IBM Watson Analytics brings new level of natural language understanding to businesses

IBM has unveiled its Watson Analytics service that serves as a natural language-based cognitive offering to 

bring access to predictive and visual analytics tools that businesses of today require.

The first release of the cloud-based service comes as a freemium version that offers a full-range of self-

service analytics that bring easy-to-use data refinement and warehousing to allow business users to acquire 

and prepare data that goes beyond simple spreadsheets.

“Watson Analytics is designed to help all business people – from sales reps on the road to company CEOs – see patterns, pursue ideas and improve all types of decisions,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, 

Information and Analytics Group, IBM.

Watson Analytics works as an all round tool that brings together self-service enterprise data and analytics 

capabilities under one cloud-based roof. Business professionals identify a problem to which Watson then 

sources data, cleans and refines it before discovering insights, predicting outcomes, visualising results, 

creating reports, and collaborating with others.

One of the pioneering features is its ability to understand natural language, interpret it and then produce 

results that explain why things are happening and also what is likely to happen in the future in familiar business terms.

Watson Analytics features predictive analytics at its heart in order to find key relevant facts and uncover patterns and relationships that cannot be foreseen, in turn bringing new questions to the table and pointing users to parts of the business that matter most.

It automates steps like data preparation, predictive analysis and visual storytelling for professionals across data hungry activities such as marketing, sales, operations, finance and human resources to make businesses more efficient.

"We have eliminated the barrier between the answers they seek, the analytics they want and the data in the form they need. The combination of Watson-fuelled analytics to magnify human cognition, the vast potential of big data, and cloud-scale delivery to PCs, smart phones and other devices is transformational,” Picciano added.

IBM has successfully used Watson’s supercomputing power in a number of different disciplines recently including the fight against cancer and cloud analytics at the Wimbledon tennis championships.