IBM appears to be flexing its not inconsiderable analytics-focused muscle towards the data center with new software intended to promote application visibility and integration. Once again repeating its "connection of IT-to-business processes" mantra, the company's most freshly baked software goods have been unsurprisingly labeled as both cloud computing centric and focused on smarter app development.

With an emphasis on predictive analytics, IBM is suggesting that developers will better serve their business counterparts (and anticipate and prevent outages) if they can get hold of fact-driven metrics that they can use to drive the software development delivery lifecycle. "This new software adds intelligence to IT and business processes — basically creating a road map (that automatically avoids potholes) to show the shortest route and fastest connection between the business and its infrastructure," said Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president, middleware software.

New products in this week's "broad portfolio" release include IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management, a tool designed to enable business users to capture the decision logic of experts and apply it to accurately detect and react in real time to critical situations. According to IBM, "This will also help eliminate delays in hand-offs between business experts and IT staff."

Also fresh from the kitchen is IBM's Predictive Business Service Management offering. Designed to reduce service disruptions and prevents impending issues before they become a problem in the IT and network infrastructure, this product once again applies analytics to gain greater visibility, control, and automation for the data center. IBM Tivoli Analytics for Service Performance, along with a new version of Tivoli Business Service Management, is also being previewed as part of today's announcements.

"By securely bringing together an organization's disparate data sources and applications, this technology ensures that users can access and incorporate vital information regardless of platform, device, or data format. As a result, it becomes easier to apply analytics toward business initiatives. Enhanced versions of IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere MQ allow users to more effectively integrate and disseminate secure information across business processes," said the company, in a press statement.

Also included in today's news are new developer tools aligned towards "collaborative development and operations" in the form of the IBM Rational Automation Framework. The IBM Rational Developer Family also now features new automated reporting tools enabling developers to detect problems earlier. Finally, new enhancements from IBM Workload Deployer are hoped to help users save time and resources when working in a private cloud environment.