Find out how the combination of business intelligence and predictive analytics can help your organization achieve greater customer intimacy.

Learn how insights from IBM Business Analytics solutions help organizations increase awareness, focus and alignment for better business outcomes.

A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability. Many organizations don't fully appreciate the magnitude of the value creation potential of social business.

In this Advisory, Clabby Analytics looks more closely at the importance of implementing an integrated infrastructure - and its relationship to business analytics. The paper will examine the business analytics workloads, discuss how these workloads put different demands on the underlying systems and infrastructure, and provide guidance designing an integrated business analytics environment that will provide organizations with high performance, resiliency, and a scalable growth path.

Justifying a strategic B2B initiative that reaches beyond the organization's four walls is especially critical. It encompasses integration of your major information systems to give your company the secure foundation needed to collaborate effectively with customers, partners, and suppliers. With so much at stake, the business case will come under rigorous scrutiny from senior executives and business managers at your company. Fortunately, you can significantly increase your chances of approval if you follow these nine steps.

While many IT professionals know that a good reference architecture can improve business performance, many still aren't sure how to pick the right one. And more importantly, a section of these IT pros -- especially those in SMBs -- still don't know how the right reference architecture can speed up their crucial business processes. The best reference architectures can help IT pros deal with the constant demands to implement new workloads, expand existing ones, and keep the current. This IT Managers' Journal is designed to help IT professionals better understand the role the right reference architecture can play in their businesses -- and how they can get the most out of it. The systems profiled in this journal make it easy to meet the demands of the business, propel growth, and help your business gain a competitive edge. Download this IT Manager's Journal to learn more.

This IBM® Redbooks® Solution Guide explains the business and technical value of emerging patterns of expertise in cloud computing, with specific applicability to IBM PureApplication™ System, IBM Workload Deployer, IBM SmartCloud® Orchestrator, and IBM SmartCloud Application Services. It explains how patterns help companies use the different cloud environments that IBM offers.

Opportunities for growth and innovation hinge on your ability to quickly access and analyze business critical information. This e-book highlights how you can maximize performance in your SAP environment, including the 3 must haves:

Analytic accelerators to deliver faster insights
Rapid ROI and lower TCO
Simplicity

Philip Howard of Bloor Research compares performance capabilities of the leading business intelligence platforms. Companies studied in this comparison are IBM® (Cognos, DB2 with BLU Acceleration), SAP (BusinessObjects, HANA), Oracle (Business Intelligence, Exadata) and Microsoft (Business Intelligence, SQL Server). His conclusion: "DB2® with BLU Acceleration should not only provide better performance in the first place, but also provide consistent performance, with a corresponding requirement for less hardware and less cost."

There's no such thing as "the cloud", says this Frost & Sullivan executive brief. It's more useful to think of the cloud as shorthand for a range of service and deployment models. This practical guide offers steps for moving your company into the cloud, at whatever pace you prefer, with a focus on the SmartCloud Services portfolio offered by IBM and its partners. Read the executive brief for usable advice on selecting the right cloud computing vendor to maximize your chance for success–one that allows you to build on your cloud strategy as your company grows.