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Continuing to blog at Building Business Capability 2016 with Ron Ross talking about operational excellence. [My comments in italics] He began by talking about the new technology available and its potential while expressing worries that technologies, and technological approaches, might not really change our businesses for the better. In particular he expressed concern that “channel mania” might [...]

Second keynote at IBM’s World of Watson is on the role of cloud and data as the foundation for cognitive systems and businesses. Bob Picciano from IBM’s analytics business kicked things off. Bob began with a discussion of how IT’s value has changed – from a focus on processing and how fast/cheap it can be done to a [...]

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 [...]

I got a briefing from a new predictive analytics vendor, DMWay. DMWay was founded in 2014 based on significant research over the previous decades. DMWay had a first VC round in 2015, have 20+ employees and dozens of customers. DMWay is focused on democratizing data science and automating machine learning so that those with business [...]

Final session today focused on systems and architecture for Big Data Analytics. It began by talking about the friction between business and IT and how this is increasing, especially around information and analytics where business users want to be able to work with data without worrying about IT. This creates challenges for IT specifically: The [...]

I got a briefing on SAS Factory Miner, to be officially released in July. SAS Factory Miner is designed to help organizations scale their analytic efforts, enabling them to solve more problems, faster, more accurately and without adding resources. SAS generally presents the analytic lifecycle with two main loops – a discovery one and a [...]

Next up at the Teradata Influencer event was a session on data lakes and related technology / approaches from the Think Big consulting team. Think Big sees a data lake as an approach to capturing, refining, storing and exploring any form of raw data at scale, enabled by low cost technologies and from which downstream [...]

Ron Bodkin of Think Big (founded in 2010 and acquired by Teradata in late 2014) came up next to talk about their consulting practice around hadoop and other big data infrastructure. They are now over 100 people (on shore and off shore) with a 100% focus on Big Data technology. They are run largely separately [...]

SAS® Model Manager is getting an update soon to release 13.1 (I last blogged about Model Manager 3.1). The vision of SAS Model Manager going forward is to streamline the integration of predictive modeling into the overall environment, make it easier to operationalize analytical models, expand the model portfolio management capabilities and improve governance and [...]

SAS® Enterprise Miner recently got a major release – 13.1 – focused on machine learning, scalability and productivity. It’s been a while since I blogged about SAS Enterprise Miner (last review here) so this might not be a complete list of the improvements since then. The machine learning focus added High Performance Support Vector Machines [...]

UPDATED 2/19/2015 for SAS® Decision Manager v 2.2 reflecting ongoing integration of capabilities into the core product as well as new features (in italics). SAS has announced its new Decision Management product – SAS® Decision Manager  – back in 2013 and it is now in version 2.2. Over recent years SAS sees an increasing focus [...]

SAP has recently announcement some new predictive analytic offerings. At the core are in-database predictive analytics and R integration based on SAP HANA and a new predictive modeling tool, SAP Predictive Analysis. The latter is aimed to close the gap between “pure” data miners/modelers and the business analysts that might typically use tools like SAP [...]

Salford Systems was founded in 1983 and initially developed SAS procedure– add-ons for SAS. They then worked with a PC-based statistics package before moving solidly into data mining and predictive analytics after meeting the inventors of the CART algorithm around 1990. Their product range now consists of CART®, TreeNet® stochastic gradient boosting, MARS®, RandomForests®, GPS™ [...]

Sapiens has been around for over 25 years developing technology solutions around business rules and model-based development, specifically in financial services and insurance. Established in 1982 and NASDAQ traded, they have $100M in annual revenues post a couple of recent mergers. They have over 750 employees in US, Canada, UK, Japan, Australia, Belgium and Israel. [...]

SAS sees Information Management as being about treating data as a strategic asset. Changes in competition, regulatory environment and more are driving this to be more importance. Information Management for SAS includes Data Management, Decision Management (mixing rules and analytics to drive operational decisions in decision services) and Analytics Management (supporting what I call an [...]

FICO Model Central is the latest addition to FICO’s Decision Management platform and is focused on lifecycle management of predictive analytic models in the context of an overall Decision Management implementation. The original driver was a growing regulatory requirement in the banking industry to have a regular cycle of model validation and monitoring of predictive [...]

USoft has been a vendor in the Decision Management space for a while. They started as Comtecno in 1986, become part of Unisys in 1995 then Ness Benelux in 1999 before returning to their current status as an independent Dutch software company in 2010 as USoft B.V. The software has had a much more consistent [...]

StatSoft was founded in 1984 and started building statistical software when it first became practical to deliver on the PC. STATISTICA is an enterprise predictive analytics platform on the Windows platform with role-based access, connections to the various data sources that companies have and support for data exploration through to deployment. The product has four [...]

Talend has been around for about 6 years and the original focus was on “democratizing” data integration – making it cheaper, easier, quicker and less maintenance-heavy. They originally wanted to build an open source alternative for data integration. In particular they wanted to make sure that there was a product that worked for smaller companies [...]