E-Business
IBM’s Cognitive Exploration to Drive Better Business Outcomes
IBM has announced the availability of a cognitive-infused Watson Explorer, a powerful combination of data exploration and content analytics capabilities.
Typical organizations only use 12 percent of their dataˡ, leaving a wealth of untapped information across the enterprise that could be leveraged to make smarter decisions.
Watson Explorer equips users with the information and analytics capabilities which can help them to deliver better performance and real-time results.
Watson Explorer has enabled hundreds of customers to connect with their data, build information-centric applications and helped them to improve the quality and speed of their decision making.
With the announcement, Watson Explorer advances core cognitive components by providing organizations the ability to quickly use natural language processing capabilities and data exploration to discover valuable business information in both structured and unstructured data.
Watson Explorer advances data exploration by bringing cognitive capabilities, providing users with a 360-degree view of contextually relevant information to offer deeper levels of insight, showing what is happening and why.
Unlike traditional search solutions that fail to provide context, trends and relationships, Watson Explorer can help professionals find and understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain more insights from their unstructured content and realize their objectives of improving business outcomes.
New Watson Explorer features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving users a view into structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a Watson journey.
Today’s business environment demands an ability to make high quality decisions more quickly than ever before, against a rapidly expanding set of inputs. Enterprise data and applications are typically siloed and lack the information sharing capacity to facilitate better employee performance. Take, for example, a customer service representative at a global retailer.
Hundreds of billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during which an average customer service representative interfaces with over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate the information and respond to the customer all in real-time – a monumental undertaking.
When a customer calls with questions, representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent experience for their customer due to challenges finding, organizing, analyzing and correlating the right information for that specific customer at that moment.
Cognitive exploration can enhance a user’s ability to use information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It does this by providing information and understanding from relevant sources, much like a human would.
With Watson Explorer, for example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics feature leverages the power of natural language processing to enable organizations to extract meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social media, legal documents and research reports
“Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of valuable information to help organizations make critical business decisions,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group.
“We are continually looking for ways to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable information often locked in structured and unstructured data.”
The Power of Cognitive Exploration
Exploration enables users to uncover new possibilities. But exploration in complex, heterogeneous environments present unique challenges with massive volumes of data spread across a variety of sources and a limited ability to understand the connections that exist in the data.
To speed the time, Watson Explorer connects information from a range of internal and external sources, analyzes that content and looks for underlying relationships or patterns that help interpret information.
Explore – Watson Explorer combines content and data from many different systems throughout the enterprise and public sources and presents it to users based on their role and current activities, which can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent looking for information, and increasing their ability to work smarter.
In today’s information-rich environment, few important tasks can be completed with information from a single source—whether the task is to assist a customer, plan a marketing strategy for a new product or investigate a security breach.
Watson Explorer brings data and analytics from many sources, as well as relevant cognitive insights to a user’s desktop or mobile device, in a context-appropriate manner to enable them work with confidence.
Analyze – For many organizations, the growing volume of unstructured data represents untapped business opportunities.
Documents, e-mail messages, call center transcripts and social media are examples of the kinds of content that may yield a wealth of insights that can help improve business performance if gathered and analyzed by the right tools.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics capabilities enable users to uncover trends, patterns and correlations from unstructured information using natural language processing technology, delivering insights in hours or days rather than or weeks or months. Those insights are then available to users in real-time as a 360-degree view.
Interpret – Watson Explorer provides the ability to integrate a growing list of IBM Watson Developer Cloud services for an enhanced experience leveraging the combined strength of exploration, analytic and cognitive capabilities.
As new capabilities are developed by IBM and exposed in the Watson Developer Cloud, they will be made available to qualified Watson Explorer users who license the Watson Developer Cloud services.
The available services for integration with Watson Explorer at the time of release are: Question Answer, User Modeling, Relationship Extraction, Message Resonance, Concept Expansion, Language Identification and Machine Translation.
“We’ve put Watson Explorer in the hands of our call center agents to equip them with a 360-degree view of the information they need, including self-performance reports and other analytics,” said Farouk Ferchichi, Corporate Manger, Toyota Financial Services.
“With over four million customers, we recognize the importance of top-notch service and are committed to actively maintaining customer satisfaction. Watson Explorer gives agents the ability to get detailed metrics on their performance to identify strengths and focus areas to improve.”
Watson Explorer will enable customers like Toyota Financial Services to maximize business opportunities by providing frontline workers with a more holistic view of their information landscape.
Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal offerings:
Enterprise Edition provides search and 360-degree information applications across multiple sources, as well as the ability of qualified customers to license cognitive services from the Watson Developer Cloud to help enhance, scale, and accelerate human expertise.
Advanced Edition includes all of the capabilities of Enterprise Edition plus advanced content mining and content analytics to help organizations take the next step with advanced content mining and analytics capabilities to aggregate, analyze and visualize massive amounts of unstructured content to expose new insights.
IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
IBM Watson represents a new era of computing in which apps and systems interact with human users more naturally, augment our knowledge with Big Data insights, and learn to improve how they assist us.
Fueled by innovation from a mission to transform industries and professions, Watson is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the new era of computing, evidenced by an unmatched demonstration of what cognitive systems can bring to transform decision-making. IBM is delivering a range of cloud-based products and services to clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, retail and education.
In January, 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. The move signifies a strategic shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover insights from massive amounts of Big Data.
IBM is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research and bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market. This includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM’s ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps made with Watson
Oracle, US-based technology giant, has initiated a sweeping round of layoffs affecting thousands of employees globally, with India among the worst-hit regions, according to multiple reports.
