Category Archives: Predictive Analytics

SAP and Yandex pair up to launch predictive analytics platform

Zumos de verdura ecolcicaSAP and Yandex Data Factory have announced a new strategic partnership to develop cloud-based predictive analytics services for the retail, e-commerce, banking and telecommunications sectors.

Using the machine learning & data analytics capabilities of Yandex Data Factory, the team will offer services such as personalised offers of goods and services, churn prediction and recommendations for the retention of customers, which will be based on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud platform.

While the offering could seemingly be extended to other verticals, the team are focusing on more consumer orientated areas due to the volume of data these companies have already collected. There does not seem to be any reason why it could not be extended beyond the industries mentioned, though there would have to be a suitable amount of information collected to realize the full potential of the offering.

“While the advantages of big data analysis are well-understood, many in the retail, e-commerce, banking and telecommunications sectors will have concerns over integrating data analysis technology with their existing systems,” said Alexander Khaytin, chief operating officer at Yandex Data Factory. “We wanted to remove this obstacle and therefore deliberately partnered with SAP – one of the leading providers of data and business automation tools in these sectors – so that we can offer our clients advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, without additional integration costs.”

The Yandex big data algorithms are based on matching a customer’s profile with another customer who has demonstrated the same purchasing tendencies. In theory, should two customers have a similar profile, predictions on what one will do can be based on the actions of the second. Yandex claims it can reduce the costs of acquiring new and retaining current customers by up to 10%.

FICO reinforces market position with product updates

dataGlobal analytics firm FICO has launched a number of new and updated offerings to enable businesses to develop prescriptive analytics and decision management applications and improve business decision agility.

The Decision Management Suite 2.0 product – an updated version of the same name – enables customers to develop analytic applications in the cloud and improve automated business decision agility. The Decision Central offering manages, audits, reports and updates decision logic and predictive models, so customers can record and store automated decisions so they can be reused, modified and improved. Finally, the Strategy Director tool helps users structure the decision flow. The tools are available through Amazon Web Services or as a private cloud or on-premises deployment.

“Many Big Data deployments have failed to deliver competitive advantage because their approach is completely backwards,” said Stuart Wells, CTO at FICO. “We focus on decisions-first, as opposed to data-first. That gives our customers the fastest route to real value, and the agility to change course faster than the competition. It means being able to innovate like start-ups. Some of our Decision Management Suite customers have reduced the time to deploy an analytic application from months to days, and the time to model a decision and act on it from weeks to minutes.”

While the concept of Big Data has been around for some time many business struggle to comprehend the vast amount collated, to utilize it within the organization in any meaningful manner. The FICO product suite is one of a number of new products in the industry which aims to bring all this data into one concise system, and ultimately drive decision making capability through the insight uncovered.

“The original launch of the FICO Decision Management Suite in 2013 represented a dramatic change in decision logic authoring and application development,” Wells said. “Now, with version 2 of the Decision Management Suite, FICO’s customers have the chance to pull even further ahead of their competitors. This product suite represents the future of prescriptive analytics and decision management, and it’s available now.”