The message that IBM brought to theCUBE from its Vision 2015 conference in Orlando last week was democratized data analysis. With its Watson Cognitive Computing platform in particular, and with other analysis tools like Cognos and SPSS in its arsenal, IBM says it is making deep analysis of huge volumes of data of different types and from different sources directly available to non-technical business and professional users. Watson can even anticipate a user’s specific needs, IBM stressed, automatically analyzing data as it comes in to provide the most significant relevant conclusions for that user without the need for a query.

This does not replace data scientists. It frees them from urgent but more basic work to pose and answer deeper, more complex questions that might have larger significance to the company long term but that might never occur to managers in the trenches dealing with myriad daily issues and decisions.

And this is not just a promise or something in the IBM lab. It is live today in real world applications in multiple fields. IBM has talked at length about Watson in cancer research, where the input can include multiple megabytes of a patient’s genetic information and the answer is a choice of detailed treatment strategies customized to the individual patient and drawn from the entire corpus of cancer research. The person posing the question is not a data scientist or traditional data analyst but rather the patient’s oncologist, and the answer is delivered not a month later but within a few hours or less.

That technology is now being used where the questions may concern market trends or other business issues. In the first interview on theCUBE from IBM Vision, for example, professional cyclist David Haase and IBM Chief Architect for Analytics Jean François Puget discussed how they will use streaming data analytics to coach Hasse during the upcoming annual race across America.

Haase will wear several wireless sensors that will stream information on his condition back to his race team manager and coach. That will be combined with weather, road condition and other information to provide advice on race strategy including pacing and when to rest, that the manager will pass back to Haase.

This is a grueling multiday event, with cyclists riding 18 or more hours a day and getting very little rest. By the third day, Hasse said, he is too tired to make the best strategic decisions, making his manager’s advice vital for him to get the best result possible. This year the team will count on Watson to provide that advice.

Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante said on theCUBE that the Watson visualizations in the general sessions “really shine. The idea that everybody in the room can be as smart as the smartest person there – when I first heard that I thought that will never happen. But then I thought if I have Watson giving me the insights, I’m going to elevate my own contributions to the discussion.”

“What we want to do is let business people ask the smartest questions they have directly to Watson,” said IBM Watson Analytics Product Experience and Design Executive John Colthart.  “Then Watson can take all the data in your organization, join it with external data, and bring that to you with visual insights to answer those questions.”

Watson allows business users to do complex analysis such as multi-variable predictive analytics directly and get answers quickly, often in minutes, said IBM General Manager for Business Analytics Alistair Rennie. That allows business people to do iterative analysis on the data, where the answer to one query leads to the next. Getting the most value requires business users to change their thinking, he says. “Too many customers are still thinking in terms of next week,” but the real value is in taking a longer view of the business.

“It does feel like a new world,” said theCUBE General Manager and Cohost Jeff Frick during the wrapup.  “The way they described interaction with Watson Analytics is very Googlesque. People’s expectations are changing.”

IBM’s latest reorganization is “aligning the company to the digital fabric,” said Vellante. “I think the organization, and particularly the analytics group, is beginning to make sense.” So does the term “citizen data scientist” that IBM is using. “IBM has built a powerhouse through acquisitions of companies like Cognos and SPSS and now bringing the organic piece that is Watson in makes a fantastic combination,” Vellante said.

Image courtesy IBM