Zementis, Inc. and IBM Corporation (NYSE: IBM) today announced a joint strategic initiative and corresponding technology solution, “Zementis for IBM z Systems”, designed for companies seeking to optimize business decisions and formulate those decisions faster.
The solution seeks to unlock the full potential of an organization’s data assets by integrating predictive analytics capabilities directly into transactional data flows that drive business processes.
The joint offering combines Zementis’ solution for high-speed development, deployment and operation of predictive analytics models with IBM z Systems, a family of next-generation mainframe computing platforms that help organizations reinvent enterprise IT to become digital businesses. Zementis for IBM z Systems enhances IBM’s capabilities by integrating predictive analytics directly into core business processes, delivering timely predictive insights directly to the point of maximum business impact.
Predictive analytics plays a key role in uncovering patterns and nuances that would have been difficult or impossible to discern without data science. Insights from predictive analytics on data allow organizations to develop informed, accurate perspectives on future outcomes and make insight-driven decisions with a high degree of confidence.
“To gain a real competitive advantage, companies today need advanced analytics executed with even greater speed,” said Ross Mauri, General Manager, IBM z Systems. “IBM’s partnership with Zementis provides an analytic solution that delivers insights to a company when it matters most –- during the transaction process. This opens a multitude of new possibilities for positively affecting the business outcome, including real-time fraud detection, risk avoidance, prevention of improper payments and even tailored offers for customers while they are shopping or checking out.”
Zementis for IBM z Systems integrates enterprise-grade predictive analytics into the IBM z Systems z/OS data lifecycle ecosystem. The joint solution represents a family of certified products that enable exceptionally fast operational deployment and embedded scoring functionality of predictive models in key transaction environments, including but not limited to CICS and WebSphere for z/OS.
By integrating analytics and transaction processing which increases customer value with every interaction, organizations can:
- Increase business agility, via accurate insights delivered at the right time and point of impact
- Improve data governance and security, via integrated software, hardware and business processes
- Reduce infrastructure cost and complexity, via streamlined architecture and business processes
The solution achieves these results by:
- Driving timely and relevant insights via in-line predictive analytics
- Maintaining the integrity of supported business processes via in-transaction processing
- Scoring thousands of data records per second, scaling with business needs to enable instant decisions
- Improving performance and cost efficiency by reducing or eliminating movement of data off-platform to conduct analysis
- Maximizing the value of existing IT infrastructure to drive capital efficiency
- Enhancing governance and security, not just of the data, but also of the predictive analytics
- Broadening consistency and assuring compatibility across data mining tools with PMML industry standard
Dr. Michael Zeller, Chief Executive Officer of Zementis, commented that “IBM has consistently demonstrated thought leadership in the field of data science, and the concept of embedding enterprise-grade predictive analytics directly into business processes via the underlying mainframe computing platforms is a brilliant and powerful move that has the potential to achieve dramatic results for organizations using IBM z Systems. IBM is taking the next step at closing a key gap that many organizations face; namely, the gap between driving high-volume transactions, running predictive analytics on that transaction data and making rapid business decisions based on the resulting insights. Organizations increasingly face market expectations that they apply predictive analytics to their real-time transactions to drive accurate and timely insights, and that those insights in turn drive business processes that shape the customer experience and market outcomes. This capability is no longer optional for world-class organizations, and Zementis for IBM z Systems helps make this possible as a repeatable, high-quality process.”
The solution will be generally available in August 2015.