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first look

First Look – Frontline Solver

Frontline Solvers has been in business for over 25 years and focused on democratizing analytics for the last five years. They identify themselves as an alternative to analytic complexity with a focus on leveraging broadly held Excel skills and a large base of trained students. They offer several products for predictive and prescriptive analytics and [...]

First Look: IBM Decision Composer

IBM has been developing Decision Composer since 2017 and is releasing it as part of its core Business Rules Management System, Operational Decision Manager, in December 2018. Decision Composer is a browser-based tool, currently available on the IBM cloud, that uses a decision model metaphor to design decision logic and deploy it as a decision [...]

First Look: OpenL Tablets 5.21

EIS OpenL Tablets is a product of EIS Group focused on using a spreadsheet paradigm to manage business rules. I last spoke to OpenL Tablets in 2013 and recently got an update on the product. EIS OpenL Tablets is available as open source and in a commercial version. EIS Group is an insurance innovation company [...]

First Look: ACTICO Modeler 8

ACTICO has just released ACTICO Modeler 8 – the latest version of the product previously known as Visual Rules for Finance (see most recent review here). ACTICO Modeler is a project-based IDE. ACTICO users can now select whether to create a “classic” Rule Modeling project or a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) project. The DMN [...]

First Look: OneClick.ai

OneClick.ai is a company taking advantage of the fact that many AI problems use similar approaches to reduce the time and cost of individual AI projects. It was founded and received its initial funding in 2017, and launched the product last year. The company has a core team of 8 in the US and China [...]

SAS Decision Manager is SAS’ platform for decision automation and is getting a significant update in December 2017. I wrote a product review of SAS Decision Manager in 2014 and a number of things have changed in the new release, which is on the new SAS Platform and leverages new SAS Viya technologies. SAS Decision [...]

First Look: Neuro-ID

Neuro-ID TM started about 7 years ago with the premise that by monitoring how people use their keyboards and mice one could identify the confidence level of the person filling out the form. And that this could be done without any personally identifiable information. They developed a Neuro Confidence ScoreTM  (Neuro-CS TM) which they have [...]

First Look: Open Data Group

Open Data Group is an analytic deployment company. The company was started over 10 years ago and has transitioned from consulting to a product company, applying their expertise in Data Science and IT to create an analytic engine, FastScore. Successful analytics require organizational alignment (specifically between Data Science and IT) to create coordination of systems [...]

Avola Decision is a decision model-based decisioning platform migrating from supporting the proprietary TDM (The Decision Model) approach to support for the DMN (Decision Model and Notation) open standard. I reviewed the previous product and since then the team has been working on a new product. The new Avola Decision is .Net based on the [...]

First Look: DataRobot

DataRobot is focused on automated machine learning and on helping customers build an AI driven business, especially by focusing on decisions that can be automated using machine learning and other AI technologies. DataRobot was founded in 2012 and currently has nearly 300 staff including 150+ data scientists. Since it was founded, well over 200M models have [...]

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics 3.1 is the current release of the SAP predictive analytic suite. Like most in the analytics space, SAP sees its clients struggling to make use of massive amounts of data that are newly available while facing ever increasing business expectations, faster business decision cycles and an analytical skill gap. SAP therefore [...]

First Look: Reltio Cloud

Reltio Cloud is a modern data management Platform as a Service (PaaS) company focused on delivering data-driven applications, founded in 2011 by folks from Siperian which was acquired by Informatica. Unlike most data integration and MDM platforms, which are IT-focused, Reltio’s mission to make it possible for business and IT teams in enterprises to “Be [...]

Equifax has been expanding beyond credit bureau data in recent years by providing better access to a broad range of their own fraud, employment, wealth, commercial and alternative data sources as well as 3rd party data to position themselves as an insights company. As part of this focus, their Decision Management platform, InterConnect, was rebuilt [...]

First Look: Conductrics 3.0

I caught up with the folks from Conductrics to learn about their 3.0 release (I have blogged about Conductrics before). Conductrics has been in the decision optimization business for many years now. At its core Conductrics is about assigning customers to experiences. They recently released 3.0 with some new features. Conductrics Express is a point-and-click [...]

JMP 13 and JMP Pro 13 launched in September 2016. JMP is a business unit of SAS with more than $60M in revenue with growth and a focus in manufacturing and life sciences. Lots of engineers, analysts, researchers and scientists as users. JMP has specialty products in Genomics and Life Sciences but this release is [...]

First Look: Enova Decisions

Enova Decisions was launched in January of 2016 as an outgrowth of Enova International’s existing technology and analytics capabilities, which are used to offer online consumer and small business loans to 11 brands in six countries including NetCredit and Headway Capital. Launched in 2004 as an online lender, Enova does all its own analytics for [...]

I recently got a chance to catch up with the IBM SPSS team for an update. Analytics, in IBM’s view and mine, are increasingly necessary as digitization increases the scale of business data and digital disruptors increase the difficulty of making good decisions. For those being disrupted analytics offers a powerful way to fight back. [...]

First Look: Avola Decision

The founders of Avola began working together in 2012 as an incubator called Bizzotope, intended as a venue for starting a number of innovative ventures. The first company was Bizzomate – a business and IT consulting firm focused on low-code platforms like Mendix and agile/Scrum approaches. Platforms like these generally lack process and decisioning capabilities [...]

Sparkling Logic is focused on enabling business and data analysts to manage automate decisions better and faster – what they call Analytics driven Decision Management. Sparkling Logic was founded in 2010 and I have blogged a few times about their decisioning platform (most recently here). Customers include Equifax, Paypal, FirstRate, Accela, Northrop Grumman and others [...]

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 [...]