Product News

First Look – in2clouds

September 29, 2010

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]

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Decision Management – aligning strategy and operations #bas2010

September 29, 2010

The folks from SPSS and ILOG presented on Decision Management – Aligning Organizational Strategy with Day-to-Day Operations. I have blogged before about SPSS Decision Management and Modeler products. Before acquiring SPSS, IBM talked about the move towards optimizing decisions – replacing sense and respond with predict and act, becoming more fact-driven in real-time and driving [...]

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IBM Business Analytics and Optimization #bas2010

September 28, 2010

Rob Ashe and Fred Balboni kicked off the IBM Business Analytics Analyst Summit with a presentation on IBM’s overall strategy for analytics – product and consulting in an integrated view. Of course this is IBM so everything starts with Smarter Planet – and Smarter Planet begins with how to get insight to drive better performance, [...]

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First Look – Aster Data

September 22, 2010

I listened in to the Boulder BI Brain Trust briefing from Aster some weeks back and then got a follow-on update last week. Aster was founded in 2005 based on research performed by a team at Stanford. The initial plan was to develop a data management platform based on commodity hardware and this was released [...]

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Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10

September 20, 2010

The Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) roadmap began with a quick review of Oracle RTD (see my earlier post on the role of RTD in e-commerce) – an analytical decision service that sits between the operational and analytic applications of an organization so that operational business processes can be analytically enhanced. Crucially it combines prescriptive [...]

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Pegasystems and Chordiant – an update

September 14, 2010

I got an update from Pegasystems recently, mostly to talk about how the integration of Chordiant is going. I shared my original thoughts on the Pegasystems/Chordiant combination at the time but this was my first chance to chat with them since then.  Pegasystems continues to do well with its  12th record revenue quarter and climbing [...]

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First Look – Predixion

September 14, 2010

Predixion Software launched their new product – Predixion Insight – this week and I got a pre-launch briefing.  Founded in 2009 based in Southern California and Redmond (development team is ex-Microsoft and the chairman is ex-Datallegro), their focus is on self-service predictive analytics, delivered through the cloud and accessible via Excel.  Information workers are the [...]

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First Look – Microsoft Analytics

September 8, 2010

I got an update from Microsoft recently. We covered lots of different products in and around data/analytics – some public, some under NDA. Microsoft is making a serious investment in SQL Server as well as into SharePoint and Excel. BI tools, they say, are not getting to most people and Microsoft sees this as an [...]

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First Look – BEZ

September 7, 2010

I got a briefing from BEZ recently, after Claudia Imhoff (@claudia_imhoff) referred them to me. BEZ has historically worked on the IT side of organizations, using predictive analytics to take historical data about system performance and transactions and use it to predict application response times, throughput, utilization of resources etc. BEZ compares itself to a [...]

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First Look – Rapid Predictive Modeler

September 2, 2010

SAS today announced SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler today. Some time ago I got a pre-release look at this most interesting product.
Today SAS sees quantitative modelers working on developing and validating models in conjunction with database architects to manage data preparation tasks. Like me they also find that business analysts work on the application of the [...]

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First Look – DataInfoCom

September 1, 2010

I caught up with DataInfoCom recently – a research-oriented software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Their focus is on what they call Predictive Decision Management. Their software product, OSMOSYS, delivers predictive decisioning over the Internet – Decisions as a Service or DaaS as I call it. Their customers include a couple of well known, Fortune [...]

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FICO Decision Management Platform – update

August 31, 2010

Model Builder 7.0, Decision Optimizer 6.1, Blaze Advisor 6.9
Decision Management remains the core focus for FICO with both a Decision Management platform and decisioning applications. The applications are increasingly built on top of the platform, sharing execution and modeling infrastructure. FICO still sees business rules as the basis for decisions, being improved and extended with [...]

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First Look – Alfresco Activiti

August 31, 2010

I got an update from the folks at Alfresco recently. This company is an open source content management project, begun by a team that left Documentum some years ago. The project now has about 2M downloads and is a commercial open source company with 1,200 paying customers – mostly among those typically comfortable with open [...]

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Clario – Update

August 26, 2010

I first blogged about Clario about a year ago, when they were focused on delivering a data mining/predictive analytic workbench on the web. Developing a new workbench, even with a compelling differentiator like being cloud-based, is difficult. The maturity of the competitive, hosted products and the tendency of analytic developers to be very entrenched with [...]

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Pervasive DataRush – an update

August 25, 2010

I have blogged about Pervasive DataRush before and I got a quick update this week. Pervasive often talks about helping companies with “big data” issues and they see this as one dimension of difficulty – with the complexity of processing being done being the other dimension. So some folks, for instance, handle big data but [...]

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First Look – Kana

August 24, 2010

I got an update from Kana this week. Kana, for those of you that don’t know, is a product/solution company focused on helping enterprises with their customer service experience – what they call Service Experience Management. Kana has over 600 B2C customers across banking, telecommunications, retail as well as high-tech, travel, manufacturing etc. They are [...]

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Update – SAS Model Manager

August 18, 2010

I got an update from SAS on SAS Model Manager recently. The new release came out August 17 alongside a new release of SAS Enterprise Miner and has some interesting new features. SAS Model Manager, as I noted in my previous review, supports the analytic model deployment lifecycle (from registering candidate models through validation, deployment, [...]

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IBM, Unica and solution-oriented Decision Management

August 18, 2010

IBM recently announced it was buying Unica. As I work with both IBM and Unica I thought I should post some comments.
To me, this is an interesting example of the ongoing evolution of decision management as a market. Today most customers aren’t looking explicitly for decision management solutions. Rather they are seeking business solutions that [...]

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Lyzasoft Update

July 28, 2010

Some weeks back I got an update from Lyzasoft but I have not been able to post it until now. I first wrote about Lyzasoft back in 2009 and since then the company has been busy. The company’s vision remains the same – to create a way for end users to work with BI that [...]

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