IBM's furious Analytics aquisitions

Is anyone keeping up with IBM and their propensity to obtain Analytics based companies?  Let's see if we can do a recap of IBM in the news in the last couple of years. 

• Acquires COGNOS for $5.0 billion in November 2007
• Acquires ILOG for $0.34 billion in July 2008
• Acquires SPSS for $1.2 billion in the same month July 2008
• Acquires Netezza for $1.7 billion in September 2010

In actuality there is an estimated $12 billion dollars of 23 Analytics based companies that IBM has acquired in the last few years.  That is quite a leap for a hardware/software/IT company.  IEOR Tools has talked about IBM's emergence as an analytics company before with new analytic centers and acquisitions.  I think its safe to assume that IBM is the de-facto analytics champion in the world right now.

So what does this mean for Operations Research and their professionals?  I believe it means the sky is the limit now.  This is a grand opportunity for the Operations Research community.  In fact I would even say that if INFORMS does not take advantage of the recent demand for analytics and decision sciences then they are missing this big picture.  Jobs should be plentiful in the foreseeable future.  There should be plenty of work to keep management happy and help drive value into organizations.  This may even be the dawn of a new day for Operations Research and Analytics.  There is so much buzz now it will leave a ringing in your ears.  Sure I might be a little optimistic but I think any news is good news right now in this economy.

I also believe that IBM is not done.  I think IBM is going to evolve even more in the Analytics realm.  Perhaps getting more involved in the software within Operations Research and statistics.  Its just a guess but who knows if SAS, Matlab, or even contributing to open source projects like R, RapidMiner  or Weka.  This is an exciting time none of the less for Operations Research. 

Eight Data Mining Social Networking Groups

 
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Networking is an essential part of career management for any professional.  The relationships we develop can have great impact on our career direction and growth.  I tell young professionals all the time that their best asset in career growth is their professional network.  I tell them to start early and maintain the network continually.  The advent of LinkedIn and other internet social networking sites has made that task easier.

Vincent Granville at AnalyticBridge.com has compiled a list of 8 data mining social networking groups with more than 2000 members.  These groups are easy to become as member as all of them are associated with LinkedIn.  If anyone is finding anyone in the data mining community more than likely they will be a member in these groups.

I have found a couple of different jobs through LinkedIn in the past.  I have found hiring managers as well as peers that I would be potentially working with closely.  I found that to be a great benefit before the interview process.  In fact I even would contact some of the peers in the group to get a pre-interview idea of where I was working and the idiosyncrasies of the organization.  The important thing is using your professional network to maximize your career productivity.

OpenGamma startup claims Open Source Financial Analytics

According to h-online.com a new startup firm, OpenGamma, is preparing to launch its Open Source Financial Analytics solutions.  OpenGamma is a London based firm that will specialize in risk management and financial markets by providing software architecture.  From the article, this is a quote from the CEO Kyle Wylie

"Our goal in building OpenGamma isn't just to build an open source technology" said Wylie, "Our goal is to build the best platform for financial analytics and risk management possible". The platform will be made available under a "commercial friendly open source licence"

OpenGamma is going to provide several solutions based on its Open Architecture software platform.  According to their website they will be providing batch risk systems, commercial trading, bespoke trading, and event-driven alert systems.  The companies main moniker and selling point is that all of their software code with be Open.  This means that companies will have the flexibility to not only debug but potential contribute back to the project, in theory.

This sounds like a brave yet prudent business venture.  I think OpenGamma could be wildly successful with their Open Architecture platform.  They can be especially successful if they allow the financial analytics community to contribute back to their software platforms.  I believe we will be seeing more companies and startups like this in the future in Analytics.  Perhaps there is an Open Source Operations Research platform on the horizon.

U.S. SEC endorses Python to fix financial problems

News from PCWorld is mentioning that ActivePython, the software distrbution from ActiveState, is going to include numerical, scientific, and optimization software with its current software bundle.  The numerical and optimization software it is going to include is Python based NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib.  All of the new software is open source and available for free download.

Apparently this is in anticipation to the new U.S. financial rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  On April 7, 2010 the U.S. S.E.C. proposed new rules for Asset-Backed Securities that will enable the markets to run efficiently and fairly.  On the first page of the released documents from the S.E.C. they mention the use of Python.  That is a nice shocker to us open source advocates.

Python is a great computing language.  It is really easy to learn compared to the other languages such as C.  Perhaps the U.S. S.E.C. thought it would be the best choice because of its ease of use and abundance of software packages.  This is really interesting news and hopefully we will be hearing more about it in the near future.

Algorithms and Wall Street

The crazy events of Wall Street last week sent off a huge wave of confusion as to the events that led to the sudden drop in stock prices. At first it was thought to be a "fat finger" that cause the decline of major stock indexes. Now the focus is on the large trading farms of computers that are said to make trades by specific rules and algorithms. Now there is a question as to what are the underlying algorithms that these computers are trading. What was thought to be a no brainer of setting trades at the speed of electrons to make a more efficient market is now all being thrown into question.

I do not claim to understand the rules or algorithms that are programmed into these trading computers. Wall Street trading is not my area of expertise. Although I am curious at this overall crisis and how it could be the result of supposed computer rules. The U.S. government is interested also as they are investigating what caused the sudden drop. Can algorithms imposed to trade on a whim cause that much market capitalization to drop out so suddenly. There are claims that market values dropped by nearly 100% on long established companies like Accenture.

I'm definitely going to be following this story closely. I'm curious what the SEC is going to find in their investigation. I'm going to reserve my opinions until more facts are brought forth. Perhaps we may never really know what caused this crisis. I would hope that it is something the Operations Research community could learn. We know that algorithms can be developed to provide great benefits to people and organizations. Yet we hardly ever hear of the times when they can cause great trouble. We can learn from those bad implementations of algorithms. Usually at the heart of it is not so much a bad algorithm but the underlying assumptions of the model. We should know this all to well with the recent mortgage crisis. Perhaps this road to recovery out of this current recession is going to take a lot more time than we thought.

Business Intelligence one of hottest skills for 2010

Computerworld takes a look at the main needs for 2010 and finds that Business Intelligence will be a hot skill. This article is mainly about the IT world but it reflects a growing need for data transformation and data mining in business today. There is a lot that goes into Business Intelligence other than just setting up an enterprise ready database system. The article mentions that there will be a need for analysis and decision making. From the article...

More important than a BI expert, though, are programmer/analysts who can relate the nitty-gritty of data tables, database joins and data structure to business requirements. "That's what I'm finding is more valuable to us at this stage in getting BI established and used by the business

Data analysis and processing information is only going to grow in this data rich economy. Organizations are going to be looking for people who can not just sift through the data but also relate it to business decision analysis. I believe that Operations Research could really see a "re-birth" if you will. I'm going to be looking forward to 2010.

IBM buys SPSS analytics company

IBM is going further into the business analytics field with the acquisition of SPSS for $1.2 billion as reported by the Wall Street Journal. From the article, IBM is expanding its business analytics focus as the demand increases from its customers for decision-based analysis. On the forefront of client's needs is to cut costs.

This is really interesting and should really boost recognition to field of Operations Research. IBM seems to be positioning itself as the world leader in business analytics. The article says that business analytics is going to grow by 4% to $25 billion world-wide market for the year.