On-Demand for Academics is an online program for teaching and learning data management and analytics. It allows professors and students to use several applications, including SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner for free. More applications may be added in the near future.  Is SAS Institue following in the foot steps of software giants?, its something which we should wait and watch!

[Bizjournals]

A University of Alberta professor is helping to create text analysis tools to deeply examine historical trial accounts from the U.K.’s famous Old Bailey criminal court. While the research project is important to academia, the Edmonton-based researcher said that improving the quality of text mining tools could have benefits for businesses as well.

While academia are developing tools like TAPoR, a textual analysis tool that can summarize a body of text, find collocates, identify important dates, and discover the co-occurrences of two target words, the same could be applied to business records as well. Some of the tools in TAPoR use forms of visualization to help researchers grasp the data even clearer.

[IT Canada]

nPario plans to offer data products and services that enable companies to understand and market consumer commercial intent.

About nPario Inc.
With operations in North America and the EMEA region, nPariooffers data products and services that enable organizations to understand and market consumer intent. Led by CEO and co-founder Bassel Ojjeh, nPario’s management team has been on the forefront of harnessing the power of data for organizations such as Microsoft, SAS and Yahoo. For additional information visit www.npario.com

[Read More at nPario]

Data mining means extracting patterns from existing data. If this extraction process is applied to corporate industry many fruitful results can be seen. If, in a business administration or organisation, one keeps a note of the Sales, Market research, Customer’s requirements and complaints encountered and then mine this data to predict or identify patterns to understand the correct requirements of the customer and further fulfilling them. This will help boost the business and improve customer relationships.

This combination of data ming and business management is becoming cheaper as the computers and large storage disks used in this process are easily available now and at affordable prices. But, this process may also lead to the shifting of focus of providing service from the most profitable (minority) less percentage of customers to less profitable (majority) highly demanding customers. It is therefore vitally important to recognise profitable customers, and the characteristics that define them, Falconer argues. For example, changes in their purchasing behaviour can either present an opportunity to follow the trend, or a threat the company will promptly have to address. Accurate, up-to-date customer information will give sales staff many cross-sell, up-sell, and repeat-sales opportunities, he concludes. Unfortunately, this data is rarely analysed or put to productive use because many small business owners often neglect to apply core marketing principles to attract and retain clients.
As more and more data is mined and converted into knowledge historical patterns will crystalline and trend lines will become evident. Data mining, integrated into modern customer relationship management solutions are already enabling IT reseller businesses to grow the ‘lifetime value’ of their customers and so assume leadership positions in the IT industry – whether their target market is individual end users or corporate clients. Now which strategy will you choose? The good old Business Negligence or the fast developing Business Intelligence. When you have success at your door step.. Why not opening up the door instead of ignoring it?

[IT WEB]

Benefits:

It appeals to a broad group of business analysts and an operational employee because of it significantly reduces the “IT complexity” for non-statistically trained users. It has become a general-purpose data mining and statistical tool. RStat provides greater business benefits by enabling more employees at all levels in an organization to take advantage of a predictive solution and make better decisions. RStat 1.2 dramatically lowers the cost of predictive analytics. By fully integrating RStat with WebFOCUS, customers benefit from significantly lower costs of mining projects simply by providing efficient access to data. Ninety percent of costs in statistical and mining projects are in data access and manipulation — two activities that are easier with BI tools. Additionally, the integration on the reporting server lowers deployment costs by minimizing the need for additional hardware. Instead of having a statistical server and a BI server, RStat 1.2 enables customers to conduct both BI and predictive modeling from a single server. Having this type of integrated environment makes the deployment of a predictive scoring solution much simpler and faster than older statistical systems. Information Builders is providing RStat free for modeling and analysis services as part of its Developer Studio product.

What’s NEW:

The new features provided in this tool are:-

– Survival analysis – included as an additional statistical modeling technique and scoring routine with both COX regression and Kaplan-Mayer.

– Library of scoring routines – expanded to advanced models such as Neural Networks.

– Charting capabilities – expanded with new charts that are relevant for survival analysis.

– Testing – Traditional hypothesis testing methods, such as T and F tests, have also been added.

Website:

www.informationbuilders.com

DOWNLOAD:

http://techsupport.informationbuilders.com/

If you are an existing Information Builders customer and you have a standard Developer Studio (version 7.6.9 or higher) license, click here to download your free copy of WebFOCUS RStat now! Just log in and select Download > My Downloads/Shipments. Registration is required.

About ‘INFORMATION BUILDERS:

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs. Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at informationbuilders.com.

