Decision Optimization has been around in some form for decades, although many business owners are just now discovering what it can do.

IBM’s Decision Optimization Center provides a platform to support businesses with analytics to solve difficult planning and scheduling challenges. Decision Optimization is the third component of analytics, the action step that works alongside descriptive and predictive tools.

Optimization offers a solutions-centric culture

“Decision Optimization is used across industries,” Susara van den Heever, product manager of Decision Optimization for IBM, told theCUBE during IBM Vision. “It’s used for planning decisions, scheduling … any decision where you have a large number of options to consider. Optimization takes the whole problem in one go and suggests one or more solutions in terms of making plans and scheduling.”

The platform is tightly integrated with IBM’s Maximo Asset Management, Algorithmics software, Unica software and SPSS Modeler.

For operations researchers, Decision Optimization offers a drag-and-drop interface via the Cloud. For developers, who may integrate a model or application into a larger enterprise-wide application, Decision Optimization uses DOcloud API. It will work with Java and any other language,” said van den Heever. “It takes about five lines of code to integrate our cloud solver with a developer’s application.”

van den Heever urges companies to research the platform to discover how it will work for them. “If you’re not talking to us, you’re really missing out on what you can do in terms of competitive advantage,” she said

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Vision 2015.