First Look – SAS High-Performance Analytics appliances

April 2, 2012

High-Performance Analytics from SAS consists of SAS Grid Computing, SAS In-Database Analytics and SAS In-Memory Analytics. The latter component has a new addition in the form of SAS High-Performance Analytics (SAS HPA), which was announced in Dec. 2011. SAS HPA is appliance-ready software that uses hardware from database partners (Teradata or EMC Greenplum) for high [...]

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First Look – Pervasive RushAnalyzer

March 29, 2012

Pervasive is best known for its data integration products but has recently been developing and releasing a series of products focused on analytics. RushAnalyzer is a combination of the KNIME data mining workbench (reviewed here) and Pervasive DataRush, a platform for parallelization and automatic scaling of data manipulation and analysis (reviewed here).
In the combined product, [...]

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First Look – Web Rule 2.0

March 28, 2012

I have blogged about code effects’ Web Rule product before. This rule editor and execution environment supports both execution rules (that have an action to take) and evaluation rules (that just return true/false) as well as an IntelliSense/type ahead editor based on an XML object model. Rules in this product are closer to a ruleset [...]

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First Look – Rapid Insight Analytics

March 28, 2012

Rapid Insight was founded 10 years ago to develop tools that were easier for analysts to use to quickly extract meaning from data. Rapid Insight has been focused in higher education until recently and is expanding into fund raising and other areas. Rapid Insight Analytics is a pure data mining or predictive analytic workbench designed [...]

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First Look – Rapid-I

March 27, 2012

Rapid-I provides open source software for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining. Incorporated in 2006, they are based in Dortmund Germany and have been working on RapidMiner since 2001. They have over 35,000 production deployments and more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Banking and financial services is their largest market followed by Pharma [...]

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Can good decisions have bad outcomes?

March 22, 2012

There was an interesting discussion on LinkedIn recently – A good decision is the same as a good outcome. True, False, or “I don’t know? This illustrates one of the key challenges in Decision Management Systems – because good decisions can have bad outcomes.
This can seem counter-intuitive. After all if a company makes a strategic decision, [...]

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We need medical decision management not just electronic medical records

March 21, 2012

An article on electronic medical records in the New York Times caught my eye recently. In this article was the comment:
Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often, a study published on Monday concludes.
Now I don’t know specifically what about the specific [...]

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Pushing the frontiers of analytics #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Brenda Dietrich from IBM research wrapped up the morning with a discussion of some of IBM’s research. This involved both managing uncertain data at scale and driving analytics for this data. Projects cover systems of people, the future Watson, Outcome-based business and resilient business and services.
As everyone knows there’s a lot more data out there [...]

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Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit Opening #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Steve Mills kicked off the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit. Business Analytics matter, he says, as shown by the focus of CEOs (8 out of 10 expect complexity to increase, enterprises applying analytics are more successful etc). The need for analytics is pervasive, with every industry seeing a massive expansion in the volume of data [...]

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Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies online now

March 20, 2012

Our new report on Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies has been available for download for a while now and thousands of you have downloaded it. To make it even easier to access (the PDF does not require a registration even) we have made it available online in the main report webpage – just scroll down [...]

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First Look – Fuzzy Logix In-Database Analytics

March 20, 2012

Fuzzy Logix is an advanced analytics software solution and services company headquartered in Charlotte North Carolina, with offices in Cupertino California, Richmond, Virginia and distribution channels throughout the world. Fuzzy Logix provides an in-database analytics solution, supporting both in-database model construction and in-database scoring.  They also offer in-GPU solutions, which allow users to access potentially [...]

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Optimization and simulation in Decision Management Technologies

March 15, 2012

As you probably know by now, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these [...]

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Documenting decisions separately from use cases

March 14, 2012

There is a nice article over on Modern Analyst on documenting decisions separately from use cases in which Mark Monteleone lays out the case for this. As he says:
I do propose making decisions visible. By visible, I mean aseparate and explicit step for each decision being made. These steps help the developer identify where possible alternate and exception [...]

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Embedding predictive analytics in Decision Management Technologies

March 13, 2012

We recently released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these areas is embedding predictive analytics. For [...]

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Book Review: Knowledge Automation: How to implement Decision Management in Business Processes

March 13, 2012

Some time ago I got a pre-release copy of Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes, Alan Fish’s new book on the analysis and design techniques of decision management. I was delighted to write a foreword for Alan and with the arrival of a printed copy I wanted to extend this with [...]

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The power of Customer Decision Management

March 12, 2012

A few weeks ago Rob Brosnan wrote a nice piece on the Forrester blog – Is it time for Customer Decision Management? It’s a great piece and he described Customer Decision Management applications thus:
Customer decision management applications are tools that tailor the content, products, offers, and next actions presented to individual customers based on analytical [...]

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Managing Decision Logic in Decision Management Technologies

March 8, 2012

As regular readers know, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these areas is [...]

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Overlapping Decision Management Technologies Product Categories

March 6, 2012

We have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology.
One of the challenges is that multiple product categories exist in the market for the capabilities we discuss in the report. These product categories often overlap.

While there are many Business Rules Management Systems [...]

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First Look – Dymatrix DynaMine

March 6, 2012

Dymatrix started in 2000 as a spinout from Computer Sciences Corporation. Focused on analytical CRM and campaign management they have done many projects and identified a number of challenges in the use of predictive analytic models. They have customers across utilities, retail, telecommunications, banking, insurance and life sciences. This work led to the development of [...]

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First Look – EigenDog

March 5, 2012

EigenDog was founded in 2011 and launched their service for scalable predictive modeling in December 2011. Their objective was to provide scalability in machine learning. As we are all aware these days, more data tends to result in better predictive analytic models while better models can result in better business results. EigenDog’s perspective is that [...]

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