Earlier this year, Altair announced that it would be partnering with IBM to better support the access and data prep needs of IBM Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics users. Now with the ability to resell the Altair Monarch solution, IBM is further enabling business analysts to harness the power of cognitive computing across the widest variety of data sources to drive more informed, strategic business decisions. 
With Altair Monarch, IBM Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics users can rapidly prepare data from virtually any information source, including traditional databases and multi-structured documents such as PDF and text reports, web pages, and JSON and log files that had previously been inaccessible. This makes data ready for analysis in a fraction of the time compared to using spreadsheets and other manually-intensive and error-prone methods. With the ability to quickly select any data source and automatically convert it to structured data for analysis, time to insight is accelerated, as is the likelihood for uncovering transformative business initiatives.
In a recent Altair guest blog, IBM Content Data Scientist Joseph True discussed the IBM Watson-Cognos-Monarch trifecta. This trio of solutions was able to help the city of Boston quickly acquire, prepare, and merge open 311 data, weather data and demographics acquired from PDFs, XLS files, and web pages for faster exploration, visualization and analysis. The results?

• Using Altair Monarch, they went from three separate collections of data, all in different formats and domains, to a single unified data set ready for smart data discovery.
• With Cognos Analytics, they quickly built interactive visualizations and dashboards to investigate and visualize trends across 311 requests, weather and demographics.

• With Watson Analytics, they used smart data discovery, asked questions using natural language processing (NLP) and ran predictive analytics to find insights that typical data discovery would not have found.

On May 11, I’ll be presenting at IBM Vision 2016, a global event designed for finance, risk management and sales compensation professionals to outthink the problems, risks and challenges they face every day in order to outperform their targets and their competition. During my session, we’ll talk more about the IBM Watson-Cognos-Monarch trifecta and how users can capitalize on the latest advances in self-service data prep and analytics to better leverage cognitive computing. Attendees will learn how to provide more transparency around data manipulation and promote reuse of data models. We’ll also demonstrate how easy it is to prepare an optimized data file for direct import into IBM Watson Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics.