Kate Tickner works for IBM’s Big Data Solutions team and specialises in the Media and Entertainment industry, covering EMEA, with a particular interest in Digital Media. This includes content publishers, marketing solutions providers, broadcasters, advertising ecosystem companies and all entertainment and gaming organisations.
This Q&A is the first of a four-part series of content to be delivered in the run-up to ExchangeWire’s Ad Trading Summit in London on 18th September 2012. The objectives of this series are to describe what IBM corporate and the IBM Big Data practitioners, are seeing in the digital marketing marketplace today and discuss their views on what is coming in the next few years.
IBM is a one of the world’s largest companies – please describe where your group fits in and what are your key product offerings?
As you say, IBM has a very wide product set, but what I’m concerned with is the Big Data portfolio. Even there, IBM has a wide definition of Big Data, because without the ability to integrate data from different systems so they can share data, and without governance to manage the data, the transition from Big Data in silo projects or research projects to enterprise use will be painful.
Part 3 of this interview series will go into more detail about IBM’s Big Data Platform, but at its core we have InfoSphere BigInsights, our Hadoop-based product, to deliver very high volume scale-out analytic processing of structured and unstructured data on low-cost commodity hardware; Data Warehousing with our Netezza product – already in use at Digital Media organisations such as MediaMath, AppNexus, http://exelate.com/, DataLogix and many more. We also uniquely have the capacity to process very high-velocity streaming data with our InfoSphere Streams product.
Who is the target audience?
IBM have solutions for almost every type of business and user, but much of our high-level messaging is targeted at C-level executives including CEOs, CIOs and CMOs. Our Smarter Commerce and Smarter Analytics messaging are very much about using the value of Big Data to be more relevant, particularly for marketers in the age of the digitally connected consumer.
The IBM Institute for Business Value delivers many research pieces that help us to understand this. For example their Executive Report: Beyond Digital – Connecting Media and Entertainment to the Future states that “to satisfy connected consumers, as well as ecosystem partners, digital marketers providers must move ‘beyond digital’ to deliver individualised experiences on demand, at any time. For those in the digital media industry, digitising content and digitally distributing it is no longer enough. Success in the connected landscape will require: a business-to-consumer (B2C) mindset, insight into consumers’ digital personalities, the delivery of relevant, enhanced experiences and the ability to find new ways to monetise content successfully.”
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Global Desk Editor