ibi is going unlimited…

Working with the product teams in the lead up to a very exciting product announcement caused me to do some reflection on what it means and how this will impact our customers. Having been with ibi since college, I’ve been a part of many exciting and rewarding experiences. One of the most rewarding for me was working with a large mutual fund company from the inception of the relationship–-including the original proof of value. While we were competitive on our analytics capabilities alone, what made them choose ibi as their enterprise standard for all new data and analytics projects was the breadth of ibi capabilities spanning data integration and the mainframe. I spent the next five years working with this customer to expand their usage to 80 different business units and three massive customer facing applications with over 100,000 users. Think of the value that was generated by the decision of this organization to go all in on ibi’s capabilities and expand their usage across their organization!

A full circle experience

That experience brings me full circle today as we think about the usage models that have delivered the most value for our customers. Our goal is to enable all ibi customers to realize the maximum value in our solution and simplify their experience. This in mind, it brings me great excitement to introduce the ibi platform which includes ibi Analytics, ibi Data Intelligence, and ibi Mainframe. The ibi platform is powerfully simple, all inclusive, and offers unlimited usage. The premise being that we succeed as you succeed.

Going back to our roots

One of the things that the founder of ibi and industry legend, Gerry Cohen, always emphasized to me was that our software helped leading organizations solve the most complex problems in the world. As someone who started out specializing in analytics, he opened my eyes to the additional value that organizations received when they expanded beyond analytics and included our solutions in data integration and for the mainframe. Gerry was always espousing the value of a single integrated platform to an organization, I am reminded of his wisdom as I write these words.

Endless possibilities for WebFOCUS customers

Having worked with nearly all of our WebFOCUS customers, I am thrilled to think about the possibilities that our new platform, ibi Analytics, will provide for them. The first customer I worked with was an outdoor gear and apparel retailer. During the evaluation I used their data to create an executive dashboard of their key performance indicators. It was gratifying to see the executives’ eyes fixated on the screen asking questions and asking me to filter and drill into certain locations and product classes. I realized in that moment the impact that data and analytics can have on decision making and the performance of an organization. After they deployed the solution, they shared that our dashboard was at the center of every meeting that they have and that it allowed them to identify countless opportunities in their business that they would never have known about or been able to capitalize on. Whether you are a small retailer or one of the largest mutual fund providers in the world, every organization can derive great value from the ibi platform. What is exciting about ibi Analytics is that it now includes many existing and new capabilities that our customers have been clamoring to use. A great example is the no code model training and deployment that we recently introduced. This will allow our customers to deploy data science at scale. Some of my favorite examples of this in action are predicting where crime will occur, identifying at-risk customers and recommending treatments to patients that reduce readmission. We’re excited to see what complex problems our customers are able to solve with all of the additional capabilities and unlimited usage provided to them by the ibi platform.

Delivering benefits at every step of the data value chain

Over the evolution of my career, I had several mentors expose me to the great potential that our data integration solutions provide. Quite simply: no analytics or data science initiative can be successful without clean, trusted data. ibi Data Intelligence can provide this trust and clarity. Business value is derived from how people use the data. The data value chain is the process of connecting, moving, fixing, relating and governing data. At every step of the chain, data becomes more valuable to the organization.

Mainframe, reborn

Lastly, I’m delighted to share a true back to the future moment with the introduction of the ibi Mainframe. When I started working at ibi in 2000, I had Customers tell me that they were moving off of their mainframe. Yet, here we are 24 years later and not only are those same customers still deriving great value from their mainframe, they are now actively seeking ways to further leverage it. What excites me about this new offering are some of the new modernization use cases that our customers can expand into with our products such as improved Developer Experience, API Enablement, Automation and Hybrid Data Grid architecture. We believe strongly that by including all capabilities and unlimited usage, our customers will be empowered to expand their usage and connect their mainframe resources to distributed and cloud environments–resulting in an exponential growth in value.