Predictive Analytics and Performance Management

Our friends at Business Objects continue to be busy in putting together their BI and performance management portfolio, as they announce a rather significant OEM agreement with SPSS to embed their data mining and analytics platform within BusinessObjects XI.

Good news all around for customers of both platforms; obviously with SPSS being a smaller player in the statistical and data mining space, there's a lot of (hands clasped before saying this word) "synergy" in bringing these two solutions together. First, the unification of two relatively complimentary technologies against a common foe--in this case, SAS, just as last week it was Abobe and Microsoft was the target.

It's an interesting combination that SAS hasn't been able to completely exploit in the marketplace, the combination of forward-looking, predictive analytic capacilities embedded into the business intelligence and performance management process. But it has some solid capabilities and potential to take performance management solutions up a notch in terms of their sophistication.

And while it's early days, it still does remain to be seen if this actually gets BI and information into the hands of more people, or if it's just a richer analytical environment for the experienced and sophisticated BI and analytics users that are already using the tools. If it doesn't expand the (pardon the pun) "universe" of users for the BI environment, then I'm not convinced that this is much more than a marketing relationship, since the BI sales process and the hard-core analytics sales process hit two different audiences with two different products.

But if they can find a way to embed the anlytics into BI processes, and make BI more process aware to the average user, thereby attracting more folks to the BI environment, then I think we can actually be getting somewhere. But kudos to both groups for seeing the potential of BI and predictive analytics and moving to bring them together in an alternative to the big dog SAS.