Cognos Analytics and Watson Analytics Announce Geospatial Mapping using MapBox

IBM has signed an agreement with Mapbox to offer geospatial mapping in Cognos Analytics (CA).  Cognos Analytics will ship MapBox with CA and offer it at no additional cost to customers (unlike some other Analytics partners of Mapbox).

MapBox is a unique provider of geospatial capabilities, deployed first and foremost in the Cloud, which means easy global access and a continual stream of daily updates to maps from leading data sources.

Important Benefits of Mapping Capabilities

Mapping will help you leverage more of your data, find patterns of traffic and overlay environmental data (like weather), and give greater context to your data.  You will be able to leverage your existing reports and dashboards with RAVE 2, which will allow embedded maps.  You can therefore further extend self-service capabilities to your users, giving them new ways to build reports and look at their data.  Mapping will take you beyond traditional analytics of predictive and prescriptive, from ‘how’ and ‘why’ things happen, to where they happen.

Goals of Mapping

You will be able to capitalize on new end-user visualizations, such as chloropleths (fill maps), symbol maps, and overlay maps with RAVE visualizations to build powerful compound analytics.  Mapping functionality offers common capabilities across all platforms, including PCs and Mobile, and all CA deployments both on premise and on Cloud.

Platform

Some of the mapping that will be available includes global base maps (“pretty pictures” – maps showing streets, water, greenspaces, place names, etc.), and worldwide polygons covering 240 countries showing geopolitical boundaries such as countries, states and zip/postal code boundaries.  Mapping has the ability to support custom polygons (ex.: sales territories) and completely custom maps (ex. : stadium or building plans).  Geocoding – the ability to take any address and covert to a latitude and longitude for analysis on the map – is supported.

What’s Possible                                                                                

Some of the many possibilities that Mapping will offer include instantly being able to see geographic trends and patterns not typically recognizable in traditional presentations such as lists, crosstabs or even in charts and graphs. Users will be able to import, analyze, segment and report on data in a geospatial context to create maps for any country in the world using address, post codes, etc.  They can then also create geographic dashboards, heat maps, charts and reports related to those maps.  Furthermore, location analytics can be used to filter and segment data and these maps can then be embedded into a website or blog.  Finally, those results can be shared, printed or exported both on and offline.

Integrating maps into the entire user experience to filter and select data can extend the interactivity that maps have by nature, with IBM-specific capabilities such as drill-up/down and through.

Designed for you – made for us (and now, made for mapping) 

Mapping will not only expand how you visualize reports, but change the way you analyze your business, reaching beyond transactional data into locational information that can pinpoint single postal codes as easily as it can identify trends across the globe.

This functionality will be available with both PVU and Authorized User licensing, and has no limits on the number of users who can access it.

By introducing geospatial analysis into your company’s self-service reporting and data discovery, you will further maximize your investment in your CA deployment.

What preparation is needed to start using Mapping?  Your organization needs to get to latest release by December 2016, so you can exploit this capability immediately once the R5 (11.0.5) release is available.  Contact NewIntelligence’s migration experts today to get assistance with planning your IBM Cognos upgrade to Cognos Analytics.

Mapbox will be featured at World of Watson 2016, so check it out if you plan on being there.  Register for this unique event soon – save $500 when you register by September 16, 2016.

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