Product News

Great Hurwitz Report on Predictive Analytic tools

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 24th June 2014 |

The Hurwitz Group just published their Victory Index for Predictive Analytics. This is a great report on the core predictive analytic vendors written by Marcia Kaufman and Daniel Kirsch. The report covers Angoss, IBM, Megaputer, Pegasystems, Predixion, RapidMiner, Revolution Analytics, SAS, SAP, StatSoft. The report aims to assess four things about each vendor:

Vision – how good the company’s strategy for predictive analytics is
Viability – how sustainable the company’s presence in the market is
Validity – how customers perceive the technical benefits and capabilities of the company’s product
Value – how much business value customers achieve with the company’s product

This assessment is based on vendor surveys, vendor s

Pegaworld 2014 – Pega 7 Summary

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 9th June 2014 |

Kerim Akgonul came up next to talk products, in particular Pega 7. Pega 7 was released last year and is being used around the world. Pega 7 focused on several elements:

Visibility through the common case interface
Speed and accuracy through automation of processes and decisions
Speed and accuracy also of development, making it easier and quicker to develop applications and adapt them over time.
Anticipating customer needs through new data integration capabilities that support streaming data and “Big Data” delivering predictive and adaptive analytics built using this data.
User adoption by redoing the UI engine so that it is easy to deliver engaging,usable interfaces.

Pega 7 also supported cloud deployment, social/mobile and all the usual enterprise capabilities.

Pega 7 is also the platform for their CRM applications – Next Best Action Marketing, Customer Process Management and Sale

Decision Management Market Highlights Q1 2014

Posted By: Meri Gruber | Posted On: 27th March 2014 |

We published our Decision Management Market Highlights Q1 2014 today. Here is an excerpt: There have been interesting developments in the Decision Management market this quarter. In particular the focus is clearly shifting from Decision Management simply as a better way to manage business rules to one where analytics, especially predictive analytics, is central. This quarter […]

Standards in Predictive Analytics: Futures

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 16th January 2014 |

In this series so far we have discussed a number of standards – R, PMML and Hadoop – that are well established. There are also some future developments that are worth considering—the emergence of the Decision Model and Notation standard, growing acceptance of Hadoop 2 and planned updates to PMML specifically.

As regular readers of this blog know, the Object Management Group recently accepted the Decision Model and Notation standard as a beta specification for finalization in 2014. DMN provides a common modeling notation, understandable by both business and technical users, that allows decision-making approaches to be precisely defined. These decision models can include the specification of detailed decision logic and can model the role of predictive analytics at a requirements level and at an implementation level through the inclusion of PMML models as functions. Decision Management, Product News

Standards in Predictive Analytics: PMML

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 7th January 2014 |

Continuing my series on standards in Predictive Analytics I am going to talk first about PMML. PMML is an XML standard for the interchange of predictive analytic models developed by the Data Mining Group. The basic structure is an XML format document that contains a header, a data dictionary, data transformations and one or more models each consisting of a mining schema based on the type of model, a target and other outputs such as measures of accuracy. PMML started in 1998 and the most recent release was 4.1 in 2011. The 4.x releases marked a major milestone with support for pre- and post-processing, time series, explanations and ensembles. Support for PMML is widespread and growing with an active community and many analytic vendors are either members of DMG or provide support for the standard in their products.

PMML has particular value for organizations as they move away from a batch scoring mindset to a more real-time scoring approach.

The growing impact of Business Rules and Decision Management. What a difference 5 years makes!

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 26th December 2013 |

Back in 2008 I wrote this post – The small impact of business rules on the big players, bemoaning the lack of serious investment in business rules on the part of major software companies. As we enter 2014 I thought I would revisit this post and consider what a difference 5 years makes. Let’s consider some of the world’s top enterprise software vendors:

IBM
IBM has become a major booster for both Decision Management and business rules. The old ILOG product is now Operational Decision Management and has seen significant and continuous investment since IBM acquired it. Decision Management is one of three pillars of IBM’s Smarter Process initiative and every year it seems to have more visibility at events like IMPACT as well

Predictive Analytics in Software Part 4: Land and Expand

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 24th September 2013 |

Most software products have multiple opportunities for using predictive analytics to enhance decision-making. Because the use of predictive analytics is new for many software companies, and because handling decisions explicitly is also new, care must be taken not to bite off too much at once. A land and expand strategy that begins with a localized […]

Tell us what you think about predictive analytics in the cloud

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 18th September 2013 |

We would really like your input for our 2013 survey on Predictive Analytics in the Cloud – Use Cases, Trends and Big Data. Back in 2011 we did a survey and associated research on the use of predictive analytics in the cloud. While it may not seem like that long ago, back then predictive analytics was […]

Predictive Analytics in Software Step 2: Focusing on Automation

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 10th September 2013 |

Once you have identified decisions that could usefully be improved by predictive analytics you must develop predictive analytic models for each decision. Each decision is going to require a different predictive analytic model, perhaps several. Some predictive analytic models, such as predicting the future value of a customer for instance, may be useful in multiple […]

Predictive Analytics in Software Step 1: Focusing on Decisions

Posted By: James Taylor | Posted On: 3rd September 2013 |

To become predictive, to use predictive analytics to differentiate a software product, you need to identify the decisions that can be made more profitably, more accurately, more precisely or more reliably. Unless the predictive analytics embedded in your product improve some decision-making then they will offer no real value. At best such analytics will be […]