterprise perspective. Even the cloud area competed with the size of the infrastructure areas.
The reality is that turning a company the size of IBM is hard. In addition to size, there are cultures that need adjustment too. But it seems IBM has started to make good strides in some specific areas with ostensibly more to come. It will be interesting to see how IBM addresses solutions going forward and starts to truly pull the different components (data, cloud, engagement) together.