Bob Moon: If Virginia Rometty had just one word for you about the next big thing, it might sound a bit reminiscent of that famous scene from "The Graduate."

"The Graduate" clip: Just one word. Yes, sir? Are you listening? Yes I am. Plastics.

That is so 1960s. Just ask IBM's incoming chief what she's focusing on. Are you listening?

Virginia Rometty: Analytics.

Yep. Virginia Rometty sees a bright future for her company in... analytics.

"A second is a very long time.  Long enough for a train track in Taiwan to sense a malfunction and alert the operators.  Or to spot a power disruption in Texas before it spreads.  Or help a global finance company pinpoint fraud and protect customers.  Smarter Analytics is helping companies all over the world predict what's coming and act on it now."

LAS VEGAS, N.V. - 25 Oct 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that XO Communications, a leading nationwide provider of advanced broadband communications services and solutions, has reduced its customer churn rates by nearly 50 percent, largely through the use of IBM predictive analytics software. The software has helped save XO millions of dollars by uncovering deeper insights into customer behaviors, spotting trends, identifying those likely to defect, allowing proactive actions to keep their most valuable customers.

LAS VEGAS - 25 Oct 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new network intelligence analytics appliance to help communications services providers (CSPs) analyze up to petabytes of customer and network data in minutes. The new appliance gives CSPs the power to turn their data into valuable insights to enhance the customer experience, secure new customers, generate cost savings, and track the overall health of the network.

CSPs are challenged to boost revenue and keep costs low at a time when customers are demanding more data-intensive products and services. The explosion of Smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices means consumers can do just about anything on the go, from checking the weather to watching movies, and posting to Twitter or Facebook while downloading music. This digital lifestyle has consumers crunching ever-growing amounts of data for browsing, streaming video, gaming, and social networking, placing a strain on network resources.  

The IBM Netezza Network Analytics Accelerator addresses this issue and provides an analytics platform that CSPs can use to improve network performance and gain insights on customer experiences. Using the new appliance, CSPs can slice and dice customer data to analyze calling plans and contract terms to see which are driving revenue, understand how each customer is using voice and data packages and the impact on network resources, and spot new market opportunities by learning how customers use different types of handsets.
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Most network analytic offerings only look at specific systems or network devices, retain certain information for a short amount of time, and have limited reporting capabilities and rigid data access. This inhibits a CSP's ability to identify patterns and trends or ask questions on-the-fly. Netezza analytics can view all customer data and speed up the flow for instant analysis on demand.

Seton Healthcare Family is the first client to adopt and use the technology, called IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. The solution will allow healthcare organizations to extract relevant clinical information from vast amounts of patient data to better analyze the past, understand the present, and predict future outcomes.

By combining IBM's Watson technology with industry solutions offerings, Seton intends to focus the new content and predictive analytics solution on the root causes of hospital readmissions, and ways it can decrease preventable multiple hospital visits.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, one in five patients suffer from preventable readmissions, which represents $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget.* Beginning in 2012, hospitals will be penalized for high readmission rates with reductions in Medicare discharge payments.

LAS VEGAS - 24 Oct 2011: At the 2011 Business Analytics Forum, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new software that brings the power of managing and analyzing big data to the workplace. Whether in the office or on the road, employees can now gain actionable insight anytime, anywhere from the broadest range of data and put it to work in real-time.
The new offerings span a wide variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM's SmartCloud. Now employees from any department inside an organization can explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, and make sense of it on the fly as part of their everyday work experience. 
With today's news, IBM is placing the power of mobile analytics into the hands of iPad users with a free software download at Apple's iTunes Store: http://bit.ly/r68A04. The new software is designed to help employees in key industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation use and benefit from business analytics on the go. 

• Wells Fargo processes around 100 million documents a month, 24x7
• Wells Fargo undertook a transformation of their environment driven by a focus on the business value they were delivering to their customers.

• Dealing with huge amounts of electronic and physical content (and physical content includes not just paper, but things like lab samples)
• They have 300 shelf-kilometers of paper (equal to around 50 million pieces of paper)
• Their Global master Retention Management System is designed to bring all records together under the same classification system and legally defensible retention policy
• It's designed to be managed at a global, country and state level, while also offering flexibility at the local level.
• It is very intuitive, with end users requiring only 15 minutes of training out on the site.

• Not for profit healthcare provider in central Texas.  
• About 1/3 of their patients can't pay for care, and they essentially donate $300M in charity care a year.
• They are going to be applying Watson to better treat patients coming in with Congestive Heart Failure.  Nationwide, around 50% of CHF cases are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and half of that should be avoided.

• SEB is a large Nordic Bank, operating in 10 countries in Europe
• They need to keep track of many different types of information under intense time pressure, and handle about 100,000 cases a month across 350 different case types.
• Their initial approach was to keep automating their processes, but found that doing so would have taken so much time and expense that they went looking for other options.
• They are replacing their workflow engine with IBM Case Manager, now have a new archive based on FileNet P8, and are providing reporting and statistics via IBM Case Manager.

