SCIENCE

IBM has announced that powerful new predictive analytical capabilities, constructed using intellectual property from 21 inventions, have been incorporated into its global technology services portfolio – including information technology and strategic outsourcing services. This is the latest example of IBM using analytics capabilities to transform the nature of high-value business and technology services, which includes everything from identifying fraud in tax or healthcare systems, to predicting consumer buying behaviors for retail clients.

Predictive analytics capabilities have been pioneered by IBM Research to enable chief information officers (CIOs) to construct specific, fact-based financial and business models for their information technology (IT) operations. Traditionally, CIOs have had to make decisions about their IT operations without the benefit of tools that could help interpret and model data.  Now, planning future investments for data center capacity or adopting emerging technologies such as cloud computing can be more predictable, resulting in savings of up to 40 percent of technology infrastructure expenses through balancing IT capacity with business growth.

"Until now, CIOs have been unable to access many of the predictive, analytics-driven tools that CEO's or CFO's have used for years," said Steven Sams, vice president, IBM Site and Facilities Services. "With today's announcement, CIO's are able to not only apply relevant facts to optimize current IT investments, but also access business insights needed to make the best use of limited resources.  In essence this broad array of new analytical capabilities take data generated from IT operations and turn it into a set of facts that clients can then use to make smarter business decisions," he added.

New analytical capabilities are available now across IBM Global Technology Services. Examples of capabilities that help clients with data center rationalization include:

IBM's Alternate Cash Flow Analysis can help determine which alternatives in data center or IT infrastructure operations can cost-effectively meet a client's business goals. Consolidate or upgrade? Two data centers or one? Short-term benefit or long-term approach?   This analysis calculates the "do-nothing strategy" – for example, what would happen to investments if left in their current state – which provides a baseline for other financial comparisons.

IBM's Physical Threshold Capacity Analysis can help forecast data center capacity requirements many years into the future, allowing clients to know how long their data centers will remain viable and when they will need to be upgraded. A patent-pending algorithm developed by IBM Research empowers decision-making and improved business performance through the use of computational algorithms and modeling to determine how to meet unpredictable demand in data center capacity. Based on client's input on expected application growth, IT strategy and current data center capabilities, the tool provides objective analysis on the data center capacity thresholds to predict energy and space capacity requirements.

IBM's Resiliency Rationalization Analysis can help clients correctly gauge resiliency within their data center infrastructure.  Current metrics for understanding reliability typically focus on the capital costs and don't facilitate the business decision of understanding the value of availability to the on-going business operations. Using client input on relative application values, recovery times, operational quality and other data can provide visibility into the trade-offs between the values of availability with the costs of reducing risk exposure.

Adopting IBM's predictive analytical capabilities to analyze cash-flow, threshold capacity and resiliency rationalization can help CIOs and business leaders better plan, manage and deploy IT infrastructure and budget effectively.

IBM continues to expand its multi-billion dollar investment in the business analytics and optimization market.  Over the past five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytics acquisitions. Today, more than 8,000 IBM business consultants are dedicated to analytics and over 200 mathematicians are developing breakthrough algorithms inside IBM Research.