The Business Intelligence Blog

From Press Release -

Forrester evaluated the top nine predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM) solution vendors across 53 criteria, segmenting them into the three categories including current offering, product strategy, and market presence. As a leader offering “mature, high-performance, scalable, flexible, and robust PA/DM solutions,” Portrait received the 3rd highest score for Product Strategy & the 6th highest score for Current Offering.”

Among the vendor products the Forrester(TM) Wave evaluated were Portrait Customer Analytics, Portrait Uplift Optimizer, and Portrait Self-service Analytics. According to the Forrester(TM) Wave, “Portrait provides a user-friendly, feature-rich PA/DM solution portfolio in support of real-time scoring, interaction optimization, uplift optimization, and campaign management for customer analytics.”

“Powerful customer analytics have always been the core driver of Portrait’s innovative marketing solutions, but analytics itself only takes you so far,” said Luke McKeever, CEO, Portrait Software. “Portrait’s ability to not only incorporate analytics but to action the insights they deliver enables us to provide our customers with highly intelligent solutions that help them operate as a customer-centric organization, differentiating them from their competitors while simultaneously improving their marketing ROI.”

Once again, software is fighting crime. Microsoft unveiled a suite of tools and initiatives for law-enforcement groups “specifically designed to improve public security and safety,” the company said.
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It’s also the latest example of law enforcement officials arming themselves with better technology to help fight crime. The FBI, for instance, said that new database and data-sharing efforts have resulted in solving a number of difficult highway serial killings.

Gathering that data is key. That’s why Microsoft this week said it is giving a free tool to INTERPOL called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), an application that “uses common digital forensics tool to help officers at the scene of the crime.”

The company is working on a mobile version for future release, said Richard Domingues Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft’s Internet security program, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail.

A larger tool set for large-scale crimes is Microsoft Intelligence Framework, which is aimed at helping intelligence and law enforcement agencies coordinate information to detect and prevent terrorism, and to solve organized and major crime cases. The framework offers tools for storing and analyzing evidence and information across a variety of sources

From EarthWeb article.

Over at The Health Care Blog, Deb Bradley, Vice President, Client Solutions at Verisk Health in Waltham, Massachusetts writes about some examples of the next generation healthcare analytics. Most of us who do analytics engineering as apart of our day jobs would agree, healthcare is on area where analytics should grow vastly. There is a lot of data that can be intelligently massaged to answer some of the most challeging health related questions.

Medical claims, pharmacy claims, lab values, HRAs, genetic markers, biometrics – the abundance of data is having an immediate impact on how analytics shape healthcare. Next generation analytics are bringing attention to health and wellness rather than disease-specific guidelines, and generating novel approaches to value-based medicine and care management.

Traditionally, analytics, such as predictive modeling, have been used to identify individuals for chronic care management and to set rates. New predictive models, however, include financial and clinical algorithms, which allow healthcare organizations to implement advanced ways to identify, manage and measure risk across and within a population.

The new version of the SPSS modeling product — the erstwhile Clementine — is now known as PASW Modeler 13; its text analysis product (formerly Text Mining for Clementine) is now PASW Text Analytics 13. SPSS says that, over the course of the year, the rest of the SPSS product line will update under the PASW umbrella — including Statistics and Data Collection.

David Vergara, director of product marketing for SPSS, explains that the change was intended to help customers and prospects understand what the products are doing and how each offering pieces together within the broader portfolio.

Aside from the name change, the new versions of SPSS products focus on usability — and not just for data experts. Wettemann says that SPSS has “recognized that moving beyond the data analyst audience is where you get the real power.” PASW Modeler 13 features a drag-and-drop interface, and functionality that will appeal to business users. Two integral updates include a “comments” tool, in which users can flag notes within the software, and automated data preparation. Data automation mitigates human error and avoids common issues in data quality.

From Destination CRM.

For most of its eight-year history, Cataphora has focused on digital sleuthing. The company hunts for statistical signs of fraud. But in the past few years, Cataphora has been dispatching its data miners into a new market: statistical studies of employee performance.

The trend, though early, is unmistakable, and it extends far beyond Redwood City. Number crunching, a staple for decades in the quantifiable domains of engineering and finance, has spread in recent years into marketing and sales. Companies can now model and optimize operations, and can calculate the return on investment on everything from corporate jets to Super Bowl ads. These successes have led to the next math project: the worker. “You have to bring the same rigor you bring to operations and finance to the analysis of people,” says Rupert Bader, director of workforce planning at Microsoft (MSFT).

Such a mission might have been laughable a decade ago. But as the role of computers in the workplace expands, employees leave digital trails detailing their behavior, their schedule, their interests, and expertise. For executives to calculate the return on investment of each worker, their human resources departments are starting to open their doors to the quants.

From Business Week, an insightful article on how value of each employee is determined by HR using Data Mining/Analytics.

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn’t just more. More is different.

This month’s Wired magazine carries one of the most important growing concerns of the scientific community, the uncontrollable growth of data. This growth of data in many directions is nearly killing theories as everything is becoming more and more data controlled.

