I like analytics as a field but I rather doubt I'd like IBM's conception of analytics as a career. They're looking to provide analytics of middling complexity -- one step above what any idiot can get out of the tool -- as an outsourced service for the cheapest they can possibly get it. The cheapest they can possibly get it is not you. Sure, if you're a Google Analytics or urchin jockey at the moment, you probably have a few years before India/China catch up to the high-demand-low-required-skill opportunity, but once they collectively do, you'll be in the bread line next to web designers who primarily slice PSD into HTML.
If you wanted to do it as a career, I'd think less chart-creating-monkey and more "analytics architect" or maybe "marketing manager with deep skills in analytics to coax extra millions of performance out of our CPC/etc campaigns".
In India, these days there are tons of analytics companies. Mostly what they end up doing is doing extremely simple number crunching mean, median, standard deviation, etc. on survey numbers or other marketing data. The salaries are not that high and as you say, I expect it to become a commodity in near future.
What is sad about analytics is that they would teach you how to use tools first: SPSS, Excel, SAS, etc. but there would be little or no fundamental understanding of concepts. Sure, data mining is a buzzword. Load some data and do a bunch of super cool analysis, but where is the insight? where is understanding of what is really happening under the hood?
You need one guy with the skill to write a bit of code and a hundred more to do the legwork of plumbing it into the source data for each customer. The latter is what you bill for, and it's commoditized (e.g. "FTP a CSV file from here, run this program, FTP the resulting PDF to the webserver then email the customer to say its done").
If you wanted to do it as a career, I'd think less chart-creating-monkey and more "analytics architect" or maybe "marketing manager with deep skills in analytics to coax extra millions of performance out of our CPC/etc campaigns".