IBM opened three new analytics centers in
Europe on Sept. 23, strengthening its offerings in the
growing business analytics market.
The announcement follows just days after IBM's
$1.7 billion acquisition of Marlborough, Mass.-based Netezza, a data
warehousing and analytics appliance vendor. Last week, IBM also acquired OpenPages,
another Massachusetts company
with an analytics package designed to help companies identify and manage risk.
"Today business leaders need to move beyond intuition to a more
predictive decision making capability and more certainty about business
outcomes," said Adam Klaber, general manager of IBM
Global Business Services, in a statement.
The new centers are in Zurich, Switzerland;
Budapest, Hungary;
and Vienna, Austria,
and will focus on a variety of markets, including logistics, financial
services, public safety, telecommunications and transportation. All the centers
are expected to open by the end of 2010.
The center in Zurich will focus
on financial services and public sector analytics and will be located on the
campus of IBM's current Zurich
research lab, in close proximity with IBM
scientists specializing in business optimization and data analytics.
The center will initially work on risk and fraud analytics, financial
analytics, brand and reputation analytics, marketing optimization, enterprise
business analytics strategy, and traffic management. The center will also
partner with local governments as part of the company's "Smarter
Cities" program to improve city infrastructures.
Budapest will focus on green
infrastructure and transportation, as well as function as a career recruitment
center for students interested in business optimization and operations
research. Housed at ELTE
University, the Center for Applied
Mathematics will focus on infrastructure, transportation, telecommunications
and logistics. Vienna will focus on
energy grids, supply chain optimization, strategy management, planning
optimization and Smarter Cities.
IBM has seven other advanced analytics
solution centers worldwide, two of which are in Europe.
Located in Berlin, Beijing,
London, New York,
Dallas, Tokyo
and Washington,
D.C., the global analytics network has more than 6000 IBM
consultants dedicated to data analytics.
"These new centers will allow our clients to collaborate with IBM
on systems that see patterns in vast amounts of data, extract critical
insights, and deliver a new level of enterprise intelligence," said Klaber
in the statement.
IBM predicts it will report $16 billion
in business analytics and optimization revenue by 2015. While the number sounds
lofty, IBM has been throwing a lot of money
at its analytics business over the past four years to meet that goal. In
addition to investing $12 billion and opening up analytics centers worldwide,
the company has completed 23 analytics-related acquisitions, including Web
analytics software and services provider Coremetrics,
business intelligence software provider Cognos, statistical software giant SPSS
and the most recent, Netezza. The company is already seeing growth in the area
as its software and service analytics revenue grew 14 percent in the second
quarter of this year.
Oracle is IBM's biggest competitor in this
market, but the Redwood City, Calif.-based company hasn't been on the kind of
spending spree in the analytics sector to match IBM's.
A former IBM partner, Netezza makes data
warehouse appliances using IBM BladeCenter
blade servers and IBM software that are fast
and easy to deploy.
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