This was my first briefing on Statistica since I reviewed v11 in 2012. Statsoft was established in 1984 and acquired by Dell in March 2014. The product has been continuously developed to the point where it has over 16,000 integrated functions. Since acquisition, Dell has been focused on integrating it into Dell systems and processes and accelerating its product development and release cycle cadence. Dell Statistica 13.1 was recently announced and Version 13 (released Sept 2015) was the first Dell version:
- The user interface got a major upgrade to be a more modern look and feel – still a windows application but significantly upgraded
- Data discovery and visualization was a big focus in V13 with interactive charts, maps, dashboarding and an entirely new visualization engine.
- New connectors support Hive, SQL etc
- New data blending and improved real-time scoring.
The overall environment supports
- Text analytics along with other analytic techniques and embedded business rules in the core environment
- Enterprise Server with embedded business rules, validated data and metadata management.
- Automated model monitoring, collaboration & process control
- Real time model scoring
- Regulatory compliance & change management
- NLP, Entity Extraction, & in-Hadoop model deployment
- Single or multi-site deployment: license and usage management
13.1 had some new specific capabilities
- Making access easier is a key feature. Data preparation is a key area. 80 pre-built functions including a node for data health checks (sparse data, missing data, outliers etc). Semi-structured data from documents or XML files is supported along with redaction of confidential information.
- Data can be exported directly to Tableau and Qlik and new visualization capabilities were added.
- Reuse of data prep and analytic workflows built by an expert is also supported, allowing an expert to create a complex flow that can be templatized and passed to someone with less expertise so they can embed it in their own work.
- Dell also added a Native Distributed Analytics Architecture. Dell Statistica runs on premise and any analytic package built in it can be exported as Java, PMML, SQL etc. This can be pushed into various deployment environments like SQL Server, Hadoop, Dell Boomi, clouds (private and publish) or embedded in edge systems like devices.
- R and Python are supported – R packages can be brought in as node and scripts can be written in Python within the environment.
- In-database analytics are supported through SQL and Spark push back. Correlation, sorts, frequency, classification, regression and other elements are supported with more to come.
A new web-based reporting UI has been added and V14 is expected to be browser based and more cloud-centric.
More information on Dell Statistica is available here and Dell is a vendor in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology Report
