It’s been over a year since I last got updated on Zementis (their 3.5 release of ADAPA and PMML Universal Plug-in). Since then they have been busy adding support for new platforms and signing new partnerships. Most recently they have announced a strategic alliance between Zementis and FICO, something Zementis sees as a big win for open standards (see this post on the new FICO cloud). The partnership means that Zementis’ PMML-based solutions will run on the new FICO Analytic Cloud platform. The FICO Decision Management Platform will tightly embed the Zementis engine so that any PMML model can be loaded up into it and executed as part of a broader decision service built on the FICO DMP.
The Zementis Universal PMML Plug-in itself has evolved with new partnerships. Zementis has partnered with IBM for Netezza, with Teradata for both Teradata (coming soon) and Teradata Aster, and now supports Hive on top of Hadoop. All of these relationships are in addition to already announced relationships with SAP Sybase IQ, EMC Greenplum and Datameer. Common to all these deployments is massively parallel execution of PMML models on the platform you already own. In addition to platform-independent deployment, of course, the use of PMML allows the model development to be very vendor neutral. Lots of modeling tools are being used to produce PMML models which can then be consumed in various MPP platforms using the PMML Plug-in. The ADAPA platform is also broadening its support with the original Amazon cloud deployment being extended with support for the IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise and now the FICO Analytic Cloud.
At the end of the day Zementis envisions their platform giving companies the maximum flexibility for their analytic expertise – use any data mining tool to build models with the ability to execute those models on any platform. They see an increasing number of customers, major leaders across all various industries, that are using PMML as the primary mechanism to move from analytic development to operational production. Big Data is also driving complexity in analytic model development, making companies want to use a wider range of more specialized tools. At the same time hiring of data scientists is hard, so companies don’t want to restrict themselves to people who know a specific tool. This is reflected on the data mining tool side also with tool vendors improving their support for PMML , plus constantly expanding R support for PMML. More and more features in PMML – e.g., 4.1 has expanded pre- and post-processing as well as ensemble models – is combining with better support in modeling environments to allow more advanced, more sophisticated models to be delivered as PMML. Momentum is really building they say.
Finally partnerships are important to Zementis and they have added a new Japanese partner, Infocom, to add to Dymatrix in Europe and Purple Analytics for other parts of Asia. These partners are focused on predictive analytics and act as Zementis implementation partners in those countries.
You can get more information on Zementis here and Zementis is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report.
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