IBM pushes automation, NLP in Cognos Analytics 11.1 update
IBM has added a host of AI-powered tools to its BI platform, Cognos Analytics, to enable more advanced analytics, while at the same time making the platform easier for consumers to use, the company said.
The new Cognos Analytics 11.1 platform features include an AI assistant, pattern detection, visualization recommendations, enhanced storytelling tools, and more advanced analytics and predictive analytics capabilities.
The update, revealed in a Sept. 27 IBM blog post, represents a “big investment,” said Greg Adams, vice president of IBM Business Analytics, in an interview. The new tools, beyond adding more advanced capabilities, also make the platform easier to use for nondata-oriented employees and citizen data scientists — a class of users that has been growing rapidly.
The new features in Cognos Analytics 11.1 make “the platform much easier to use to generate insights, especially the natural language search, which allows users to have real conversations with the data,” said Wayne Eckerson, founder and principal consultant at Eckerson Group. “It automates data preparation and data modeling tasks, so analysts can focus more on insights. It also auto-generates insights based on a field of interest selected by a user, using algorithms to tease out key drivers of a metric, for instance,” he continued. Still, Eckerson noted, these are features that “all the BI vendors are racing to incorporate.” “Some are a little bit ahead of others, but most will end up in the same place in 18 months. IBM is [in the] middle of the pack, which is a tad surprising, given their Watson heritage,” he said. Earlier this year, BI software vendor Alteryx Inc. released Alteryx 2018.3, which added enhanced visualization capabilities and set the stage for future updates that are said to increase the platform’s augmented intelligence and smart capabilities. Tableau also made a move to add more automation to its platforms this year with the acquisition of MIT startup Empirical Systems. The startup worked on a platform to automatically model data for analysis, and it provides predictive insights into that data — features that Tableau noted it will work to add into its own platforms. Cognos Analytics 11.1 enables quick comparisons of two visualizations in a new exploration tool.
