IBM enhances analytics capabilities within i2 Safer Planet Intelligence Analysis portfolio

As enterprises gather increasing amounts of information about their missions, IBM has unveiled a new analytics package to help customers make sense of all the new data, according to Steve Dalzell, principal offering manager for IBM i2 Intelligence Analysis portfolio.

“There is a ton of stuff that you can do with IT, in terms of clever analytics that filter data down and slice it and dice it,” Dalzell said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “But, at the end of the day, somebody has to make sense of it and translate all of that machine stuff into what we would term ‘actionable intelligence.’ Because somebody needs to understand it in a way that people can understand it, and understand it in a way that people can make decisions based on that [information].”

IBM plans to make mining data to find key decision-making information much easier with its i2 Safer Planet Intelligence Analysis portfolio, which the company says includes three primary components:

• IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook, which helps an enterprise translate data into results about 60% more quickly and allows users to make network diagrams with descriptive links between people and/or property;
• IBM i2 Analyze, which lets analysts and user access analyses and intelligence data from almost any web browser, as well as supporting collaboration among team members; and
• IBM i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis, which lets analysts uncover connections and patterns from terabytes of data in near real time.

Being able to sort through massive amounts of data to uncover relevant links and relationships is helpful in a number of industry sectors, from a public-safety agency trying to piece together clues to solve a crime to a healthcare provider trying to diagnose an unusual set of symptoms to an enterprise trying to determine who leaked proprietary information, Dalzell said.

“It doesn’t matter what it is, the tool will visualize it and let you understand it very quickly,” he said.

While current IBM customers may be familiar with the components—for instance, the Analyst’s Notebook as been around for 25 years—the enhancements to each component and their integration with each other should make the i2 portfolio especially attractive to enterprises, Dalzell said.

“The bringing of all that together into a single joint offering is new,” he said. “It’s immensely powerful. I’ve been in the business for 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything that can do what this can do.”

Sporting a new user interface that is designed to be simpler and clearer, the update to the Analyst’s Notebook “is probably the single biggest new iteration of Analyst’s Notebook since it came out,” Dalzell said.

“We’ve completely reorganized the workflow within the tool, so that things now flow from one thing to the next to the next in a much more simple and straightforward way than before,” he said. “So, we’ve been able to reduce the number of clicks [needed to perform an average task] by something like 60%. Where it used to take seven clicks, we quite often can do it in one.

“That may not sound like much by itself, but if you are doing it all day, that’s a considerable saving of effort.”