There are a series of articles ranging from what data miners are digging today to elaborate algorithms that predict air ticket prices to how we can monitor epidemics hour by hour.

If you are a BI entusiast or not, this month’s Wired cover story will challenge all your predictions about science and technology, even if you have a petabyte of data to support it !! Read it, like, right now !!

From IT Web Article -

Business intelligence firm SAS is set to release a solution that enables companies to measure how their operations impact the environment – a tough sell for now but a step in the right direction, according to one analyst, says Inquirer.net.

SAS says its Sustainability Management solution allows end-users to measure business based on what it refers to as the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social and economic indicators.

SAS says its solution uses predefined “green” metrics from the Global Reporting Initiative, used by more than thousands of businesses to measure the environmental impact of their operations.

From Silicon Republic, an interesting article on the exponential growth of data -

CURRENTLY the amount of data worldwide is doubling every 11 months – by 2010 it will double every 11 hours.

Ireland stands in the direct path of this tidal wave of data, warns a senior executive with business intelligence (BI) giant SAS.

Dr John Brocklebank, director of analytic solutions at privately held software giant SAS Institute, believes Irish firms are ill-equipped to deal with this rapid growth in the world’s data.

He says the challenge for Irish companies is to capture and exploit the 1-2pc of data that is relevant to their decision-making processes and strategic objectives.

“We know that, on average, managers spend two hours a day looking for data and that more than half of this is useless to their decision-making process,” Brocklebank explains.

“Most frightening is that 42pc of managers say they accidentally use the wrong information to make a decision at least once a week. So never mind trying to deal with the data in its entirety; it needs to be made meaningful and accurate to support business decisions.

Business Objects is now officially into Predictive Analytics with its new tool Predictive Workbench and that’s a good news. Read more from Infoweek.

Business Objects on Wednesday announced Predictive Workbench, a new module for its business intelligence platform that lets businesses make predictions about such things as customer behavior and business performance. The module, based on technology from SPSS Inc., is the latest example of a traditional BI company looking to move beyond its expertise in reporting and analysis tools.

Predictive Workbench is the result of an OEM deal Business Objects struck last December to offer SPSS’s technology. IBM (NYSE: IBM)’s Cognos struck a similar deal with SPSS in March, and also plans to integrate IBM-developed predictive analytics within Cognos. Both efforts take a direct competitive shot at SAS Institute, by far the market leader in predictive analytics.

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Since the December OEM deal, Business Objects has worked to integrate the SPSS technology, called Clementine, into Business Objects X1 3.0 so that it’s “totally transparent and seamless for customers,” said Franz Aman, VP of BI product marketing. The result is Predictive Workbench, from which a user can launch the Business Objects Universe metadata layer to run predictive analytics against various databases and data warehouses. Business Objects will disclose the price of the module only to interested customers, Aman says.

CRM Buyer has a series on breakthrughs in analytics world. A good read. Part 1 and Part 2.

While BI is about quickly obtaining enterprise information, Web analytics encompasses the collection, analysis and reporting of information about user activity on company Web sites. This process of analyzing the behavior of Internet visitors involves the study of the impact of a Web site on its users.

Distinctions between the two should be disappearing fairly quickly, according to Gary Angel, president and CTO of Semphonic, a tool-independent Web and search engine marketing analytics consultancy.

“I think it’s clear that there’s an increasing merger between traditional BI and Web analytics,” wrote Angel on his SemAngel blog. “This is true both in terms of data integration and tools. That’s certainly going to accelerate, and I see no reason why, in three years, the two disciplines will be separate in any meaningful sense. In addition, I think we’ll start to see much more ‘data-driven’ analysis within Web analytics.”

In 2006, IDC estimated the size of the 2005 Web analytics market at US$318 million and projected it to more than double in the ensuing five years. JupiterResearch put the size of the Web analytics market at $463 million in 2006. Today, the market is above $500 million.

This growth has occurred because the Web has become a part of the marketing mix model and is proving its value, according to Jim Sterne, president of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

“Today, Web analytics tools can do their magic from afar,” Sterne told TechNewsWorld. “Ten years ago, we weren’t thinking about selling Software as a Service. Today’s tools are also much more capable of capturing the growing quantity of data and segmenting visitors to ensure the best possible response to a click. Further, 21st century tools are becoming more integrated with other marketing systems like e-mail, direct mail, telemarketing and in-store sales.”

E-commerce companies often use Web analytics software to measure such concrete details as how many people visited their site, how many of those visitors were unique visitors, how they came to the site (i.e., if they followed a link to get to the site or came there directly), what keywords they searched with on the site’s search engine, how long they stayed on a given page or on the entire site, what links they clicked on and when they left the site. Web analytic software can also be used to monitor whether or not a site’s pages are working properly.

With this information, Web site administrators can determine which areas of the site are popular and which areas of the site do not get traffic. They can then use this data to streamline a site to create a better user experience.