IBM Analytics To Facilitate Catalina's Digital Overhaul

International Business Machines Corporation’s (NYSE:IBM) solutions are enabling businesses to digitally transform and evolve their business processes. Recently, IBM Integrated Analytics System or IIAS suite of analytics services were selected by Catalina.

IIAS is a comprehensive high-performance data system with embedded data science tools. It enables users to work across multiple hybrid cloud environments. Notably, Catalina intends to utilize IIAS to offer its clientele with more meaningful and appropriate shopper insights.

St. Petersburg, FL based Catalina provides targeted digital marketing solutions to notable consumer packaged goods (“CPG”) brands by leveraging data analytics. Catalina attempts to digitally transform its business to aid brands and retailers to maintain a robust connection with customers irrespective of location and time.

IBM is enhancing services which facilitate digital transformation to boost customer engagement. This is anticipated to drive robust adoption and strengthen the company’s growth prospects in the domain. Per a MarketsandMarkets report, digital transformation market is envisioned to witness a CAGR of 19.1% to $493.39 billion by 2022 from $205.99 billion in 2017.

Focus on Enhancing Data Mobility: A Key Catalyst

IBM is leaving no stone unturned to enhance IIAS suite of services. IBM’s common SQL engine supports the IIAS suite, facilitating the clientele to seamlessly move workloads across a hybrid infrastructure (comprising both on-premise and public or private cloud environment).

This increased mobility of workloads aids the enterprises to automate their business processes by leveraging machine learning capabilities of IBM’s IIAS.

The latest embedded feature being Data Virtualization which allows users to note down and access analytics queries across hybrid infrastructure.

IBM is anticipated to benefit by adding virtualization capabilities given the ongoing workspace trends of Bring Your Own Devices (“BYOD”) and increasing mobile workers.

Additionally, new IBM fast data movement functionality of IIAS provides users with the option of moving data from Hadoop clusters to IIAS, in turn enhancing the performance capacity of the processing infrastructure.

Rapid Adoption to Benefit Top Line

We must note that the number of companies utilizing analytics and AI to automate their business processes is increasing. The companies want to leverage machine learning and analytics to obtain accurate customer insights in turn assisting them to make apt business decisions.

Increasing adoption of IBM’s analytics services by notable companies including Catalina, is expected to bolster the company’s Strategic Imperatives (which includes cloud, analytics, mobility and security) revenues, consequently driving the top line.

Notably, Strategic Imperatives revenues in the third-quarter 2018 grew 7% year over year at cc to $9.3 billion. Furthermore, IBM’s analytics displayed a strong performance in the third quarter of 2018, driven by data science offerings and IBM Cloud Private for Data offering.

IBM is restructuring its business to explore new ways to provide enterprises with market leading hybrid cloud solutions enabling them to digitally transform their business applications. We believe increasing allegiance to emerging technologies over legacy stand-alone products will aid IBM to penetrate the high growth markets.

Zacks Rank & Other Key Picks

IBM carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) , Upland Software (NASDAQ:UPLD) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) are some other stocks worth considering in the broader technology sector. All the three stocks flaunt a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Long-term earnings growth rate for Twitter, Upland Software and Intel is currently pegged at 22.1%, 20% and 8.4%, respectively.

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