From the category archives:

Product News

First Look – ioSemantics

July 10, 2008

ioSemantics is a company focused on automating and improving the QA process within decision management. Focused on increasing agility, ioSemantics is developing new technology to improve the link from development to production, especially in the kind of tight operate – assess – adapt – redeploy loop you see when business rules are being used [...]

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First Look – Cogito

July 2, 2008

Neil and I caught up with Expert System, a Semantic Intelligence company, last week to discuss their Cogito product. Expert System is based in Italy, has 145 employees and originally worked on spell checkers for Microsoft. While they have a lot of business in Europe they are now growing in the US. Their core pitch [...]

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Business Rules, Free Trials and ILOG

July 1, 2008

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it – I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

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First Look – Strategy Director

July 1, 2008

One of the things I like to do on the blog is bring attention to those companies applying the principles of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver useful, smart enough systems. I recently came across Strategy DirectorTM from Stratagem Portfolio Services. This uses EDM to deliver analytics and strategy support for collections.
The product is built on [...]

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First Look – Corticon

June 30, 2008

I got a walkthrough of Corticon’s Business Rules product last week – the first time I have discussed it in a while. Version 5 has some interesting features. The Business Rules Foundation is a set of headless services, designed to support a variety of development tools, UI frameworks and metaphors along with a variety of [...]

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First Look – Visual Numerics

June 27, 2008

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while – nearly 40 years – and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

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First Look – OutSystems Agile Platform

June 27, 2008

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

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Buying predictive analytics like books – Zementis ADAPA

June 20, 2008

Zementis has recently announced its ADAPA predictive analytics edition for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This essentially allows you to deploy PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language, an XML format for defining predictive analytic models) on the Amazon compute cloud. Based on their Enterprise Edition (which has PMML deployment, reporting and business rules (using Drools), this [...]

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Tibco becomes the first company with BPM, visualization, rules and data mining

June 20, 2008

Just saw the announcement that Tibco is buying Insightful. Insightful has a range of data mining tools build on the open source R algorithms as well as some proprietary pieces. This means that Tibco now has a BPM environment, a rules/event processing one, Spotfire for visualization and data mining/predictive analytics development and deployment. In theory [...]

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Demand Driven Development, Intalio, Rules

June 18, 2008

Shao Fang presented the D3 (Demand Driven Development) program and their work on integrating business rules into the Intalio BPMS. A few notes on the D3 program:

Not custom development
Community suggested projects
Customers put up money for features they really want and get credit for them
Some are decoupled and done offshore, some more tightly integrated and done [...]

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First Look – Jaspersoft v3

June 18, 2008

In keeping with the open source theme this week (given I am at Intalio’s user conference), a quick note about Jaspersoft who just released version 3. This version puts a nice web 2.0 interface on a browser-based product. There’s a nice dashboard with some mashup capabilities and input controls that can be dragged and dropped [...]

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First (second really) Look – LucidEra Update

June 16, 2008

LucidEra is an on-demand analytics company that seems to be growing fast, not least due to its integration with Salesforce.com through Appexchange. They sell mostly to mid size businesses with some departments at larger organizations. They emphasize simplicity, focused analytic applications and leveraging the CRM platforms companies already have.
I blogged about their first product before [...]

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Searching structured data and the finding the voice of the customer

June 2, 2008

A couple of companies I follow had interesting announcements today. First Attensity announced its new “Market Voice” product designed to allow automatic analysis of blogs, forums, reviews and other kinds of customer-generated content. The idea is to bring this information into the same environment as internal unstructured information so it can be analyzed as part [...]

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First Look – ILOG Scorecard Add-on

May 7, 2008

ILOG today announced a Scorecard modeler as an add-on for ILOG JRules ® (which I first saw at DIALOG). As their press release says, this add-in allows customers to “incorporate statistical scorecard models directly into decision services” – a key tenet of enterprise decision mangement or EDM. ILOG is targeting financial institutions clearly but apparently [...]

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First Look – Attensity

April 25, 2008

Attensity is a text analytics company based in Silicon Valley and Utah that is focused on helping companies hear the “voice of the customer”. By allowing companies to effectively process the text in emails, service logs, call notes and, more recently, forums, blogs and wikis, Attensity aims to make companies both aware of their customers’ [...]

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First Look – InRule Technology

April 21, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]

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First Look – InfoCentricity Xeno

April 15, 2008

I recently got an overview of InfoCentricity and their analytic product, Xeno. InfoCentricity is an analytic solutions company focused on helping customers find the insights buried in their data. They see a gap between BI-like analytic tools and data mining/analytic tools like SAS or S where you need to be a programmer. Their objective is [...]

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First Look – ThinkAnalytics

March 31, 2008

I spent some time with Peter Docherty of ThinkAnalytics recently, talking about their decisioning product. ThinkAnalytics grew out of K.wiz, a small team focused on the automation of the data mining process. The team had experience in data mining, real-time telecoms monitoring and data compression. They delivered an open, component-based platform with the intent to [...]

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First Look – Kognitio WX2

March 27, 2008

The folks at Kognitio gave me a quick overview of their WX2 product recently. WX2 is aimed at three distinct areas:

Software platform for high performance analytics
Data as a Service – it is being offered hosted to SMBs for instance
Data Warehouse Appliances

WX2 came out of the UK and is the end result of [...]

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First Look – Chordiant Decision Management

March 27, 2008

I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers – those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]

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