IBM Watson gets closer to business and regular users.

IBM introduces Watson Analytics , an innovative cognitive service capable of understanding natural languages, which provides continuous access to powerful predictive and visual analytics tools. According to research, only a small part of business users use analytics to make decisions. In turn, the Watson Analytics service provides the possibility of a simplified and convenient work with the tools of predictive analytics to any categories of users.

The first version of Watson Analytics will be a shareware service compatible with desktop PCs and mobile devices. Watson Analytics offers a full range of analytics tools, including the organization of convenient access to data refinement and storage services, thus allowing you to collect information and prepare reports in complex formats for subsequent analysis and visualization, as well as decision making and interaction.
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IBM Watson Analytics understands natural languages ​​with a goal, making working with predictive analytics tools easier by being able to answer key questions such as:

• What are the key drivers for my company's sales growth?
• What benefits will help keep employees?
• What transactions are completed successfully with a greater likelihood?

Unlike data-centric solutions and professional analysts, IBM Watson Analytics automates primary data processing, predictive analytics, and visualization, focusing on the tasks of marketing, sales, operations, finance, and personnel management.

Three key innovations make it easy to work with Watson Analytics:

• Unified Analytical Solution for Business Users Tasks - Unlike modern analytics tools created for specific types of data analysis, Watson Analytics provides a comprehensive set of cloud services. Users set the task, and Watson Analytics helps them identify the source of the data, perform the initial processing, gather valuable information, predict the results, visualize the data, create a report and share it with colleagues.
• Guided Predictive Analytics - Watson Analytics uses predictive analytics to automatically find the most relevant information, patterns and relationships. This process entails new questions and conclusions, leading users to solve the most important business problems.
• Using natural language that users can understand - Watson Analytics speaks the language of business and business users; you just need to indicate the desired result. Watson Analytics allows you to understand why certain events occurred or are likely to occur. All this information will be presented in terms familiar to the user. Interacting with analytical reports, users can adjust their queries in order to improve the final result of the work.

“Watson Analytics is designed to help sales professionals and top managers of companies identify key data and make informed decisions,” comments Bob Picciano, senior vice president, Information and Analytics Group, IBM. “We help business users find the right answers to their questions, get the analytics they need, and all this is in the format they want. The combination of Watson's analytical capabilities and cognitive technologies, the powerful potential of big data and the provision of cloud services for PCs, smartphones and other devices is a real breakthrough in analytics. ”

With Watson Analytics, business users get instant access to personalized business scenarios related to their role in the organization. Instead of trying to find the required information among vast amounts of data, testing various hypotheses, the user can focus on understanding and evaluating specific business problems in order to effectively interact with interested parties.

Many analytics tools assume the availability of data that has undergone primary processing for further analysis, an idea of ​​what type of analytical information the user wants to receive, as well as skills and time to build an analysis model. However, many business users do not have such assets. Primary data processing may take 50 percent or more of the time required for the analysis of information. In turn, it is often difficult for business users to understand which type of data analysis will be appropriate and how to visualize the obtained information in the form of a report or a chart.

Watson Analytics provides analytics and data processing in the cloud. Like other IBM cloud solutions, it will be available in the SoftLayer environment, as well as through the IBM Cloud Marketplace. IBM also plans to make Watson Analytics services available in the IBM BlueMix environment in order to provide independent developers with the opportunity to take full advantage of the service in the process of creating new applications.

Watson Analytics will be available for beta testing in the next 30 days, and for shareware from November 2014.