IBM is going freemium with a new cloud-computing analytics tool it unveiled on Tuesday. Dubbed Watson Analytics, the tool isn't just riding on the fame of the supercomputer that won in Jeopardy. It actually uses Watson technologies to support natural language queries, as in, "Watson, what sector was most profitable for my business in the last three months?"
The move just comes after Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff teased a new cloud-based analytics product on Twitter, which the company plans to unveil next month. While IBM is the biggest enterprise IT company of its sort, there are a number of smaller players, such as DataPRM, ThoughtSpot and UpShot Data, offering natural language queries to help business owners understand big data without having to acquire the skills of data scientists and developers.
"We know that they (clients) want to infuse analytics and better informed decisions in every part of their business," says (video) Alistair Rennie, IBM's general manager of business analytics. "But we also know that the current generation of tools they have get locked up in IT or in the domain of data scientists. We just want to break that wide open and change the game by allowing every user in every business to have credible and powerful analytics at their fingertips."
Using the free version, business users from CEOs to secretaries can upload their data sets via .CSV files or import them from another data source, such as Salesforce.com or Google Drive, and Watson Analytics takes over to clean up the data, perform basic and predictive analysis and create simple visualizations that business users can easily understand. The tool can also help users who don't know where to start with analytics by offering story templates for other relevant data.
Eric Sall, IBM vice president of worldwide marketing for business analytics, introduced the invitational beta version of Watson Analytics on Tuesday. Sall said the template visualizations are useful for business users who lack training in analytics. Once they realize they like the freemium tool, it won't be long for users to upgrade to the paid version, which essentially offers the same features but with more advanced tools and bigger storage. Sall admits IBM is new to going freemium but says it is an essential part of Big Blue's overall cloud strategy to adopt to the changes in the computing world.
Watson Analytics runs on the Softlayer platform which IBM purchased in 2013. Aside from business users, the company is also targeting developers by making the new tool available through its Bluemix Platform, which will allow developers to integrate Watson Analytics into third-party applications.
IBM hopes to launch Watson Analytics by the end of November.
