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LANINGHAM: Welcome back to Information on Demand 2011.
I'm Scott Laningham with Todd Watson.
Our guest this time is Deepak Advani who is vice president IBM Business Analytics,
Products, and SPSS.
Deepak, thanks for spending a few moments with us.
ADVANI: It's my pleasure.
LANINGHAM: Before we jump into that,
we should just...I'm sure we should mention...it's very timely...that we just heard
the announcement that Ginny Rometty has been named as Sam Palmisano's successor as IBM's CEO
which will take effect January first.
Is that right?
WATSON: January first.
LANINGHAM: And Ginny's been senior vice president and group executive
for sales, marketing and strategy.
And, as we were talking about, was a real early force behind all of this predictive analytics,
business analytics we're talking about.
WATSON: Business analytics, yes.
Really helped gear it up.
LANINGHAM: So that just shows how much commitment there is to this direction at IBM.
So, anyway, with all that in mind, not to add pressure to the discussion or anything,
but you gave a keynote address this morning.
What...could you remind folks, especially for those that were not able to see it
on LiveStream, what your themes we're, what you were talking about?
ADVANI: Absolutely.
I mean, the interest in analytics at this conference is incredible.
I mean, it was strong last year, but this year seems like it's increased by a huge amount.
And what people are interested in is, well, how do I get started.
And we've got a pretty interesting framework called AQ.
Just like IQ and EQ, there's an analytics quotient and where are you
on the analytics quotient and how do you progress up the curve.
So one of the things we talked to the teams about is some of the trends we were seeing,
the trends like if the data continues to grow, there's this need to make decisions
in real time, there's this need to not only focus on propensities of individuals,
but also the time and space dimension
because our propensities change over time and where we are.
LANINGHAM: Okay.
ADVANI: So all of these changes that are happening, what we communicated
to our attendees was what are the key bets we are placing.
Because, you know, we've got a couple thousand developers.
We work on a lot of things.
And in order for us to really, really move the needle on analytics,
we have picked three key plays at the platform level, three key plays at the solution level,
and that's what we communicated with the teams as to why and what they are.
LANINGHAM: Should we...can we like quickly remind ourselves of what those plays are?
ADVANI: Absolutely.
So, you know, at the platform level,
one of the big trends we're seeing is BI going personal and mobile.
Right? Because for decades when you look at business intelligence,
it was a world where you had the IT group that was setting up multidimensional cubes
on how you should look at your business, you come up with reports
that are predefined and off you go.
LANINGHAM: Okay.
ADVANI: And what's happening is line of business people are saying I want to do stuff right now.
I want to build the report the way I want to see it right now and I want
to see this information wherever I am.
LANINGHAM: Right.
WATSON: Hence the Cognos for iPad solution introduced yesterday.
ADVANI: Exactly right.
Exactly right.
So, you know, there's a Cognos app for iPad available on App Store,
great reviews, fantastic product.
I mean, got great reception by the attendees.
And when we look at BI Goes Personal, it's not just about having iPad, which is important...
WATSON: Sure.
ADVANI: ...but the ability on a desktop to start doing slicing and dicing
and getting insights quickly without having to wait for someone to build a predefined report
for you, you know, it's sort of agile, more responsive, that whole space.
It just received very, very well.
And that's one of the three investments we're making
at the platform level is BI Goes Personal and Mobile.
A lot more to come.
The second area is big data.
Because a lot of people think whether it's BI or whether it's predictive analytics,
that you're dealing with large, structured database system.
Which is still important.
So we are investing with Netezza to have really optimized versions of predictive NBI on Netezza.
But 80 percent of the data is unstructured.
And it's just growing like crazy.
So how do you analyze unstructured data, right,
which could be petabytes in a way that makes sense.
How do you find that needle in the haystack.
So big data analytics is the second key bet.
And the third one is decision management.
Because, at the end of the day, what makes a smarter planet?
That is organizations, government entities, companies, individuals making better decisions.
And to make those better decisions, you need to have analytics,
and you also need to have operational,
sort of institutional decision-making that's encapsulated in software.
So that's a big bet we're placing is decision management that takes business rules,
predictive models, bring them together.
So decisions are made better every day, not just by knowledge workers,
but also people like in a call center, reps and rep sites, your processes, embedded analytics
through decision management is the third key bet.
WATSON: Okay.
ADVANI: And then at the solution level,
the three key areas replacing bets are customer analytics,
finance analytics, and risk analytics.
And so I think that those messages were received extremely well.
And what we want to convey to customers is, look, these are the areas
where we're going to double down.
We're in Vegas.
So that's the terminology.
We're doubling down.
And I think this resonates with a lot of folks.
WATSON: Sure.
So we also heard a little bit about the predictive analytics with respect
to healthcare today, the announcement.
I'm not sure if you're fully briefed on that, but I'd love to hear if you are,
because there's been so much interest in the Watson technology, and to see it now starting
to really take root in the market I think is very exciting
and there's a lot of interest out there.
