The Business Intelligence Blog

A blogpost on BI Vendors by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise -

In the “Advanced Analytics” camp, IDC’s stats show that Microsoft, SPSS and SAS were the fastest-growing vendors among the top five with 20.0%, 17.8% and 15.2% sales increases, respectively (see chart at left). Visual Numerics grew 9.3% and Teradata treaded water with 3.0% growth. Mind you, SAS and SPSS are in a league of their own with $440 million and $205 million in revenue, respectively, while all the others were in the Single-A, sub-$50 million ballpark.

SAS has plenty to crow about in IDC’s stats, so it has once again purchased rights to distribute an excerpt of the report as a free download. Unfortunately, this year’s excerpt only covers the top-five vendors in each category (last year’s excerpt covered 21 BI tools vendors and 13 analytics vendors). If you’re prepared to pay $3,500, you can purchase the complete “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2007 Vendor Shares” report, which details sales among the top-15 vendors in BI in 2007 — a list that adds MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, QlikTech, Panorama Software, IBM (without Cognos), and TIBCO to the companies mentioned above.

Here’s a follow-up to the previously posted series, Breakthroughs in Analytics, from Tech News World.

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

Interesting article on Data Quality from B To B Mag-

Today, most corporations are tightening the screws on their corporate cash drawers. In attempts to conserve funds yet still reach stated revenue goals, businesses are turning to their existing customer bases to generate incremental revenues. This is a logical step as the costs to cross-sell additional products and/or services to existing customers are far less than those required to attract new customers. Obviously, this puts tremendous pressure on the accuracy of databases.

As one-to-one relationship marketing becomes more the norm, databases are expanding at exponential rates. In fact, corporate databases double in size roughly every six to nine months. These two factors alone should be sufficient stimulus for businesses to get their databases in order in a cost-effective manner. The average business database contains a staggering amount—15% to 40%—of bad data. That means roughly one in four pieces of marketing material mailed is worthless.

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.

Read more from the Computer World article -

Based on the open-source Gecko browser engine from Mozilla, Strata is designed for people who need to create ad hoc reports from myriad data sources. It has its own scripting language so you can write a script that, say, monitors a Web site for changes to your data. Kirix also produces packaged scripts, or extensions. For example, by September, it will offer one that encrypts data going in and out of Strata.

Currently available for Windows and Linux users (a Mac version is ready but not yet shipping), Strata sells for $249 per seat.

I liked the recent article of Seth Grimes which talks about Text Analytics Accuracy. His article, today, on Intelligent Enterprise, pointed me to the IBM article on IBM® OmniFind™ Analytics Edition which talks in detail about extracting unstructured data from e-mail, Web pages, news and blog articles and building a data warehouse out of them to unlock the huge potential which was previously untapped.

In recent months/weeks, the focus on unstructured data is becoming more and more as businesses and vendors are starting to understand the power of this unstructured data and how it can text mined and used to the benefit of the exterprises. And its a good this.

A must read. Highly Recommended.

Text analytics enables you to extract more business value from unstructured data such as emails, customer relationship management (CRM) records, office documents, or any text-based data. IBM® OmniFind™ Analytics Edition provides rich text analysis capabilities and interactive visualization to enable you to find patterns and trends hidden in large quantities of unstructured information. The text analysis results from OmniFind Analytics Edition are in XML-format and can also be stored, indexed, and queried in a DB2 database. This allows you to incorporate your text analysis results into existing business applications and reporting tools by using regular SQL or SQL/XML queries. This article provides an overview of text analytics with OmniFind Analytics Edition and describes several ways of bringing its analysis results into DB2, in relational or pureXML™ format.
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OmniFind Analytics Edition provides the ability to interactively explore and mine the results of text analysis, as well as structured data that is typically associated with unstructured text. For those of you familiar with business intelligence applications, you can think of it as content-centric business intelligence, in that it aggregates the results of text analysis to detect frequencies, correlations, and trends. Typical use cases include:

Analysis of customer contact information (e-mails, chats, problem tickets, contact center notes) for insight into quality or satisfaction issues
Analysis of blogs and wikis for reputation monitoring
Analysis of internal e-mail for compliance violations or for expertise location

Teradata Corporation has introduced a new family of platforms from entry-level to active enterprise data warehouses that addresses many customer needs (especially of Indian and other similar markets). Powered by the Teradata 12.0 database engine, the family includes Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550.

