IBM Helps Companies Tackle Big Data Challenges

At IBM Information On Demand & Business Analytics Forum 2012, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled Monday a new digital marketing system and big data software.

It is designed to help organizations gain actionable insights on the broadest range of data to transform the way they do business with customers, employees and partners.

According to IBM, the new offerings tackle the most pressing big data challenges facing organizations today — accessing and gaining intelligence into an enormous stream of data generated from mobile, social and digital networks.

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The offerings, part of IBM’s big data platform, can be up and running in hours, analyze petabytes of industry specific and social media data in sub-second response times, and continuously analyze geospatial, financial services and telecommunications data in motion, says the company.

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Quoting market research firm Gartner, IBM says that worldwide big data IT spending will grow from $27 billion in 2012 to $55 billion in 2016.

Enterprises across all industries are under increasing pressure to extract new insights from an explosion of available data. In communications, six billion global mobile phone subscribers are demanding unique and personalized offerings that match their individual lifestyles.

In financial services, Wall Street firms generate five new research documents every minute. In addition, nearly $100 billion in total sales are missed each year because retailers don’t have the right products in stock to meet customer demand, according to IBM.

A recent global survey by the University of Oxford and IBM of 1,144 business and IT professionals from 95 countries and 26 industries shows 63 percent of respondents are gaining a competitive advantage by using big data and analytics for their organizations. This is a 70 percent increase from the 37 percent who cited a competitive advantage in a 2010 IBM study.