The Business Intelligence Blog

“[We don't] have all the functionality of something like a SAS or an SPSS, because that’s just not our market,” he concedes. It comes down to a difference of scale, Farmer argues: SAS and SPSS typically target larger, more expensive deployments — typically with users well-versed in the usage of their tools. Microsoft is targeting a different kind of data mining consumer: the Excel analyst, for example, who might not have much (if any) experience — with data mining, predictive analytics, or statistical analysis for that matter.

“By the way, I don’t mean to say we can’t hit the high-end. Within Microsoft, we have our own database marketing team. We’re one of the largest companies in the world. We have a huge database marketing team who do classic customer analysis. These guys were all SAS users, but when they joined Microsoft, they started using our tools. The entire process runs on our database, they actually use the Excel [data mining] add-ins to do it. It’s not that there’s nothing they don’t miss, [it's that] they are able to achieve the same business results using our tools.”

Last year, Microsoft released a data mining and predictive analytic add-on for its Excel 2007 product (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7c76e8df-8674-4c3b-a99b-55b17f3c4c51&DisplayLang=en). The add-on, which is similar to Microsoft’s well-known SQL Server BI Accelerator products, integrates natively with Excel 2007. It introduces a new “Data Mining” tab that exposes several pre-built functions, including forecasting, accuracy charting, cross-validation, exception highlighting, category detection, key influencers, shopping basket analysis (the last is a SQL Server 2008-only function) and many others.

From an article on ESJ.