Datawatch Corporation
Facilitating Self-service Data Prep for IBM Watson Analytics

Since the advent of analytic platforms, such as IBM Watson Analytics, organizations’ outlook towards big data has changed tremendously. Rather than dreading the rapid boom in data volume, data scientists, and business users can now leverage Watson Analytics, and other similar tools, to turn their data into intelligence that drives decision-making and business value. As a result, a world of new opportunities, once hidden beneath debris of datasets, has emerged.

Watson Analytics uses natural language processing and machine learning capabilities to sift through large volumes of text and data. It notices the nuances of vocabulary, meaning and context, and then ranks potential responses for users to select. However, to yield maximum ROI from Watson Analytics’ capabilities, organizations must feed their data into a structured, analysis-ready format. The process of collecting, manipulating and blending data from a variety of sources and preparing it for analysis is known as data prep. Research has found that analysts spend up to 80 percent of their time manually preparing data, which does not leave many hours in the day for them to perform analysis.

To solve this challenge, Datawatch Corporation [NASDAQ-CM: DWCH] helps data analysts and business users prep less and analyze more–and has been doing so for years. Datawatch Monarch, Datawatch’s self-service data prep platform, enables users to easily and rapidly access, manipulate and blend data from virtually any source and prepare it for data analysis. In March, Datawatch and IBM teamed to deliver better and faster data access and self-service data prep to IBM Watson Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics users.

“Datawatch Monarch enables business users to prepare their data and bring it into modern analytics environments like IBM Watson Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics,” said Dan Potter, Chief Marketing Officer, Datawatch. “With our platform, users can drastically reduce their data prep time by quickly and easily acquiring and preparing data locked away in previously inaccessible multi-structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources, such as PDF and text reports, web pages, JSON and log files.

Datawatch Monarch enables business users to prepare their data and bring it into modern analytics environments like IBM Watson Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics

With the ability to retrieve and use not only the right data, but all of the data required to get the whole story, Monarch users can focus on performing analysis that will result in timely, more informed business decisions and better operational processes.”

The relationship between Datawatch and IBM [NYSE: IBM] goes back a long way, beginning with Datawatch’s Report Mining Server solution for extracting data from IBM’s Content Manager OnDemand. “Today, our focus is on bringing the power of advanced and predictive analytics to the average business user,” continued Potter. “Organizations are increasingly moving away from IT-driven analytics and toward the self-service movement. That is where we come in. The move toward self-service data prep and analytics is all about speed and agility for the business user. With Monarch, even novice business users can access the data they need for analysis, without relying on IT. Not only does this significantly reduce data prep time, but it helps users make timely and more informed business decisions without having to worry about incomplete or outdated data due to IT lag time. Monarch bridges the gap between the ease-of-use and flexibility that business users demand and the governance, automation and scalability needed by IT.”

Illustrating the power of Datawatch Monarch, the Marbridge Foundation, which provides community living for more than 240 adults with intellectual disabilities, has seen an ROI of 495 percent since deploying the solution to assist in the transfer of all of its payroll data, which was previously stored as PDF files, into its new payroll system. Automated data prep is saving the foundation a drastic amount of money in contracting fees, and helping them to eliminate human error from the data transfer process and comply with Affordable Care Act regulations.

The powerful combination of Datawatch’s intuitive self-service data prep technology and IBM’s modern BI system enables everyday business users to spend their time on high-value analytic activities, rather than getting bogged down in data prep tasks. And being able to derive new insights every day that have the potential to innovate and transform operational processes is an invaluable business benefit.