Business Analytics Updates for June 14th

Greetings. It’s been an incredibly busy few weeks for me with lot’s of travel through Asia. The IBM Finance Forum events for that region were kicked off last Wednesday. I was pleasantly surprised by the huge number of finance professionals that joined the events in Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai. As I am still recovering from a serious jet lag, here are some short and pointed news for this week.

• IBM Innovations in Smarter Analytics Launch event: Make sure to register for the June 19th launch event. IBM Business Analytics will launch and present a bunch of really exciting and cool new capabilities. The big focus will be on Analytical Decision Management. This is an area that combines predictive analytics, business rules and business intelligence. Using analytical decision management, you can optimize and automate transactional decisions by combining predictive models, rules, scoring and optimization techniques. Very cool stuff! There are also a bunch of updates to other products such as Cognos Express and SPSS Modeler. This is a virtual event and you can attend from your desk. Make sure to register today.

• Winning CFOs: Thought-leader David Parmenter just traveled with me through Asia and spoke at the different Finance Forum events. The audiences loved his keynote presentation that was based on his new book Winning CFOs: Implementing and Applying Better Practices. The book provides a great amount of hands-on best practices. If you are working in the finance department, you should no miss this book! If you want to see David live in action you can register for some of the other Finance Forum events that are scheduled for late summer.

• European Soccer Cup 2012: If you love soccer, make sure to watch all the exciting games that are happening this month. It’s been an interesting tournament so far. As a business analytics guy, I love to check out the statistics for the match. You can find some interesting information on the official site.

All the best,

Christoph