IBM plans to sell Watson as a big data tool

If you are an executive at the company and are ready to engage in an online marketing campaign for a new car, you first want to figure out which consumers in those areas are more likely to click on your ads.

You can ask a system engineer to go to the company database to check the data, but that certainly takes a certain amount of time; in fact, you can get the answer in a simpler way. All you have to do is ask the super computer questions in the most straightforward way, and the latter will give you the answer in just a few seconds.

This is the idea behind Watson Analytics, the latest big data service IBM has launched. IBM wants to sell its latest AI technology as a business intelligence tool.

Watson is a supercomputer because of its reputation for defeating two world champions in the quiz show Jeopardy. IBM has been trying to commercialize the technology. But according to the media, the income generated by Watson's business has not been satisfactory.

The supercomputer was originally designed to test state-of-the-art computing techniques such as natural language processing and data mining, and IBM researchers have deposited millions of of documents into Watson, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and literary works, among others. According to IBM, Watson can handle 500GB of information per second, equivalent to 1 million books per second.

IBM is seeking to develop beyond the core business of the semiconductor chip, such as software tools and clouds, and Watson Analytics is a new business it has tried. The service is designed to help enterprise users collect a wide variety of data from different departments to address a variety of business issues.

Alistair Rennie, IBM business analyst Aristellenri, said in an interview that Watson Analytics could help executives predict which deals could be completed in a specific period based on historical data, or what incentive plans could help retain talent. Later this year, he said, the service will run as a tool on the IBM cloud.

Large data-software areas are already quite crowded, although few products can be identified like Watson, but some are better tested and more specialized.

For example, splice machine and 6Sense, each of which has financed 25 million of billions of dollars of startups, focus on helping business users analyze their marketing and sales activities.

Another company called Aviso can help business users better predict performance. In recent years, many large enterprises have developed their own query and analysis system software.

IBM has launched large data query services to help enterprise users make decisions. It is unclear how IBM intends to deal with the relationship between Watson Analytics and the services it has launched.

Watson's Easy-to-use natural language model may be more appealing. Although many companies are interested in better ways to reduce the amount of data, but because some technology is too complex, so many enterprise users look and sigh.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)