Datawatch Corporation announced it has teamed with IBM to deliver better and faster data access and self-service data preparation to IBM Watson Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics users. As part of this agreement, IBM will resell Datawatch Monarch, Datawatch’s market-leading self-service data preparation solution, which enables business analysts to rapidly access, manipulate and blend data from the widest variety of sources.
Self-service data preparation is one of the key components in an effective analytics strategy; however in many instances an organization’s source data is diverse and rarely presents itself in a form that is accessible or in the format needed to perform analytics. Data sources come in a wide range of report formats, which often require IT intervention to make it usable to the average line of business user or citizen analyst. In fact, business analysts and data scientists typically spend up to 80 percent1 of their time manually preparing data, and it’s estimated that only 12 percent2 of enterprise data is used today to make decisions.
With Datawatch Monarch, IBM Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics users can now rapidly prepare data from virtually any information source, from traditional databases to multi-structured documents, such as PDF and text reports, Web pages, JSON and log files that had previously been locked away. Data can now be prepared for analysis in a fraction of the time that it takes using spreadsheets and other manually-intensive measures.
Many organizations still do not have access to the underlying data needed for critical business insights and as a result are spending entirely too much time preparing data and not enough time analyzing,” said Marc Altshuller, Vice President, Watson Analytics and Business Intelligence, IBM Analytics. “The ability to simply send data accessed and prepared in Datawatch directly to Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics will enable businesses to quickly select any data source and automatically convert it into structured data for analysis. This will not only expedite time to insight, but it increases the likelihood of uncovering new insights that have the potential to transform the business.”
Additional features of Datawatch Monarch for Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics include:
- Simple data preparation – Drop a file or document on a prep canvas, and data is instantly available in rows and columns. More than 80 pre-built functions are available to transform and manipulate data with simple mouse clicks.
- Disparate data integration – Quickly combine dissimilar data using a joint analysis recommendation engine with fuzzy matching.
- Sharing and automation – Achieve transparency and reuse leveraging data preparation steps that are automatically saved in human-readable format.
- Security and information governance – Leverage features such as data masking to protect sensitive information, including patient names and social security numbers, and meet regulatory requirements.
The Fauquier Bank, established in 1902, is an independent, locally-owned community bank offering a full range of financial services for commercial and retail customers including internet banking, insurance, wealth management and financial planning based in Virginia.
Datawatch has increased the use of information throughout the organization. Before this, it was inconceivable to bring data from different areas into one data set that could be used for security, marketing, audits and other business line decisions that would directly impact the bottom line,” said Janet Grimsley, Vice President, Decision Support. “The new relationship with IBM Watson Analytics extends the value by delivering powerful predictive analytics capabilities using simple natural language queries.”
Southeastern Med is an acute healthcare center serving some 4,000 inpatients and 100,000 outpatients. Similarly, they use Datawatch to access and prepare data from previously inaccessible sources like PDF reports to provide a more comprehensive understanding of their business and conform to regulatory requirements.
Datawatch’s intuitive self-service data preparation technology was specifically designed for the everyday business user and is a perfect complement to IBM’s modern business intelligence system,” said Michael Morrison, president and CEO of Datawatch. “Users can now spend their time in high-value analytic activities and harness the full power of IBM’s cognitive capabilities to derive new insights that have the potential to innovate and transform their business.”
1 Forrester Blog, 3 Ways Data Preparation Tools Help You Get Ahead Of Big Data, February 2015
2 The Forrester Wave(TM): Big Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014
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