From the category archives:

Product News

Update from SAP Co-CEOs

March 15, 2010

Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running the [...]

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Thoughts on Pega acquiring Chordiant

March 15, 2010

The news today is that Pegasystems (rules-based business process management) is acquiring Chordiant (decision-centric CRM). This is interesting news as it merges a company (Chordiant) with a very decision-centric/decision services separate from process mindset with one (Pega) that has mixed rules and process together much more.
Chordiant have been one of my companies to watch for [...]

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Oracle Data Mining on the Amazon compute cloud

March 3, 2010

I just heard from a colleague that you can check out Oracle’s Data Mining tools on the amazon.com compute cloud.  The Oracle Data Mining development team has set up an instance for prospective customers who want to try the in-database data mining algorithms via SQL/Java APIs or the Oracle Data Miner user interface. You can [...]

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First Look – eBureau

February 22, 2010

eBureau is a predictive scoring and information service provider founded in 2004, focused on technology for very rapid model development and deployment. Using their own purpose-built modeling software, a small group of modelers developed 900 predictive models in 2009 alone. The company has been applying this capability for real-time and interactive marketing like contact centers, [...]

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First Look – FICO Xpress and Business Rules

February 17, 2010

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

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First Look – TRIAD 8.5 and Decision Graph

February 15, 2010

TRIAD 8.5 has just been released and is the latest version of FICO’s combined account manager and customer manager platform for financial services companies (its focus is on accounts/customers where credit risk is a critical issue). I got an update recently focused on Decision Graph. Decision Graph is  one of the new capabilities. Decision Graph [...]

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First Look – Quantivo

February 11, 2010

I got a briefing from Quantivo recently. This is a company focused on behavioral analytics – uncovering patterns within the mountains of customer data that companies have – web analytics and point of sale data for instance. They help companies find these patterns, find the insight that they are not seeing with their current tools, [...]

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First Look – Wolf Frameworks PaaS

January 25, 2010

Wolf Frameworks is a USA/India PaaS company started in 2006 as a pure play cloud computing platform. They have a front end (AJAX) using XML to communicate to a .NET backend on C#. They have about 3,000 plus people designing software using the platform and have about 13 plus solution providers covering 7 countries. They [...]

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First Look – SAS Real Time Decision Manager

January 19, 2010

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager (RDM) is designed for inbound communications, complementing outbound communication solutions. It aims at real-time delivery of decisions and recommendations during a customer interaction to optimize that interaction to improve revenue, growth and retention. For example, in retail banking, a customer might come in with a new job with very different income [...]

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First Look – Aha

January 14, 2010

I got a chance to catch up with Aha! recently. Aha! is based in the Denver Tech Center and was founded back in 2006. Aha!’s premise is that it is now possible to build analytics into a platform and to focus on how to operationalize predictive models and deliver analytics within business processes. Initial customers [...]

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First Look – Dulles Research Carolina

January 14, 2010

I recently met the folks at Dulles Research, a scientific computing outfit focused on analytic solutions for enterprise software. The folks who founded Dulles had previously worked at Marketswitch (focused on large scale optimization and sold to Experian in 2004) and have a long history of working with companies who are serious about using analytics [...]

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First Look – Data Applied

January 13, 2010

I got a chance to chat with Data Applied, a new start up that, like Clario (reviewed previously), offers real data mining in the cloud. This product is aimed at business users and is a very data-centric, web-based application for visualization and data mining/deep analysis. They are targeting folks with hundreds of thousands of records [...]

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First Look – Scorto

January 5, 2010

I caught up with a new (to me at least) decisioning platform recently. Scorto works with credit organizations to manage credit risks and make objective decisions when selling mass credit products. They offer what they refer to as decision support (but I would call blended decision management and decision support) in everything from personal/small commercial [...]

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Quick thoughts on IBM and Lombardi

December 18, 2009

I have been out this week visiting clients and prospective clients on the east coast and so not blogging much. While I was gone IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi. Now I don’t have much to add to Sandy Kemsley’s excellent post on the topic except to say that Lombardi has also been virulently anti-business [...]

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First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner/Model Manager

December 3, 2009

The folks from SAS gave me a quick update the other day on SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Model Manager, two of SAS’ data mining/predictive analytics products. I often blog about SAS, as you would expect, but I have not done any product posts. SAS’ Business Analytics Framework is focused on helping organizations find the [...]

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Update – Red Hat Jboss Business Rules

December 2, 2009

I got a chance to catch up with the folks from Red Hat recently. I have reviewed the new functionality that Mark Proctor and his team have been adding to turn the old Drools rule engine into a competitive Business Rules Management System or BRMS when the latest release came out. This time we chatted [...]

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First Look – Convergys

November 30, 2009

While I was attending the Business Rules Forum a few weeks back I got my first chance to learn about Convergys. A major sponsor of the event, Convergys is focused on improving the customer experience and customer relationships using decisioning technologies. Building on a history in customer care and billing, Convergys is now a nearly [...]

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SAS – An executive overview

October 27, 2009

I am spending some time as a guest of SAS this week and we got started today with Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. He began by describing SAS Institute’s 33 years of continuous revenue growth as well as similarly growing reinvestment in R&D. SAS has not laid anyone off this year, for which kudos, and [...]

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First Look – FICO Insurance Fraud Manager

October 20, 2009

I got a chance to catch up with Andrea Allmon of FICO to hear about their new Insurance Fraud Manager release (3.0 in July). This is a timely topic because of the debates around healthcare at the moment. In all the discussions about healthcare costs you never hear about the amount of fraud involved, yet [...]

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Corticon launches RulesWorld – free software

October 19, 2009

Cost, time and expertise are obstacles to business rules adoption. Corticon’s recently announced RulesWorld is designed to let individuals prove the value of rules without cost or risk. RulesWorld is an online community supplying learning materials, samples and forums as well as access to the software itself. All of this at no cost. Users can [...]

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