The job cuts, which began on March 31, are part of a broader restructuring exercise that could impact between 20,000 and 30,000 employees worldwide, making it one of the largest workforce reductions in the company’s history.
While the exact number remains unconfirmed, multiple reports suggest that around 12,000 employees in India have been affected,
Employees across several geographies, including India, the United States, Canada, and Mexico, reported receiving termination emails early in the morning, informing them that their roles had been eliminated with immediate effect.
“Today is your last working day,” the email stated, citing “organisational change” as the reason for the decision. Access to company systems, including email and internal platforms, was revoked shortly thereafter.
The communication, according to Business Insider, described the move as part of a broader “reduction in force and other terminations,” and said affected employees would be eligible for severance benefits subject to company policy.
The email also instructed employees to share personal contact details to receive separation documents.
In India, impacted employees have reportedly been offered severance packages that include 15 days’ salary for each completed year of service, notice period pay, leave encashment, gratuity where applicable, and an additional two-month salary top-up in cases of voluntary separation.
The layoffs are linked to Oracle’s strategic shift towards artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud infrastructure.
The company has announced plans to invest approximately USD 50 billion in AI infrastructure and has reportedly raised an equivalent amount in debt to fund its expansion.
In a recent regulatory filing, Oracle said it expects restructuring costs for fiscal 2026 to reach up to USD 2.1 billion, largely driven by severance payouts and related expenses.
The move comes as Oracle looks to strengthen its position against global cloud competitors such as Amazon and Alphabet.
Uncertainty continues to loom over employees, with reports indicating that another round of layoffs could follow in the coming weeks. Employees who were affected described the layoffs as abrupt, with little prior indication.
Some former staff members have taken to social media to share their experiences.
Tricia S Marsh, a former Senior Principal at Oracle, said the layoffs marked the end of an important chapter in her career while urging affected colleagues to remain hopeful.
As of May 2025, Oracle had around 162,000 full-time employees globally.
Kaspersky Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) has uncovered an active malicious campaign distributing a previously undocumented RAT with a very broad feature set. Beyond the standard remote access trojan functionality, it combines stealer, keylogger, clipper, and spyware capabilities.
Cybercriminals are selling it to third parties as MaaS (malware-as-a-service) promoting it on YouTube and Telegram, increasing the likelihood of its use across a wider range of actors, including less-skilled operators.
Due to its stealer functionality, the malware can collect a wide range of data about its victim: it gathers system information, extracts credentials for Steam, Discord and Telegram, and also harvests data from web browsers. It also poses a threat to cryptocurrency users, as it includes a browser-based clipper that replaces crypto wallet addresses.
Beyond data theft, CrystalX RAT is capable of full-scale surveillance, with the ability to take screenshots, record audio from the microphone, and capture video from both the webcam and the victim’s screen.
Particularly notable is the CrystalX RAT “playful” Prankware feature set, which is actively promoted by the developers. These capabilities allow operators to visibly interfere with the victim’s system by shaking the mouse cursor, setting wallpapers on the victim’s screen, changing screen orientation, hiding desktop icons, forcing system shut downs, and even delivering real-time pop-up notifications and messages to the victim.
While seemingly trivial, these features introduce a disruptive and psychological dimension to the attack, making the attack both visible and distressing for the victim.
Kaspersky reports attacks targeting users in Russia, but the trojan has the potential to spread to other countries due to its sales and distribution model.
“Such a diverse feature set effectively enables a 360-degree compromise of the victim and a complete loss of privacy. Beyond gaining access to account credentials, the stolen data could potentially be used for blackmail.
“At the moment, the initial infection vector is not precisely known, but it is already affecting dozens of victims. Our telemetry is already detecting new versions of the implants, indicating that this malware is still actively developed and maintained.
“We expect the number of victims to grow significantly and its geographic spread to expand in the near future,” says Leonid Bezvershenko, senior security researcher at Kaspersky GReAT.
Kaspersky has discovered a new phishing tactic used to evade traditional security controls that exploits Bubble, a platform that allows users to build web and mobile applications through a visual interface without writing code.
Attackers are increasingly adopting innovative tools designed for legitimate software development and repurposing them to boost phishing campaigns.
Traditional phishing attacks often rely on malicious links or obvious redirection techniques, which are typically flagged and blocked by modern security systems.
However, attackers are now leveraging Bubble’s no-code environment to generate intermediary web applications which are hosted on Bubble’s legitimate infrastructure and trusted domains such as *.bubble.io, which improves their credibility and helps them bypass security filters.
These applications function as disguised redirectors, silently forwarding victims to malicious credential-harvesting websites.
In the observed campaign, victims were ultimately redirected to a convincing imitation of a Microsoft login page, protected by a Cloudflare verification layer designed to further obscure malicious intent.
This technique is likely being integrated into broader phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platforms and phishing kits. These kits enable a wide range of malicious capabilities with ready-made tools, including real-time interception of session cookies, driving phishing campaigns through legitimate services such as Google Tasks and Google Forms, and carry out adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks that can bypass multi-factor authentication.
They also support the generation of phishing emails using AI, implement geo-filtering and anti-detection mechanisms to evade security crawlers and are often hosted on reputable cloud services like AWS to avoid blacklisting.
“The use of legitimate platforms like Bubble introduces a new level of trust abuse, making it harder for both users and automated systems to distinguish between safe and malicious content. This significantly increases the likelihood of credential theft, unauthorised access and potential data breaches,” comments Roman Dedenok, Anti-Spam Expert at Kaspersky.
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