LAS VEGAS, Oct. 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM)
today announced the availability of a cognitive-infused Watson
Explorer, a powerful combination of data exploration and content
analytics capabilities. Typical organizations only use 12 percent
of their data1, leaving a wealth of untapped information
across the enterprise that could be leveraged to make smarter
decisions. Watson Explorer equips users with the information and
analytics capabilities which can help them to deliver better
performance and real-time results. Watson Explorer has enabled
hundreds of customers to connect with their data, build
information-centric applications and helped them to improve the
quality and speed of their decision making. With today's
announcement, Watson Explorer advances core cognitive components by
providing organizations the ability to quickly use natural language
processing capabilities and data exploration to discover valuable
business information in both structured and unstructured data.
Watson Explorer advances data exploration by bringing cognitive
capabilities, providing users with a 360-degree view of
contextually relevant information to offer deeper levels of
insight, showing what is happening and why. Unlike traditional
search solutions that fail to provide context, trends and
relationships, Watson Explorer can help professionals find and
understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain
more insights from their unstructured content and realize their
objectives of improving business outcomes. New Watson Explorer
features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving
users a view into structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer
provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise
proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a
Watson journey.
Today's business environment demands an ability to make high
quality decisions more quickly than ever before, against a rapidly
expanding set of inputs. Enterprise data and applications are
typically siloed and lack the information sharing capacity to
facilitate better employee performance. Take, for example, a
customer service representative at a global retailer. Hundreds of
billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during
which an average customer service representative interfaces with
over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between
different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate
the information and respond to the customer all in real-time – a
monumental undertaking. When a customer calls with questions,
representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent
experience for their customer due to challenges finding,
organizing, analyzing and correlating the right information for
that specific customer at that moment.
Cognitive exploration can enhance a user's ability to use
information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It
does this by providing information and understanding from relevant
sources, much like a human would. With Watson Explorer, for
example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural
language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled
from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured.
Watson Explorer's content analytics feature leverages the power of
natural language processing to enable organizations to extract
meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social
media, legal documents and research reports
"Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of
valuable information to help organizations make critical business
decisions," said Stephen Gold, vice
president, IBM Watson Group. "We are continually looking for ways
to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a
difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom
line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at
every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable
information often locked in structured and unstructured data."
The Power of Cognitive Exploration
Exploration enables users to uncover new possibilities. But
exploration in complex, heterogeneous environments present unique
challenges with massive volumes of data spread across a variety of
sources and a limited ability to understand the connections that
exist in the data. To speed the time, Watson Explorer connects
information from a range of internal and external sources, analyzes
that content and looks for underlying relationships or patterns
that help interpret information.
- Explore - Watson Explorer combines content and data from many
different systems throughout the enterprise and public sources and
presents it to users based on their role and current activities,
which can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent looking for
information, and increasing their ability to work smarter. In
today's information-rich environment, few important tasks can be
completed with information from a single source—whether the task is
to assist a customer, plan a marketing strategy for a new product
or investigate a security breach. Watson Explorer brings data and
analytics from many sources, as well as relevant cognitive insights
to a user's desktop or mobile device, in a context-appropriate
manner to enable them work with confidence.
- Analyze - For many organizations, the growing volume of
unstructured data represents untapped business opportunities.
Documents, e-mail messages, call center transcripts and social
media are examples of the kinds of content that may yield a wealth
of insights that can help improve business performance if gathered
and analyzed by the right tools. Watson Explorer's content
analytics capabilities enable users to uncover trends, patterns and
correlations from unstructured information using natural language
processing technology, delivering insights in hours or days rather
than or weeks or months. Those insights are then available to users
in real-time as a 360-degree view.
- Interpret - Watson Explorer provides the ability to integrate a
growing list of IBM Watson Developer Cloud services for an enhanced
experience leveraging the combined strength of exploration,
analytic and cognitive capabilities. As new capabilities are
developed by IBM and exposed in the Watson Developer Cloud, they
will be made available to qualified Watson Explorer users who
license the Watson Developer Cloud services. The available services
for integration with Watson Explorer at the time of release are:
Question Answer, User Modeling, Relationship Extraction, Message
Resonance, Concept Expansion, Language Identification and Machine
Translation.
"We've put Watson Explorer in the hands of our call center
agents to equip them with a 360-degree view of the information they
need, including self-performance reports and other analytics," said
Farouk Ferchichi, Corporate Manger,
Toyota Financial Services. "With over four million customers, we
recognize the importance of top-notch service and are committed to
actively maintaining customer satisfaction. Watson Explorer gives
agents the ability to get detailed metrics on their performance to
identify strengths and focus areas to improve."
Watson Explorer will enable customers like Toyota Financial
Services to maximize business opportunities by providing frontline
workers with a more holistic view of their information
landscape.
Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal
offerings:
- Enterprise Edition provides search and 360-degree information
applications across multiple sources, as well as the ability of
qualified customers to license cognitive services from the Watson
Developer Cloud to help enhance, scale, and accelerate human
expertise.
- Advanced Edition includes all of the capabilities of Enterprise
Edition plus advanced content mining and content analytics to help
organizations take the next step with advanced content mining and
analytics capabilities to aggregate, analyze and visualize massive
amounts of unstructured content to expose new insights.
IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
IBM Watson represents a new era of computing in which apps and
systems interact with human users more naturally, augment our
knowledge with Big Data insights, and learn to improve how they
assist us.
Fueled by innovation from a mission to transform industries and
professions, Watson is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the
new era of computing, evidenced by an unmatched demonstration of
what cognitive systems can bring to transform decision-making. IBM
is delivering a range of cloud-based products and services to
clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance,
retail and education.
In January, 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson Group, a new
business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing
cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. The move signifies a strategic
shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services and apps
that think, improve by learning, and discover insights from massive
amounts of Big Data.
IBM is investing $1 billion into
the Watson Group, focusing on development and research and bringing
cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market. This
includes $100 million available for
venture investments to support IBM's ecosystem of start-ups and
businesses building cognitive apps made with Watson.
For more information on IBM Watson, visit: www.ibmwatson.com
To join the social discussion about Watson, include the hashtag
#ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTube and
Flickr.
Check out the IBM Watson press kit at:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss
1 Forrester Research: Can You Give The Business
The Data That It Needs?, November 13,
2013
Contact:
Katy Rosati
(973) 698-6954
krosati@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM