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IBM Unveils Cognitive Exploration to Drive Better Business Outcomes(M2 PressWIRE Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) LAS VEGAS, N.V. - IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced the availability of a cognitive-infused Watson Explorer , a powerful combination of data exploration and content analytics capabilities. Typical organizations only use 12 percent of their data?, leaving a wealth of untapped information across the enterprise that could be leveraged to make smarter decisions. Watson Explorer equips users with the information and analytics capabilities which can help them to deliver better performance and real-time results. Watson Explorer has enabled hundreds of customers to connect with their data, build information-centric applications and helped them to improve the quality and speed of their decision making. With today's announcement, Watson Explorer advances core cognitive components by providing organizations the ability to quickly use natural language processing capabilities and data exploration to discover valuable business information in both structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer advances data exploration by bringing cognitive capabilities, providing users with a 360-degree view of contextually relevant information to offer deeper levels of insight, showing what is happening and why. Unlike traditional search solutions that fail to provide context, trends and relationships, Watson Explorer can help professionals find and understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain more insights from their unstructured content and realize their objectives of improving business outcomes. New Watson Explorer features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving users a view into structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a Watson journey. Today's business environment demands an ability to make high quality decisions more quickly than ever before, against a rapidly expanding set of inputs. Enterprise data and applications are typically siloed and lack the information sharing capacity to facilitate better employee performance. Take, for example, a customer service representative at a global retailer. Hundreds of billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during which an average customer service representative interfaces with over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate the information and respond to the customer all in real-time -- a monumental undertaking. When a customer calls with questions, representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent experience for their customer due to challenges finding, organizing, analyzing and correlating the right information for that specific customer at that moment. Cognitive exploration can enhance a user's ability to use information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It does this by providing information and understanding from relevant sources, much like a human would. With Watson Explorer, for example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured. Watson Explorer's content analytics feature leverages the power of natural language processing to enable organizations to extract meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social media, legal documents and research reports "Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of valuable information to help organizations make critical business decisions," said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group. "We are continually looking for ways to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable information often locked in structured and unstructured data." The Power of Cognitive Exploration Exploration enables users to uncover new possibilities. But exploration in complex, heterogeneous environments present unique challenges with massive volumes of data spread across a variety of sources and a limited ability to understand the connections that exist in the data. To speed the time, Watson Explorer connects information from a range of internal and external sources, analyzes that content and looks for underlying relationships or patterns that help interpret information. "We've put Watson Explorer in the hands of our call center agents to equip them with a 360-degree view of the information they need, including self-performance reports and other analytics," said Farouk Ferchichi, Corporate Manger, Toyota Financial Services. "With over four million customers, we recognize the importance of top-notch service and are committed to actively maintaining customer satisfaction. Watson Explorer gives agents the ability to get detailed metrics on their performance to identify strengths and focus areas to improve." Watson Explorer will enable customers like Toyota Financial Services to maximize business opportunities by providing frontline workers with a more holistic view of their information landscape. Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal offerings: IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing IBM Watson represents a new era of computing in which apps and systems interact with human users more naturally, augment our knowledge with Big Data insights, and learn to improve how they assist us. Fueled by innovation from a mission to transform industries and professions, Watson is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the new era of computing, evidenced by an unmatched demonstration of what cognitive systems can bring to transform decision-making. IBM is delivering a range of cloud-based products and services to clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, retail and education. In January, 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. The move signifies a strategic shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover insights from massive amounts of Big Data. IBM is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research and bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market. This includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM's ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps made with Watson. For more information on IBM Watson, visit: www.ibmwatson.com To join the social discussion about Watson, include the hashtag #ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTube and Flickr . Check out the IBM Watson press kit at: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss ? Forrester Research: Can You Give The Business The Data That It Needs?, November 13, 2013 Contact(s) information Kathleen Tyler UK External Relations 44-(0)7771 976255 [email protected] . (c) 2014 M2 COMMUNICATIONS |