IBM launches Insight Cloud Services an analytics platform

by Abhinav Mohapatra

IBM has launched a new industry analytics solutions platform named Insight Cloud Services that promises to deliver data and data-science based insights.

The insights will be based on combining internal data with external data about people, events, geo-spatial factors, and businesses from sources such as Twitter and The Weather Company.

The service hopes to change critical business outcomes across industries such as retail, insurance, and media & entertainment.

Insight Cloud Services are built from a combination of technologies and resources from Analytics portfolio, cloud infrastructure – SoftLayer, technologies from IBM’s partnerships with The Weather Company and Twitter, and a wide variety of Open Source software and Open Data sources. The initial services will be enhanced over time as more data sources are added and data scientists and engineers help address new and emerging client challenges.

“Insight Cloud Services (will) help clients create actionable insights from the noisy reality of the world,” said Joel Cawley, GM, Information and Insights as a Service, IBM. “IBM is applying data science expertise and advanced analytics to exploit external data, find and connect the signals in that data to create new insights, and then deliver these insights embedded in clients’ business processes,” he added.

Cloud services are accessed in a variety of offerings, including:

  • Insight APIs for Developers: Four new APIs that developers can access from IBM Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, to incorporate historical and forecast weather data from The Weather Company into web and mobile apps; and two APIs that allow developers to incorporate Twitter content –that is enriched with sentiment insights from IBM –from Decahose or PowerTrack streams into apps.
  • Insight Data Packages for Weather: New bundled data sets from IBM and The Weather Company customized for key industries and available on the IBM Cloud. Built on a variety of weather data feeds that provide everything from real-time alerts for severe weather disasters to seasonal forecasts, the data packages can help insurers use weather data to alert policyholders ahead of hail storms that may cause property damage, help utilities forecast demand and identify likely service outages, help local governments to develop detailed emergency planning in advance of severe weather, and enable many industries such as retail to use data to help optimize their operations, reduce costs and uncover revenue opportunities ahead of changes in weather.
  • Industry Analytics Solutions: A set of pre-built solutions that leverage IBM Insight Cloud Services cognitive techniques to help enable business users to tackle very specific industry challenges. This expands on a set of industry solutions IBM introduced in May 2015 that provide businesses with the ability to generate new types of insights based on customer behavior. IBM is continuing to launch these new solutions to deliver expanded insights for merchandising, demand planning and market profiling by combining data from multiple external sources, such as Twitter, The Weather Company and others.