Editor’s Note: The ecosystem of big data analytics, and its intersection with mobile networks and cloud computing has increasing relevance to wireless in areas that include service assurance, customer experience management, mobile marketing, location-based services and more. Here is a look at the week’s big data analytics news.Â
—IBM made what it called its “biggest announcement in a decade” with the launch of its Watson Analytics, which organizes and analyzes data based on natural language processing and puts big data into familiar terms for the purposes of interactions and being understood by business professionals, not just data scientists. The first version will be a “freemium” offering designed to be run on mobile devices and desktop computers.
“Most analytic offerings assume users have data ready for analysis, a clear idea of the type of analysis needed, and the skills and time to build a model for analysis,” said IBM in a statement on the launch. “However, most business users have none of these things. Finding and validating data can represent 50 percent or more of the time in an analysis project. Business users often then struggle with figuring out what analysis would be relevant and how to tell the story in a report or diagram. Watson Analytics automates these steps to accelerate users’ ability to get to the answers they’re seeking, quickly and on their own.”
IBM said that the solution automates big data processing steps such as data preparation, predictive analysis and visual storytelling so that it is usable by business professionals at various levels rather than requiring a data science background to understand. IBM describes Watson as  “[speaking] the language of business and people by enabling someone to simply type in what they would like to see; Watson Analytics produces results that explain why things happened and what’s likely to happen, all in familiar business terms.”
—A new survey of IT professionals in healthcare shows that analytics is their top priority for investment. Health Catalyst surveyed members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), who are CIOs or similarly senior IT executives. Among the respondents, 54% said analytics was their highest IT priority, followed by investments in population health initiatives ranking second most-important at 42%. More than 90% of respondents said that analytics would be extremely or very important to their organization within the next one to three years.
Those healthcare IT execs cited a variety of drivers for the adoption of analytics, with population health management ranking first at 84%, followed by quality improvement at 79%, accountable care (68%) and the need for cost reductions (63%).
—Ricoh Americas has added two new offerings from Kofax to its portfolio for information mobility for enterprise. The Kofax Mobile Capture platform allows information to be captured via a mobile device — such as taking a picture of an expense report with an iPhone or Android smartphone — and then its Kofax TotalAgility system provides coordination with back-end systems: in this case, to initiate an automated payment process. TotalAgility also offers analytics so that the incoming information can be analyzed; Ricoh said the solutions enable analysis of user activity without requiring modification of enterprise applications.
Ricoh, based in Tokyo, is one of Kofax’s leading channel partners.
—Food-focused research group HowGood has raised $2 million in venture funding and launched a new mobile app for iPhone and Android. The company says it has developed the world’s largest database of sustainable food ratings that users can access in-store and includes information on more than 60 areas from ingredients to labor practices.
