Watson Analytics Now Available In Free Beta Mode
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The “Freemium” beta version opens up analytics to non-statisticians in all industries.
IBM has announced it is making a cloud-based “freemium” beta version of its Watson Analytics software available to all, accessible from any desktop or mobile device. More than 22,000 people have registered for the beta.
Watson Analytics is a natural language-based cognitive service that can provide instant access to predictive and visual analytic tools for businesses and industries. According to the press release, “IBM Watson Analytics automates the once time-consuming tasks such as data preparation, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling for business professionals.”
Since mid-September, the software has been available under a closed beta program which now has been expanded to anyone in any industry. Also now available is the Watson Analytics Community user group to facilitate sharing news, best practices, technical support, and training.
Specifically, IBM has opened the Watson Analytics platform up to everyone in a public beta. The analytics platform is meant to make ‘big data’ processing available to people without a statistics degree – in theory, you'll be able to enter a dataset, and Watson will analyze it and produce correlations, predictive analyses, and present the findings in a series of infographics and graphs.
“For instance, Watson Analytics could ingest 20 spreadsheets and data from Salesforce, Teradata, and Oracle systems to start making connections and answering questions in a natural language format,” writes Larry Dignan for ZDNet. “In some respects, IBM is trying to push microanalytics via what it calls a ‘single business analytics experience.’“
Watson Analytics includes a set of self-service tools to source, clean and refine data, conduct predictive analyzes, create various reports to present results, fine-tune the results with additional queries, and collaborate with others, according to IBM.
For more than two years, Watson has been developed and refined through partnerships with early adopters in multiple industries, including medicine where a particular focus has been oncology, with new capabilities recently announced.
In a related story, IBM also announced a new global partnership with Twitter which includes plans to offer Twitter data as part of IBM Watson Analytics.