Organizations that run their analytics workloads on IBM Corp.’s public cloud now have access to three new services designed to ease day-to-day operations.

The first and most significant addition that the company announced today is a tool called Decision Optimization, which can be best described as a virtual assistant for business analysts. Under the hood, it’s based on the CPLEX mathematical programming software that Big Blue acquired in 2009. The service can ingest unstructured information such as supplier contracts and produce automated insight in response to various user questions. A planner at an electronics retailer, for instance, could use it to find the most efficient approach to restocking a product that is in high demand.

Decision Optimization is meant to spare users the tedious task of manually comparing shipping costs, delivery times and the countless other factors involved in such calculations. IBM says that the resulting time savings can significantly speed up decision-making in a variety of different business scenarios. Besides the retail industry, the company also sees its service coming handy for the manufacturing, utilities and financial sectors among others.

Many of the companies that stand to benefit from Decision Optimization should also be able to make use of dashDB for Transactions, the second new tool that IBM is rolling out. It’s a repurposed version of the company’s existing hosted columnar store that is designed to power web applications rather than back office analytics projects.

Both DashDB for Transactions and Decision Optimization are set to become available as part of the company’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service suite, as is the third offering introduced today. Dubbed Bluemix Lift, it’s designed to help organizations move records from their on-premises infrastructure to the IBM Cloud more easily. The company says that the tool can provide transfer rates of up to 225 gigabytes per hour depending on how much bandwidth is available.

Bluemix Lift should help level the playing field against better-established rivals such as Amazon.com Inc. that are also working to ease customers’ data migration struggles. The provider introduced a service called S3 Transfer Acceleration earlier this year that promises to improve upload times by up to 300 percent. And in scenarios where transferring information over the web isn’t practical, companies can physically ship their information to Amazon by way of its traveling Snowball appliances.

Image courtesy of IBM