IBM on Tuesday introduced 3 new cloud-based apps – IBM Concert, Project Catalyst and OpenPages, at the Vision 2014 conference for finance and risk management professionals in Orlando, Fla.
The company’s newly released apps encourage employee interaction with data in the cloud to help them collaborate with others and make business decisions quickly. The apps includes lists personalized based on tasks, analysis and dashboards to make interaction easy.
IBM Concert targets decision makers in the sales, marketing and incentive-compensation fronts with easy access to and processing of budgeting, forecasting, planning software and data. IBM Concert is the brainchild of Vericent, acquired by the company in 2012 from which it gets its sales and compensation management capabilities.
IBM Project Catalyst is based on SPSS modeling and Statistics Analytics server and is yet to debut as an on-premises software. It is specifically designed to chart trends in data to help business users explore and process data into meaningful patterns of trends.
“You just upload your data and Catalyst comes up with suggested visualizations as well as descriptions, in English, of what stands out in the data,” said Erick Brethenoux, IBM director, business analytics & decision management strategy.
IBM OpenPages, offered as a managed service as a part of its SoftLayer, helps with the governance and risk management tasks. OpenPages makes it possible to analyse and recommend corrective actions for issues involving a grand-scale of data.
SoftLayer, acquired in a $2 billion deal by IBM almost a year ago, has been supporting the cloud strategy. The company also announced in January that it will inject $1 billion to expand the SoftLayer architecture and has been using the SoftLayer IP to make a fresh surge into cloud computing.
