SaaS

Update – In2Clouds

May 16, 2011

I got an update from in2clouds recently. Since I last wrote about them (see this First Look on in2clouds) they have made 3 key updates – they have added support for ensemble models, moved to allow private/hybrid cloud deployment and completed their service definition API.
Ensemble models first. While using an ensemble model does not always [...]

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Decision Management, Big Data and McKinsey

May 13, 2011

Cross posted at International Institute for Analytics
McKinsey just published a new study “Big Data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity” that is definitely worth reading. With lots of detail – it runs to more than 150 pages – it discusses why there is so much more data, what that means and how this [...]

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First Look – Sparkling Logic

April 27, 2011

Sparkling Logic is a new company founded by a couple of old colleagues of mine and focused on what they call “Social Logic”. They have developed a social, cloud-based environment designed to help companies find the best, most defined decision logic that launched today at the Gartner BPM Summit. Fundamentally the new platform aims to [...]

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First Look – Talent Analytics Advisor

April 20, 2011

I got a demo of the Talent Analytics platform recently. Talent Analytics is a company that develops solutions that provide relevant information to help companies anticipate the impact talent has on their business goals. Advisor, their platform, is a web-based SaaS platform.
At the top level the product allows one or more organizations to be managed [...]

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First Look – Activant DynaChange rules

April 13, 2011

I saw an interesting press announcement the other day about Activant’s new business rules functionality. Activant (who recently agreed to be acquired and merged with Epicor) is an ERP provider focused on distribution and retail – 60% of revenues come from retail and 40% from distribution. Activant as a whole has 15,000 customers concentrated in [...]

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First Look – Eagle Eye Analytics

March 30, 2011

Eagle Eye Analytics is an analytics company offering advanced predictive modeling to the Property and Casualty insurance market. The company was formed 4 years ago and has been marketing a machine learning SaaS product for the last three years. The company prides itself on selling solutions to clients the way they want to buy them [...]

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First Look – Kount

March 8, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Kount recently, a 4 year old company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Keynetics (a 13 year old e-commerce company) focused on preventing fraud in e-commerce. They offer an all-in-one SaaS solution aimed at detecting fraud fast (intra-transaction real-time) while giving customers flexibility and usability. They [...]

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SAS product portfolio and roadmaps

March 7, 2011

Warning, long post follows – SAS has a lot of products and even this summary was a lot. A big session on the product portfolio – 2010 and 2011 highlights in some specific focus areas. New releases in 2010 included:

Customer Link Analytics – released in Q1 this product focused on using links between customers to [...]

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Future trends in business rules (with a little help from my friends)

January 20, 2011

I was presenting this week to a company that asked what trends I saw in business rules. I had my ow thoughts but I also reached out to some other experience business rules implementers. Here’s what we came up with:

A broader context for business rules

Business rules are increasingly adopted as part of a broader effort [...]

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Event capture and analytics #inext2010

November 3, 2010

Mike Hoskins talked about event capture and analytics, or the transition from data acquisition to meaningful knowledge – how to build data pipelines from client data to meaningful insight at a Business Service Provider (BSP or SaaS data processor).  BSPs have an interesting challenge  – they provide a service in the cloud but they have [...]

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Product Update – FICO Blaze Advisor in the cloud

October 18, 2010

FICO had an interesting announcement today – Blaze Advisor, their business rules management system, is supporting Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for cloud deployments (the press release is here). The announcement is a first step only – at this stage Microsoft and FICO have focused solely on verifying the deployment of decision services built using Blaze [...]

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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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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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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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First Look – Experian hosted decisioning solutions

May 24, 2010

I got a quick update from Roger Ahern at Experian recently. Roger runs a recently founded group focused on hosted decisioning applications. Experian also has a Decision Analytics group with teams handling software (their Strategy ManagementSM and ProbeSM products), fraud products (like Precise IDSM) and Decision Sciences (custom analytic models and related services).  Experian’s Credit [...]

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First Look – Verix

May 14, 2010

I got my first look at Verix recently. Verix targets the commercial side of Pharmaceutical companies – sales first, then managed care and then marketing. They are trying to shift the burden of analysis work from sales managers, sales consultants to automated systems. They started with a core analytic competency and it evolved over time [...]

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Teradata in the cloud

April 27, 2010

Dan Graham and Mike Riordan presented on Teradata’s cloud strategy. They began with a quick reminder that a cloud involves on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and pay per use. Teradata is currently testing and developing for clouds and virtualization – Teradata Express.
They are working with amazon.com’s web services team for instance [...]

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Stephen few on the problem with BI

March 22, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
In a recent post, Big BI is Stuck: Illustrated by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, Stephen Few took issue with the claims of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. I have not spent any time with the product so I am not going to discuss his specific criticisms but I was struck by a [...]

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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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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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