pricing

Last session of the day is a freeform executive Q&A so I will just list bullet points as they come up: Open Source R is obviously a hot topic in analytics and SAS’ focus on more open APIs that are broadly accessible and their renewed focus on academic partnerships are designed to “leave R in the [...]

Blue Yonder is based in Germany (Karlsruhe) and was founded in 2008 by an ex-CERN researcher, Prof. Michael Feindt and focusing on solving big data problems such as demand estimation. Several solutions targeted at retail were released over subsequent years. In 2013 they launched their Data Science Academy. The Blue Yonder platform for predictive applications [...]

Valen Analytics has been around since 2004 and is focused on providing proprietary data, analytics and predictive modeling to the Property and Casualty market with 25 customers in production. To help carriers manage and segment their portfolios to drive underwriting profitability, Valen develops productized models based on pooled consortium data for carriers. Valen’s InsureRight platform [...]

Josh Prismon and Matt Beck came up next to walk through a 5 step plan for Big Marketing – Marketing in the era of Big Data. Admit you have a problem Stop interrupting and start understanding Create a personal dialogue guided by analytics Continuously improve your decisions Push out by building network effects The context for this [...]

FICO Xpress Optimization Suite is part of the FICO Decision Management tools suite. It can be used in conjunction with various FICO applications too. It is used directly with their Marketing product and is embedded in their Decision Optimizer product that can generate optimal rules for their Originations, Customer Management, Collections and Fraud products. Outside [...]

Fuzzy Logix is an advanced analytics software solution and services company headquartered in Charlotte North Carolina, with offices in Cupertino California, Richmond, Virginia and distribution channels throughout the world. Fuzzy Logix provides an in-database analytics solution, supporting both in-database model construction and in-database scoring.  They also offer in-GPU solutions, which allow users to access potentially [...]

Some time back I wrote Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them) and it seemed to me that this could do with being repeated with small updates. One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. Business rules are, after all, one of the core technologies [...]

Zoot was founded in 1990 and has been providing hosted decision management solutions since 1992. With a focus on financial services, Zoot’s clients include 3 of the top 5 U.S. banks and they work with clients of all sizes and across all lines of business.  Instant credit decisioning is one of their critical offerings, but [...]

Meri Gruber, VP Biz Dev here at Decision Management Solutions, had a post a little while ago that she recently tweeted – How many service reps does it take to change a light bulb or lose a customer? In it she makes the point that a company lost her business because the customer service department [...]

One of my clients, Nomis Solutions has a number of jobs open: Client Director, Data Architect, Senior Optimization Engineer, Agile Developer, Technical/Customer Support Director, and Software Architect. Nomis Solutions provides Pricing and Profitability Management solutions to the financial services industry. Nomis Solutions is headquartered in San Bruno, California, with offices in London and representation in [...]

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 [...]

Some weeks back I wrote a series of posts on the role of Decision Management in Insurance. One post was called multi-channel distribution and customer communication and outlined how Decision Services that automate customer decisions improve customer treatment in a multi-channel world by improving their accuracy, timeliness and consistency. The diagram at left shows how [...]

Final IBM IMPACT session for me this year is If P&C Insurance talking about the role of process and rules in claims processing. If is the largest property and casualty insurer in the Nordic region and covers all sorts of risks across personal and commercial lines of business. Insurance Customer Satisfaction can seem like an [...]

Focus of the presentation from Russ Cobb was Banking, Insurance, Retail and Government. Banking first. Lots of releases this year primarily around Enterprise Risk Management, Governance Risk Compliance, Customer intelligence, fraud and financial crime solutions. Key customer issues for SAS in banking: Customer Growth How do you identify, grow and manage your most profitable customers. [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Opera Solutions recently. A company that aims to improve “machine intelligence” and couple it with human insight to help companies with sustained profit growth, Opera has 400 staff worldwide with over 125 analytic scientists. This makes it a very large analytic solutions provider in a market dominated [...]

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

My old friend Marcia Conner pointed me to this great piece yesterday Investing at the Bottom of the Ladder that discussed how “Companies that invest in their lowest-level employees are more productive and more profitable”. Personally I found this cheering and a nice counterpoint to the outsource everything, always reduce costs no matter what mindset [...]

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]