ADVANI: You know, a lot of companies will apply predictive analytics
and they'll say I improved my churn from 3.2 percent to 1.6 percent.
Great. You know, I improved my ROI for customer acquisition 600 percent
like First Tennessee Bank.
Great. All those pale in comparison to improving the quality of healthcare.
Right? So what we announced today is there's a couple of ways to go about it.
There's a Watson approach to healthcare, which is fabulously exciting,
where you can feed hundreds of millions of pieces of information, right,
of the medical journals, research...
...and it really becomes a physician's assistant that answers a lot of questions
with probabilistic outcomes; that based on what the system is seeing and hearing the symptoms,
here's the probabilities of different things it could be.
But we also have a different solution for hospitals that have been using things like SPSS
for years, and what they do is they come at evidence-based healthcare
from a slightly different perspective.
So look at Sequoia Hospital in California.
They have built up a database of 10,000 patients who've come
to the hospital over the last many, many years.
They capture as much information as they can about the patient, what the systems were,
family history, what drugs were they on.
And for cardiac surgery, you know, they will basically recommend based
on data mining what you should or shouldn't do.
Should you have a different preoperative procedure based
on your symptoms and your information.
So there's a classic data mining approach to evidence-based healthcare
that we announced today that really becomes a precursor that when you use data mining
on existing information you've built up over the years in conjunction with Watson
that gives you deep Q&A based on latest research,
you have an incredibly exciting solution.
WATSON: That's very exciting.
LANINGHAM: Do you think you'll look back in a few years...I mean, we'll say 15
or 20 years...at this period as one of those big leaps, or at least the groundwork is being laid
for some changes that really overturned the way we were doing things,
we went a whole new direction?
ADVANI: I have no doubt about it.
I have no doubt about it.
Look, one thing I've learned many years in the IT industry is when people are working
on something that is just bigger than them, right...I mean, my people, they're writing code,
they're doing marketing, they're doing sales, but what I want to keep communicating to anyone
in IBM that's working on business analytics or customers
or business partners is get freakin' excited.
[ LAUGHTER ]
ADVANI: Get excited.
And the reason I say that is because, you know, when it's all said and done and we're all like,
you know, 75 years old with grandkids on our laps, we're not going to talk
about that extra bonus we got in 2011.
If we were part of something that made the world a better place, that's exciting.
And I really think we're in the early innings of a major,
major sea shift in how businesses are run,
how governments operate, how healthcare gets delivered.
So I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we're going to look back
at this time a few years down the road and say, boy, we were part of it.
WATSON: So in terms of looking now...I totally get that excitement; I'm definitely hip
to that mission, being an IBMer myself...but one area that's really interesting we're hearing a
lot and that's being used throughout the conversation is social data,
I'm interested to understand what we're able to do today and maybe where we may be going
with the ability to understand, you know, sentiment in the marketplace,
but not just using it to understand it, but, again,
always to try to take actionable insights.
ADVANI: I think that's the key point.
Because there's a lot of companies out there that will say, hey, 500 bucks a month,
I'll do sentiment analysis on your brand, you can start looking at trends.
And after a while you say, Now what?
So the way we look at social is if you really want to get good at customer analytics,
if you really want to understand your customer, you need to collect
as much information as you can from them, right?
The demographic information, you've got to get behavioral information,
attitudinal information, interaction information, right?
And social media becomes a very important channel to learn more
about the attitude of your customers.
So we don't think social should be looked at as part of an overall holistic strategy.
It's not just about measuring buzz and measuring sentiment.
As a lot of hard-nosed CFOs and CEOs will say, you know, buzz never really wrote the checks.
You know? Because buzz is good, but then what?
So what we've been doing with social media is we've got world-class natural language
processing and text analytics, algorithms to extract sentiments.
We got that.
We can also do it on top of Hadoop, you know, the big insight project that we have.
So we've got a product, CCI, that leverages big insights
to process tons and tons of data, right?
And then what you do with it is...we've worked with, you know, folks on the smarter commerce,
the core metrics, the Unicas of the world.
And in fact the demo that we gave this afternoon at the keynote was how do you take a lot
of this buzz and this information that's available in social media,
use that to design campaigns that are very targeted, the brand advocates
and the segmentation that you built up, and then you can go back and measure the return
on that investment and you can actually make a correlation between investments
and social media marketing and revenue and profit that you get out of the business.
That to me is exciting.
WATSON: That's great news.
ADVANI: Yes.
WATSON: Absolutely.
Scott? LANINGHAM: Deepak, appreciate you stopping by to visit with us.
Fascinating conversation.
ADVANI: My pleasure.
LANINGHAM: And I hope you have a great rest of your conference.
ADVANI: Thank you very much.
WATSON: Thanks very much.
ADVANI: Thanks.
You bet. LANINGHAM: Deepak Advani who is vice president
of IBM Business Analytics, Products, and SPSS.
I'm Scott, and Todd.
We'll be back in just a minute.