theCUBE Live with Marc Altshuller, vice president of Product Management and Business Analytics at IBM

Watson Analytics is designed to discover “what’s actually interesting” in a customer’s data, according to Marc Altshuller, vice president of Product Management and Business Analytics at IBM. Using predictive technology and cognitive discovery, Watson Analytics makes data-driven insights even more meaningful to clients.

It’s an amalgamation of older IBM technologies that occupies a space Altshuller calls “analytical discovery.” While Watson Analytics is made up of previously created IBM discoveries, it represents two new business approaches for IBM:

The target audience for Watson, for example, ranges from what Altshuller identifies as  level 1 users, such as line-of-business users with just the most basic understanding of data, to users at level 3, which would be data scientists looking into the nitty-gritty nature of the associations. Level 1 users are a persona [IBM hasn’t] worked with before, Altshuller added, so there’s been an emphasis on making sure that Watson is both meaningful and easy to use.

Watson Analytics, currently in beta, is offered via a freemium model, underlying IBM’s shifted focus from high-cost hardware services to lower-cost middleware services. This is also new for IBM, said Altshuller, but the idea is to put Watson Analytics in the hands of as many people as possible, because “the market is the best place to figure out the value of a product.”

At present, Watson Analtyics has about 17,000 signed up for its beta version. IBM is phasing in users at a rate of 1,000 a day and gathering lessons learned from each new group. The product is “very out-of-the-box,” so that it’s easy to use for people with only an essential grasp of data, Altshuller added.

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