• More data: better the predictions
• Lower false positives
• Fewer false negatives
• More data: bad data... good
• Suddenly glad your data was not perfect.
• More data:  less compute  [the last few puzzle pieces to put together go faster than the first ones]

• In 5 years SunTrust made quantum leap in analytics.
• Each region used to have to fend for itself.  Now standardized reporting as a shared service
• Used to use Excel and ccess, now Data Warehouse and Business Analytics
• Intranet portal fo one-stop shopping and self-service.
• Now put customer in center - everything produced is client relationship based.
• No more tower of Babel problem - standard definitions and quality metrics.
• Can now do in seconds what used to take days to do.
• Managers and lines of business used to divert hundreds of people to create reports, now they can focus on growing their business.

• Becker Underwood - 50% increase in inventory turns.  (They were making decisions based on rearview mirror.  Now can make more accurate predictions to better manage inventory.  More timely and accurate raw material orders.)
• JM Family Enterprises - $2.1M annual call center savings
• Santam Insurance (South Africa) - Saved $2.4M in just 4 months, improved claims processing by 70%.  Automatically scored each claim based on risk level and moved on to appropriate group to process.  Identified pattern of fraud by major crime syndicate in first 4 months, leading to $2.4M in savings.
• Vivo (largest mobile provider in southern hemisphere) - Reduced campaign execution time by 86% by use of Unica.

• Are you prioritizing and delivering specific business outcomes in your industry
• Are you applying the right technology?
• Do you have a proactive partnership between business and IT?
• Have you made an investment in innovation, skills and IT efficiency?
• Has your organization made a lasting commitment to strategic/cultural change?

• HealthNow - needed one view of the client.  Now provide better care and are saving $5M a year.
• Hennepin County (Minnesota).  Improving child welfare and saving $2.5M annually.  Integrated case management, across paper and electronic.  Now case workers have infor they need and can spend more time in field with clients.
• Pacific Northwest Smart Grid - $178M smart grid project.  Tapping into new information sources.

The goal is for Watson to help medical professionals diagnose and sort out treatment options for complicated health issues. Think of the system as an electronic Dr. House.
"Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient's medical care -- symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies," Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's chief medical officer, said in a prepared statement.
"Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment," he added.

• Press Release:  WellPoint and IBM Announce Agreement to Put Watson to Work in Health Care
• CNNMoney:  IBM's 'Jeopardy' computer lands health care job
• CNet:  IBM's Watson to offer medical advice to doctors

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Data cholesterol is a condition in which the excessive buildup of data leads to sluggishness across your systems. Just as too much cholesterol in the human body can lead to serious health problems, data cholesterol hinders the function of enterprise systems. It causes slower response times for customer service requests and report queries. It prolongs testing and reporting. It can even expose your organization to needless litigation.  Even mid-sized companies are amassing databases of over one terabyte that are growing at 30-70% each year.

By their nature, trains invite imagination. They conjure visions of exotic travel and long-distance commerce. But trains are also large, complicated, and expensive to repair when they break unexpectedly. For a railway operator, the ability to predict a failure before it happens would be tremendously valuable.
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On a modern train, more than 1,000 different types of mechanical and electrical events are recorded, including operational events such as “opening door” or “train is braking,” warning events such as “line voltage frequency out of range” or “compression is low in compressor X,” and failure events such as “pantograph is out of order” or “inverter lockout.” More than 2,000 events are collected on each train every day.

IBM proposed to use sequential analysis to determine whether any of these events or event sequences indicate that a more severe problem is about to occur.

In this video, Christine Twiford, T-Mobile's Manager of Network Technology Solutions, explains how and why T-Mobile replaced a 40 terabyte (TB) Oracle data warehouse with an IBM Netezza appliance. She discusses the various business units served by the IBM Netezza appliance today and the evolution of that platform which today holds 2 petabytes (PB) of data.

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For example, businesses would be able to evaluate Facebook or Twitter activity, and offer customers tailored promotions delivered to their mobile devices on the fly.   IBM's suite also enables businesses to deliver and fine tune digital marketing programs based on what customers are doing offline.  For example, a consumer who purchased a new tablet in a brick-and-mortar store would receive special offers via email to purchase tablet accessories.  The benefit to the customer is a consistent, relevant brand experience that reflects all of their online preferences, not just what they did, read or saw on one specific site.

The Big Data paradigm is a little bit different. It’s focused more on if you can gather all of the information about a particular topic or, even more broadly, it can be a lot more exploratory between business and IT to say, “Well, what questions could I potentially ask?”
We have a client who is in the energy business that said, “If I could bring together geospatial information and weather information and a history of weather information, would I be able to ask this question: Where should I best place a wind turbine for optimal usage from a wind point of view?” And the answer was yes, you actually can get enough data from all of those various sources to have a relevant answer to that question.