IBM Offers Enterprise Search For BI

IBM on Monday unveiled software that combines business intelligence applications with search for structured and unstructured information within an enterprise.

The WebSphere Content Discovery for Business Intelligence is meant to overcome the limitations of BI products that can only analyze and report on structured data typically stored in relational databases.

The IBM software can search comments, descriptions and note fields typically found in business applications for users to enter more details about a claim, a problem or a transaction. In addition, it can search Web pages on corporate intranets, documents, audio and video.

By combining unstructured information with BI, the new product, for example, could extract data from call center and warranty notes and make it available for use with BI-generated quantity, sales and return rates for products, IBM said. Together the information could help uncover reasons why return rates are high.

The new product delivers in search results information from BI systems, including reports, scorecards and dashboards. The information, therefore, is made available to employees who don't normally access BI tools, but could benefit from the additional information. Those employees could include marketers, engineers, technicians, analysts, sales and customer service agents.

The IBM product leverages the open source Unstructured Information Management Architecture, a framework for connecting different text analytics modules that help identify and extract specific business information from unstructured data. This capability can be used in creating new types of reports and analysis, or be made available as a service to rules processing engines or other business applications to deliver information on demand.

The software can also display within BI applications contracts, spreadsheets, project plans, scanned images, audio, video, email and other correspondence, to provide context for business decisions. BI vendor Cognos Inc. has integrated the IBM product with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

WebSphere Content Discovery for Business Intelligence is available this week from IBM and IBM partners.

yahoo.com/