IBM’s recent “World of Watson” event showcases how Big Blue is turning its super computer into a provider of multiple business solutions as the artificial intelligence market grows increasingly competitive. Technology Business Research offers an in-depth overview of Watson’s progress in the second of two reports.

LAS VEGAS – Collaborative analytics tools support multiple organizational roles for IBM’s Watson.

With the merger of IBM’s analytics-focused conference, IBM Insight, into IBM World of Watson in 2016, it follows that IBM’s analytics strategy aligns with and supports the company’s overall cognitive strategy — focusing on business outcomes, making it easier to work with multiple data sources, and catering to a broad spectrum of analytics users. During the event IBM provided an update on its two business analytics offerings, Cognos Analytics and Watson Analytics, following up from announcements at IBM Insight 2015. IBM continues to develop and market the two offerings separately, as Cognos Analytics targets core business intelligence (BI) functions such as reporting by acting as an enterprise’s “single version of the truth,” while Watson Analytics enables open-ended, unbiased data discovery by novice users (what IBM terms “citizen analysts”).

However, enhancements made to both offerings during 2016 improved self-service, data governance, data prep and shaping, and operational reporting capabilities. The two developments teams now share visualizations, enabling a consistent experience.

IBM’s business analytics portfolio, combined with the Watson Data Platform (announced as Project DataWorks at IBM’s DataFirst launch event in September), positions IBM to attack the top pain points organizations face with analytics. TBR’s 3Q16 Analytics & Insights Professional Services Customer Research found that successful analytics programs depend on collaboration from executives through line employees and across IT and LOB teams.

By infusing its offerings with user-friendly experiences, flexible data integration and domain-oriented templates such as “expert storybooks” for citizen analysts, as well as governance controls and security for IT, IBM improves its ability to gain organizational buy-in for its analytics portfolio.

Watson gives IBM a leg up in the race to automate services delivery

Many services vendors invest in automation to offset the negative profitability impacts of traditional IT services commoditization and rising worldwide labor costs, and IBM Global Services is no exception. However, due to the Watson-driven actionable insights that can be added to the automation systems, IBM seeks to also enhance services quality, reduce time to value and develop solutions that are more powerful. According to TBR’s 2Q16 Global Delivery Benchmark, “Cross-collaboration between product-centric development units with personnel with business domain, IT and procurement knowledge will be critical for vendors to create integrated solutions that can both meet clients’ needs and bolster vendors’ bottom line.”

IBM is in a unique position compared to its servicesled peers to address this challenge, and the “Automation agenda” outlined at World of Watson indicates the company plans to exploit the advantage of its IBM Research capabilities and Watson and analytics IP to transform its service delivery in GBS and GTS.

Recognizing that client adoption of automation remains in varying stages, IBM builds solutions across the automation continuum, from simple desktop automation, to rules-based robotic process automation (RPA), to knowledge-based autonomic process automation, to AI-based cognitive automation. An Automation Innovation Hub applies analytics to data generated through service delivery to find new opportunities to automate or optimize existing processes.

As services peers also ramp up usage of RPA tools such as BluePrism, IPSoft, UiPath and Automation Anywhere, we expect IBM will bet heaviest on its cognitive automation capabilities to differentiate. The IBM Automation with Watson solution connects Watson-enabled cognitive assistants to standard RPA tools through a network of APIs that enable process robots to act on Watson recommendations.

Though still in development, the platform would improve IBM’s competitiveness with peers in business process services, such as Cognizant’s Intelligent Process Automation platform, application management services, such as Accenture’s myWizard platform, and infrastructure services, such as HCLT’s DryIce platform. In the short term, GBS and GTS will each continue to see positive impacts from services automation in their operating margins, each of which improved sequentially in 3Q16 due to productivity gains from recent workforce rebalancing.

PART ONE: Read the post at WRAL TechWire.

(C) TBR