Also Lets listen to Chris Brady of DSC on WebFOCUS:

[webFOCUS]

Cloud computing is the popular and widely used term for virtualization of computing services. Cloud technology is all about services, and it fits into several categories:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) is an Internet-based model for deployment of software applications. SaaS allows on-demand use of applications without the need to license and install for every computer where the software is used. SaaS is differentiated from earlier client-server and application service provider (ASP) models by multi-tenant architecture where many customers simultaneously use a single instance of the software.
• Data as a Service (DaaS) is a relatively recent term that encompasses four somewhat different kinds of service models.
  • Most common among DaaS models is the “data marketplace” where many different kinds of data are available on a pay-per-use basis. Marketplace data can be combined with internal data to enrich data warehouses and add new dimensions to analytics.
  • Some providers of data marketplace services extend the model to include some data quality, standardization and correlation services. Most of these services revolve around address data and go beyond common address standardization routines to include features such as delivery route optimization.
  • A more recent and emerging DaaS model uses web services to create a developer-centric data hub. In this model, developers upload their own data to be hosted by the DaaS service provider. Developers can then build web services around that data.
  • Finally, the acronym DaaS is also used to mean data warehousing as a service, an architecture in which data and BI applications are hosted in a virtualized environment and deployed using a services model.
    
    
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an approach to virtualizing the hardware, operating systems, applications frameworks and technology stacks upon which applications are built and deployed. PaaS removes the cost and complexity of buying and managing the hardware and software layers needed to deploy applications. A PaaS environment supports the entire life cycle of building, delivering, operating and supporting web applications.
  
  
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an architecture of virtualized hardware and operating systems. On the surface it sounds a lot like another name for PaaS, but there are some subtle differences. PaaS provides developer environment as well as operations environment but is limited to web applications. IaaS delivers only the operations environment but supports a broader range of applications. IaaS is, in fact, the foundation upon which PaaS environments are constructed.
  
  
• Analytics as a Service has not been tagged with the acronym AaaS, perhaps due to the inevitable vocalization that is sure to fail as a marketing buzzword. But analytics as a service is a concept that is gaining attention in the BI community. Analytic services are built upon SaaS and DaaS foundations to create analytic applications and OLAP engines as web-hosted and web-deployed applications.

Today the Cloud Services are very real and available. The BI solutions on the cloud are also being made available to people, business and enterprises. But when would the transfer complete to the cloud,  is still an ongoing discussion.

Read more here.

What is Customer Analytics? Customer analytics is a process by which data from customer behavior is used to help make key business decisions via market segmentation and predictive analytics.

“VOCA draws on IBM’s expertise in analytics, predictive modeling, information management, and deep industry knowledge,” said Robert Morris, vice president, services research, IBM Research. ”IBM’s clients operate in a very competitive environment and are constantly evaluating how they can improve customer loyalty, while maintaining their profitability,” said John Lutz, general manager, IBM Managed Business Process Services. “Traditional customer analytics is limited to the static analysis of factors like call handling time and hold times. Now, by harnessing innovation from IBM Research in our Analytics Business Process Services offering, we can deliver a level of insight that enables clients to operate smarter, more responsive businesses.”

Service detail: Enterprises, such as yours, are only effectively leveraging structured data capture with your customers if you truly understand the shortfalls in the customer experience and make appropriate operational decisions.

Highlights of VOCA:

• Effectively leverages all data provided to your enterprise by customers in making business decisions
• IBM offers a managed service approach that is designed to allow you rapid startup with no upfront investment in hardware, software or resources
• Managed service enables VOCA to “get better with age”; text mining and predictive modeling become more robust and accurate as more data is amassed

Will customer analytics present a holistic view of the customer, and the customer’s view towards products and services offered? Will IBM break ground in the customer analytics market. We just have to wait and see how this service fairs. Also Forrester Research surveyed 55 business and technology decision-makers and influencers to discover their strengths and weaknesses compared to 12 customer analytics best practices capabilities which are available here.

Read more about this at the IBM press release.

About IBM

For more information about IBM please see www.ibm.com/services.

“Business Intelligence (BI) helps business people make more informed decisions by providing them timely, data-driven answers to their business questions. BI analyzes data stored in data warehouses, operational databases, and/or ERP systems (i.e. SAP®, Oracle, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft) and transforms it into attractive and easy to understand dashboards and reports. BI delivers the insight needed to make strategic planning decisions, improve operational efficiencies, and optimize business processes.” -Microstrategy.

What are BI tools?

Business Intelligence (BI) tools  are a set of software systems and practices that enable organizations to analyze data, and make better decisions based on the insight from that information. Companies can use this insight to take the following steps to improve overall corporate performance:

• Enhance cost-efficiency and productivity
• Build strong customer relationships
• Optimize revenue-generating strategies
• Increase revenue and maximize profitability
• Monitor trends and discover anomalies
• Forecast business opportunities
• Maintain compliance and perform risk management

Categories of BI Tools:

• Spreadsheets
• Reporting and querying software
• OLAP
• Digital Dashboards
• Data mining
• Process mining
• Business performance management
• Local information systems

State of art of BI in Industry today:

In one word, most companies do not use BI to their fullest potential according to market research.

Some stated reasons include:

• Lack of proper training, followed by limited staffing resources.
• Most custom reports remain very sophisticated
• IT staffs still create the majority of BI reports, followed by  business analysts.
• Dissatisfaction with BI technology is found among all user communities.
• The idea that BI applications can create more work

Now the latest of all is the move of BI from industry to everyday life.