While IBM Corp. has been in involved in Business Intelligence for many years, the recent advent of IBM Watson’s cognitive power and cloud capabilities have taken BI into an entirely new, more open and fluid space. IBM’s managed platform approach for BI, on cloud (software as a service) or on premises, can help organizations enlist trusted data and self-service capabilities to enable agility and accelerate growth, according to Marc Altshuller, GM of Business Analytics at IBM.

Altshuller joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM World of Watson in Las Vegas, NV. They discussed the different aspects of BI that IBM provides, what cognitive design means for BI and ways that IBM customers can try out machine learning on their own business models.

Analytics in a cognitive space

Given the broad meaning of analytics, Furrier asked for clarity around what this term means to IBM. Altshuller clarified that he’s from the business analytics side, which has three offerings: Cognos Analytics, Watson Analytics and Watson Analytics for social media.

Altshuller went on to explain, “On one side of it, you have Cognos Analytics, which a year ago, we released a completely reimagined Cognos BI. We’ve had users on our Cognos BI platform for many years; we re-imaged it now for business users. So now, business users can get in there and use the authoring capabilities, the reporting capabilities, the distribution capabilities and, for the first time, self-service analytics. The other big change with Cognos Analytics is [that] we’ve gone away from these big, annual, monolithic releases, and we’ve moved into rapid delivery. So, every eight to 10 weeks, we do a Cognos Analytics release.”

Furrier asked if that means they’ve gone agile. Altshuller confirmed that they have.

Delivery details for Cognos Analytics

Vellante asked Altshuller if they deliver Cognos as a SaaS product, on premises, and how clients are doing with the eight-to-10-week update schedule.

“You don’t load data into Cognos (unless you were doing self-serve, if you wanted to bring in a spreadsheet, you can),” explained Altshuller. “But when you’re going to enterprise data, you connect to the data. So in the cloud, you’re not actually loading data into Cognos Analytics — you’re attaching to the data in place, running analytics as a service. So whether you run it onprem or in the cloud, it’s one code base; the same offering, but you’re never loading the data in anyway.”

The update schedule is a big change, Altshuller said. “The other thing we used to carry with Cognos were these ugly upgrade cycles, a lot of ‘heavy lifting’ to move from version to version. So getting from Cognos BI to Cognos Analytics is our more straightforward update … once you’re on Cognos Analytics, we have in-place upgrades. You can go from release to release, with a minor install.”

Furrier said that’s the real benefit, where the customer is able to manage their own patches and upgrades, saving themselves a lot of time.

Customer self-education, free trials

One of the big initiatives for IBM is “total user experience,” where ease-of-use is planned in the inherent design of every IBM product. Furrier asked Altshuller what that means for the business analytics side of things.

“Watson Analytics and Watson Analytics for social media have gone 100 percent digital, so people can get on there; they can do trials,” he said. “In the case of Watson Analytics, it gives you 30 days to try our best edition of it. Around design, not only have we pushed everything digital,  we’ve instrumented everything so heavily behind the scenes. So we actually see how users use it — data-driven product feedback.”

He went onto say, “There are free trials [look for the white “free trial” button] on IBM’s site for Watson Analytics, Watson Analytics for social media and for Cognos Analytics.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM World of Watson 2016.

*Disclosure: IBM and other companies sponsor some IBM World of Watson segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Photo by SiliconANGLE