IBM Watson Analytics: First impression
Statistics is boring but computationally intensive. Hence for a long time, data warehousing and business intelligence (DWH & BI) was a specialized job. The contradiction being - folks who could understand pattern in data (business users) didn't know how to mine it; on the other hand, folks who could crunch data (engineers) didn't know what to look for. Needless to say, anybody who could do both were looked up as wizards (Excel wizard!!). People learnt to live with it by compromising on a standard set of reports. IBM Watson Analytics aims to change this. It's a cloud based predictive analytics application. The cloud platform gives it the number crunching prowess resulting in instantaneous feedback. The beautifully designed application brings out the most important information out of humungous data at once. Further analysis can be done using drag-n-drop making analytics a playful exercise. After spending a couple of hours on the beta application, I must admit an