Information Management and Analytics

Predictive analytics has become a key component of a competitive company’s analytics arsenal. It is one of the most important trends in analytics because in difficult economic environment companies need to have a better ability to anticipate where markets are headed and where customer demand will be. Predictive analytics provides the capability to use more sophisticated techniques to understand trends and anticipate future outcomes. Among its use cases, companies across many industries are using predictive analytics to understand customer behavior and requirements, predict equipment failures, and understand propensity to spend.

In the inaugural Victory Index Report, Hurwitz & Associates examines critical trends and assesses twelve key players in the predictive analytics market. Designed as a market research assessment tool, the Victory Index analyzes vendors across four key dimensions: Vision, Viability, Validity and Value. A rigorous methodology that employs approximately 50 attributes across these four dimensions is applied in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the market and the vendors. The report provides two rating assessments- one from the perspective of the vendors’ market strength and the other from the customer perspective. IBM SPSS, SAS, StatSoft, and Pegasystems were named Double Victors. Pitney Bowes and Angoss, were Victors in a specific category, due to strengths in key market areas. Other vendors assessed in this Report include Megaputer Intelligence, Rapid-I, Revolution Analytics, SAP, and TIBCO.

Authors

Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Judith Hurwitz President & CEO

Sponsored by IBM

The typical IT organization often has trouble understanding the data requirements from a business unit as well as the ovall corporate context.

Because of the dramatic changes in the financial services industry, companies are looking for technologies that help them streamline their business processes and systems, and leverage their business information across the organization. Hurwitz & Associates reviewed IBM’s approach to leveraging data models to accelerate successful data warehouse deployments. In-depth interviews with customers of IBM’s Insurance and Banking Data Models provided the basis for this research. The companies interviewed found tangible and business benefits using the IBM technology. Key findings included:

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, President and CEO,
Dr. Fern Halper, Partner, and
Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by IBM

Innovative IT managers have begun to move their organizations away from traditional data integration to a new way of leveraging valuable corporate information assets in an effort to build flexible, responsive software.
There is an increasing sense of urgency among CIOs to get control over their vast array of information across the enterprise. CIOs are, for the first time, ready and able to transform their information infrastructure because of innovations in information integration and data management. While the state of data has long been a topic of discussion within corporations, there is something new happening. An historical example helps clarify this point. More than twenty years ago a forward thinking financial services organization recognized that their customer data was a potential financial gold mine. If the corporation could find a way to consistently look at and leverage customer information across all of its product offerings, it could more easily up-sell and cross-sell everything from annuities to term life insurance. What this CIO really wanted to do was to be able to bring together all the silos of data across the company in a consistent and reliable way. However, because of the state of technology at that time, the cost and time required to achieve this goal was out of reach. The company had to abandon the strategic initiative.