Intelligent Enterprise

I attended the Information Builders annual conference this week where they entertained over 1,100 customers from across the world. Information Builders announced and demonstrated their predictive analytics tool called RStat, which is built on top of the R open source project. The movement to provide deeper analytics has been evolving over the last decade and this year we have already seen new industry partnerships focused on predictive analytics including SAS and Teradata along with SPSS and Cognos. These partnerships have promised future new versions of existing products that will integrate together.

Information Builders, who already partners with SPSS, introduced RStat as an extension of their current BI platform called WebFOCUS. RStat can create and deploy predictive models that can be used to provide forward looking insights inside of analytic centric BI applications. With a deep set of predictive analytics that span from decision trees, regression, neural networks, clustering and others, RStat enables trained professional to create and train models without programmers.

I have been skeptical of industry efforts to deepen BI with predictive analytics, partly because most products require future releases and suppliers have been unclear about dates and capability commitments. Also, the types of users that can use these capabilities can vary drastically by industry and by organization.

Many organizations cannot model and perform basic scoring and analytic routines without hiring statisticians or assembling an already burdened dedicated team. Perhaps now, with the release of RStat and other similar products, savvy business analysts can dust off their analytic skills and get more involved with the data and help understand potential future outcomes from existing operations. As Information Builders moves to release RStat this year, we will see how their customers can use this predictive analytics tool to deepen BI into the business.