At the IBM Information On Demand & Business Analytics Forum (#IBMIOD), IBM today announced three new data discovery and visualization software capabilities. These new solutions will help line of business employees engage, experience and gain actionable insights from data and help them drive insights from data in a matter of minutes. 

IBM is introducing new data discovery software that enables business users to visually interact with and apply advanced analytics to their data without any specialized skills to get deeper insights about their business. The new software will help close the analytics skills gap that makes current data discovery tools inaccessible for the everyday business user and make it possible to go from raw information to answers hidden deep within structured and unstructured information in minutes. 

The current data discovery solutions in the market today can still be challenging for everyday business users to leverage and do not provide deep, meaningful insights that are immediatly actionable. Most of these solutions still require data modeling and do not have any built-in predictive analytics. In addition, the current offerings leave interpretation of the visualizations to the user with a “query” paradigm, which forces the question to be asked in the language of analytics to uncover a single insight. 

Survey Tree Map generated through IBM's new cloud analytics offeringProject Neo was created in IBM Labs to help users better engage with their data. Rather than forcing business users to learn analytics, without any specialized skills or knowledge, they can apply the Project Neo software to raw data sets. The software uses a simplistic interface, interactive visualizations and advanced analytics to automatically surface hidden insights and patterns and guide the business users to answers deep with in their data, and can be hosted on the cloud. Project Neo will be available as a Beta program in early 2014. 

For example, a marketing manager can ask a question in plain English input raw data into the new software and immediately discover through visualizations and guided analytics what is causing sales to fall in a particular quarter. The manager can then quickly share his findings with employees asking for additional input and the team will immediately see the alert to contribute suggestions via their laptops or mobile devices. Additional technological advancements, such as IBM’s Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) are driving highly flexible and interactive visualizations that empower users from human resources, marketing and sales departments to leverage analytical graphics on any of their devices to find answers in ever increasing amounts and varieties of data.

Right-Time Decision Making 
The second capability, IBM Concert on Cloud, offers business users who are inundated with information but often lack contextual insight the collaborative tools to make the best decisions. IBM Concert on Cloud (insert hyperlink here) is a mobile-ready social analytics platform that helps organizations make better decisions through collaboration. The real-time cloud analytics platform enables users to easily view, understand and interact with specific performance insights and more easily determine when they need to take action. Remote employees can contribute and update data immediately via their mobile devices, improving accuracy and providing real time planning and forecasting.

IBM Concert on Cloud is one of the 100-plus IBM software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that will infuse analytics into line of business supported by SoftLayer infrastructure in the near future. SoftLayer is fast becoming the foundation of IBM’s cloud portfolio adding more than 1,000 new clients since IBM’s $2 billion acquisition in July. 

Extensible Visualization: Always the Right Visualization
Beyond Project Neo, IBM continues to provide rich and innovative visualization capabilities to business analyst and line of business users across the Cognos Business Intelligence portfolio. New extensible visualization capabilities are being introduced to unleash report authors and business users from a static library of charts. No longer are users locked into only the in-product visualization options. Now users can easily augment reports, both general and active reports, with a growing collection of visualizations to meet data and insight requirements. With the new IBM Cognos Visualization Customizer, visualizations can be edited, including changing fonts, colors or even icons to meet the most specific requirements.

Through the new Visualization Marketplace on IBM Analytics Zone, users can chose from over 30 visualization options ranging from radar charts to heatmaps and area charts. New visualization options will be consistently added to the Marketplace.
Watch the livestream from the Forum below: (The event takes place November 3-7, 2013):