IBM clients showcase composable business models
Big Blue announces BlueInsight, new data and analytics services
Published April 30, 2014
Enterprises around the globe are reinventing the way they do business and interact with their customers through innovation, real-time insights, and a focus on the market.
“You have to keep the user at the center of everything you do,” explains Marie Wieck, General Manager, Application and Integration Middleware, IBM Software Group.
At IBM’s Impact event in Las Vegas Tuesday, many innovative companies showcased how they are using IBM’s composable business model to connect to customers and drive significant growth in sales. The chocolate company Lindt, for example, has implemented a scalable cloud solution to make its 800 different products more consumable. As a result, the company’s online sales grew 300 percent over the Christmas holiday season.
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington, had 12 million data points from ticket sales and customer interactions, but didn’t have a way to unlock the potential of that data. “With big data and analytics solutions from IBM, they saw a 700 percent growth in online sales and now have insights to open up possibilities on how they optimize their operations across the board,” says Wieck.
Sun Life Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins, in Miami, Florida, is leveraging mobile to create a personalized experience for fans who hold season tickets, including tips about where to park and where to find the shortest lines for food. In addition to making the biggest fans feel special, the stadium realized a 90 percent increase in the efficiency of their operations.
To differentiate its brand from others in the market, electronics retailer hhgregg, Inc. turned to mobile to bring homes to life for its customers.
“As a regional retailer, we can’t be satisfied with being like everyone else,” says Kevin Lyons, Senior Vice President and General Manager of hhgregg, Inc.
The company turned to IBM MobileFirst to align its transformation to digital with its brand transformation with a mission to supply customers with a friction-free shopping experience, whether in the store or on the web, social media or smartphone.
“We had to find a solution that could deliver against our timeframe while allowing us the flexibility to easily move into downloadable apps,” says Lyons. The company brought in a team from PointSource and used Worklight to develop an architecture quickly and with a focus on the customer experience.
With a mobile storefront in place for just five months, hhgregg saw a 30 percent improvement in conversions, and with increased traffic to its site, the company also saw an 80 percent improvement in revenue over that holiday season.
“Better traffic, performance, engagement, revenues—all of this stems from better customer experiences,” Lyons explains.
A composable business is all about changing the way you work and how you integrate across teams, says Wieck. “It’s about connecting your business; integrating your people, processes, data, your assets, your applications, your systems of engagement.”
The key to a composable business is composable processes, she explains. Organizations need to optimize and automate business processes, institutionalize the knowledge of experts, and have a high-performing culture that rewards innovation and change. Technology is the final key; according to IBM, 86 percent of high-performing organizations globally integrate technology across the enterprise.
Competitive advantage also comes from analytics and the ability to act on insights from the data, says Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, Information & Analytics Group at IBM.
IBM’s ability to help organizations realize this potential is through real-time actionable insights, which embraces the Internet of Things and makes business processes smarter, explains Picciano.
Dr. Carolyn McGregor is bringing actionable insights to healthcare data to speed treatment to patients and transform care. In typical critical care units, roughly 1,000 readings a second are logged from signals including the heart, breathing, blood pressure, and blood oxygen. According to McGregor, that’s 19 billion data points a second. With real-time actionable insights, manually logging information on a paper chart is no longer necessary, allowing doctors and other healthcare professionals to conduct evidence-based treatment and prescription writing. This will save lives, she explains, particularly when doctors want to try something new with a patient.
“Real-time actionable insights applied to smarter process and the Internet of Things helps organizations optimize decision making and implement repeatable business outcomes across all applications, all data, and all interactions,” says Picciano. “It’s putting the data and events in context to understand how everything relates and applying analytics and business roles together to gain the best possible insight and make the best possible decision.”
With these concepts in mind, Big Blue is previewing its IBM Operational Decision Management Advanced, which will be available both on the cloud and on premise. “We’re taking business rules, events, predictive analytics and capabilities into one single, easy to operate, integrated platform that will sense changing business conditions and respond to them with predetermined action,” says Picciano. “With predictive analytics, you can analyze past results to determine what normal is and identify patterns and trends to predict what is likely to happen next.”
On Tuesday, IBM also announced additions to its data and analytics services for developers, including geospatial analytics, IBM Informix TimeSeries database, predictive scoring and reporting so developers can easily create sophisticated apps that predict outcomes to help organizations make better business decisions.
To ensure this data really fuels the next generation of applications, IBM announced the technical preview of a new data and analytic service Codenamed BlueInsight, which, according to Picciano, compliments and integrates directly inside Bluemix.
BlueInsight provides a workspace experience designed for business analysts who want to explore new insights and solve business problems much faster. BlueInsight brings together data refinery and catalyst insight.
Insights Magazine is covering IBM Impact all week; read our story on IBM's Impact announcements and check back tomorrow for more on the latest IBM developments.