IBM’s new Analytical Decision Management software was unveiled this week as an enterprise-ready, decision-oriented big data platform that’s tailored for Big Blue’s core customer base. It falls under the IBM Smarter Analytics umbrella and offers a number of capabilities that the vendor hopes will appeal to companies that want to freshen up parts of their internal and outbound strategies.

For one thing, insight that the platform produces can be leveraged by other applications, even if they’re running on legacy mainframes. Integration is one of the biggest selling points, and this also covers the fact that Decision Managements is connected to the InfoSphere Streams real-time data processing engine.

There’s another big feature called Entity Analytics – a component that contextualizes data with people, brands and other entities while adapting to changing circumstances along the way. Entity and the other capabilities are also coupled with social media analytics, and it all adds up to create a ‘hyper-intelligence’ element that can be implemented across an organization.

“In today’s marketplace, when a customer says they’re not happy, companies must decide how to react – not later that day, or in an hour, but instantly,” said Deepak Advani, vice president business analytics products and solutions, IBM.  “With these new technologies, winning organizations can embed analytics into under-served areas of their business, empowering all employees to make information based decisions.”

IBM is not the only one that’s attempting to rework analytics, at least to some extent, in order to solidify its position in this industry. Autonomy also made a move just a couple of weeks ago.

The HP-owned big data firm announced Clickstream, software that offers a different kind of meaning that specifically targets advertisers. Clickstream supports other uses as well, thanks to features such as Hadoop integration.