Blue Insight for Smart Cloud Analytics

by Curt Hall

Believe it or not, IBM has developed an internal, private cloud-based BI analytics environment -- called "Blue Insight" -- designed to support its overall corporate sales, marketing, and product development needs. Moreover, IBM is now marketing and producing a version of this tool. This new solution -- called the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud -- offers large organizations the hardware, software, and services needed to implement a private cloud environment designed to support cloud-based data warehousing and BI analytics on an enterprise scale. Like Blue Insight, the Smart Analytics Cloud runs on a mainframe (running Linux), which IBM is positioning as a platform for large-scale, very reliable/secure enterprise cloud environments. IBM is also offering various financing options for organizations that want to implement the Smart Analytics Cloud. These latest developments from IBM are interesting because they show how companies are applying virtualization and cloud computing technologies to develop private cloud data warehousing and BI analytics environments -- both for internal use and for commercial solutions offerings.