Continuing its investment in education programs related to big data analytics, IBM announced a partnership with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for an executive program focused on the use of big data analytics for marketing and customer engagement.
Earlier this year, IBM committed $100 million to training and support for big data scientists in China. At Wharton, the two-week course is designed for chief marketing officers and chief customer officers to “provide the knowledge and tools necessary to use cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies to unlock deeper insights about their customers.”
In IBM’s most recent annual survey of CMOs around the world, the company found that 94% of them believe advanced analytics will help them accomplish their goals — however, more than 80% also said that their organizations were unprepared to leverage big data analytics.
IBM described the program, which will first be offered June 2015, as a mix of learning from executive peers, live case studies and hands-on, data-based simulations that examine social, mobile and digital marketing scenarios.
“We live in a data-driven world that’s changing the nature of the marketing profession while also expanding its role to help organizations better understand and engage their customers in every interaction across marketing, sales and service,” said Kevin Bishop, vice president of IBM’s ExperienceOne customer engagement offering, in a statement. “Today’s consumers are more connected, more knowledgeable and create more information than ever before. CMOs need a way to extend their existing expertise into areas like advanced analytics and cloud-based technologies to quickly unlock and act on the deeper insights trapped in that wealth of data.”
News of the program came as IBM hosts its IBM Enterprise conference this week in Las Vegas. The company also is highlighting new real-time analytics capabilities for main frames, as well as software-defined storage as a new model that would be interoperable across hardware and software and allow more flexible access to data for management and analytics purposes. IBM’s Jamie Thomas, general manager of its storage and software-defined systems segment, said in a keynote that 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are being produced per day.