Teradata 550 SMP is a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers’ need for a smaller, less expensive system. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system or Windows. In addition, customers can license and run the Teradata 12 database on their choice of Intel-based platforms, starting at $40,000. Teradata Express Edition, a free developer version of Teradata 12, is available to work on Windows servers and laptops for development, testing and learning.

From EFY News article.

According to Ian Michiels, an analyst with Aberdeen Group Inc., successful companies find a way to more tightly integrate marketing and sales. “How do you prioritize the leads that go into the sales pipeline? Metrics that help you do that are going to make you more effective,” he said. The goal is to find ways to define the best leads, whether that’s by the number of times a potential customer has gone to a Web site, attended a webinar or visited a trade-show booth. Only send the best leads to sales.

Once you provide this information, Rego said, your reps have the information they need to close more sales. “The carrot is providing sales with as much ammunition as needed to close the sale. The way you need [to] do that is tight integration from the marketing automation system into the SFA system.” Once you do this, you begin to build a consensus around the definition of a “good lead.” Rego said this approach gives marketing a view into the sales funnel and can provide marketing-level information as the sales staff approaches a sales opportunity.

Read the entire article on Marketing analytics at Inside CRM.

Varolii Corporation today announced Varolii Predictive Analytics(TM), an on-demand service that helps organizations understand, analyze and strategically target more effective customer outreach for collections, customer service and loyalty programs. Varolii unveiled Predictive Analytics at Interaction ‘08, the company’s inaugural customer conference.

Combining client data with the behavioral insight gleaned from billions of Varolii-led customer interactions, Varolii Predictive Analytics helps companies identify who to contact, when to contact them, through what channel, using which treatment, and how frequently in order to generate the greatest response. This combined data offers much more than a simple success or failure measurement; it’s a complete record of customer interaction and response on an individual level. The application is designed to gain intelligence from these conversations and progressively “learn” to predict customer behavior.
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At the highest level, Varolii Predictive Analytics can help companies analyze contact strategy options (e.g., automated communications, an in-house call center, outsourced agents, or a combination of them) and select which will work best to solve their specific needs. At a more tactical level, it can help decide such things as an appropriate collection strategy based on Varolii and customer history, including probability to pay, days delinquent, and other metrics for improved results.

Read more from the Press Release.

“As an early adopter of RAP – The Trading Edition, our trading desk has been able to be more responsive to market opportunities through faster, more complete analysis of market data, both historical and real-time feeds,” said Jason Ross, director, Rates Trading Group at MUSI. “We were pleasantly surprised at the performance speed, and found we need only half the storage capacity to store the same amount of data.”

Other key beneficiaries of the solution include quantitative analysts, risk managers, and compliance officers. Analysts can run powerful quantitative models against years’ worth of time-series market data, trading histories, and reference data, with complex analysis running in minutes vs. hours; risk managers can monitor balance sheet exposure hourly to reduce firm-wide risk; and compliance officers can audit the trade flow to meet the latest market compliance requirements.

“RAP – The Trading Edition is the only integrated solution today with the ability to absorb streaming market data feeds and consolidate these with vast stores of historical data for common shared access and analysis. We offer an enterprise-class platform that can offer a single source of data to the entire trade life cycle, from quantitative analysis, through pre-trade pricing, to market risk analysis and compliance,” said Dr. Raj Nathan, Chief Marketing Officer at Sybase. “In today’s unforgiving market environment, financial services firms need best-in-class, bullet-proof solutions that afford instantaneous throughput with no down-time. Sybase® RAP – The Trading Edition is very robust, having a built-in administrative console and dependable business continuity/disaster recovery solutions to protect against system failures.”

More on RAP - The Trading Edition from the Press Release.