“Don’t be a curator; be an innovator … a disrupter,” advised Bob Picciano during his keynote address at MIT CDOIQ Symposium. Fresh from his delivery, Picciano, senior VP at IBM Analytics, recapped his speech for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media team.

Picciano encouraged CDOs to “think deeply” about the changing face of customer engagement. He conveyed the importance of focusing on transforming the efficiency of the CDO role, as well as thinking about partnerships that provide insight.

IBM has recently partnered with Box, Apple, Twitter and other companies. Picciano expressed that IBM has experienced greater innovation through these partnerships, and he emphasized that “who owns the data” is less of a concern than what can be done with it.

Growing analytics

Quoting The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims, “Data is the new middle manager,” Picciano went on to discuss the ecosystem approach that IBM Watson (a cognitive system enabling a new partnership between people and computers) is employing. Watson allows the user to interact with the software using “natural language” and “applies machine learning” on issues as they arise. Thanks to Apache Spark (an open-source computing framework) and Watson, IBM is growing six times faster in analytics than the market, according to Picciano.

With Watson’s analytics on Cloud, each industry or data set has its own applied statistical patterns and machine learning algorithms specifically tailored for that industry. It is “important to put it all in [the context] of the industry or the domain” and to focus on the “behavior of the machine versus the business or equity,” according to Picciano, who said those factors contributed to IBM “aggressively and openly promoting Spark” to help scale analytics.

While Picciano explained that Watson does have an open developer platform zone, called Bluemix Watson, IBM has no plans to make Watson open source. However, through the developer ecosystem, developers can work with the Internet of Things, cognitive applications and other functions. IBM will keep its “barriers low,” however, as it has seen Watson start “to expand rapidly.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE