IBM announces Watson Analytics

In September, IBM announced Watson Analytics, a cloud based service that brings together the technologies that IBM has been percolating for some time. IBM has combined the natural language cognitive computing capabilities that Watson first became known for with predictive and visual analytics tools, all designed to drive value from insights to more users within organizations. IBM’s data refinery services continuously gathers information across data sources, optimizing, enriching and refining the data sets, making the data more useful for analytic exploration and discovery. IBM is tackling the cloud analytics market full on with a freemium model, combined with the ability to deal with large volumes of data with self-service and natural language computing capabilities.