How does SPSS fit into IBMs “Smarter Planet” strategy?
I don’t know if it’s the economic downturn, but a lot of companies are now looking exclusively at business outcomes. Yes, you need technology and speeds-and-feeds to deliver a business outcome, but companies are very focused on the end game. They will say, “We’re a telco and we need to reduce customer churn. How do we do that?” Or “I’m a police chief and I need to do smart things to reduce crime in my area.” IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy is all about taking the petabytes of new data that gets created every day and mining that for insights to build competitive advantage. SPSS fits in really well because it comes at that challenge from the angle of understanding social behavior. If we have a data-rich environment, we can build a model that can predict what the outcome is likely to be. We can apply different statistical techniques to build multiple models and then find the one that gives us the greatest accuracy. With SPSS, we can go beyond the rear-view mirror and start predicting where
