IBM to Invest $100 Million to Further Watson-Like Technology
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest computer-services provider, plans to invest $100 million exploring how companies can mine data like its game show-winning machine Watson does.
The company will use the money for research in the next two to three years, studying how to find trends among words or sentences scattered around the Web. The company will sift through user information on sites like Facebook and Twitter, said Rod Smith, vice president of emerging Internet technologies at IBM.
“I need to harvest parts of that information to improve my products if I’m a business,” Smith said in an interview. “The problem is, finding your product is like finding a needle in a haystack, and that’s where analytics comes in.”
By 2015, IBM projects $16 billion in revenue from business analytics and optimization, one of Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano’s focus areas for sales growth. The amount of data in enterprises is estimated to increase by more than 650 percent in the next five years, and 80 percent of it will be unstructured, or information in the form of words, sentences and video streams, according to research firm Gartner Inc.
IBM, based in Armonk, New York, used the same technology in Watson, its computer that bested humans to win the game show Jeopardy! The machine understands words and sentences rather than the formatted data computers normally process, according to IBM.
Insight From Data
The process can be used elsewhere, for example, to sift through user complaints about software malfunctions and to discover problematic trends, said Steven Sams, a vice president in IBM’s global technology services. It could also tell a business which of its applications are easiest to move to the "cloud," or delivered over the Internet, versus those that might not be worth it, he said.
The company is beefing up some of its products with data capabilities and has added the technology to 20 services that help executives utilize their firms’ information. In a 2011 IBM study, 83 percent of 3,000 chief information officers surveyed said applying analytics to IT operations was the “most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years,” according to IBM.
“Businesses have been frustrated,” Sams said. “They’ve got hundreds and thousands of pieces of data, and they’re trying to get some insight out of it.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Danielle Kucera in New York at dkucera6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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