SAP announced the general availability of SAP Predictive Analysis software, which is intended to help organizations gain a competitive edge by uncovering and predicting trends in their business. SAP Predictive Analysis can be deployed stand-alone or with other SAP software, including the SAP HANA platform.
Customers, whether in marketing or a credit risk department, struggle with questions such as which customers are most likely to churn, which transactions could be fraudulent, how to target the best customers at the holidays with marketing campaigns, and in order to answer those questions, they require advanced analytics and they need to do this analysis in way that can provide insight in real time, Manny Gill, vice president and general manager of SAP Advanced Analytics, tells 5 Minute Briefing. That has been missing, says Gill, and the reason for this is that the way predictive analytics, advanced analytics and data mining have been done historically is as a separate process and everything about the process, including the people, and infrastructure, is separate from the organization’s other processes.
“First and foremost, with the SAP Predictive Analysis solution, the goal is to make advanced analytics more broadly usable by customers, and to solve that process issue, bringing advanced analytics right into customer data environments so there is not this huge latency and the information is surfaced to the people who really need it,” says Gill.
“The technology, systems, people, and processes have all been disconnected and so in order to solve that problem we have really focused on two things,” Gill notes. “One is: How do we make advanced analytics more approachable to the people who do analysis in an organization? And then two: How do we bring it to people across the organization that are touching data and understand the questions that need to be asked, so that all of those people in the organization, whether they are data scientists or business analysts working for the marketing or sales department, in marketing - the people who do business intelligence reporting, analysis, dashboarding? How do you bring all of these people together so that they can collectively be smarter about analytics?”
According to SAP, SAP Predictive Analysis software provides an intuitive, easy-to-use environment for designing predictive models, the ability to acquire and manipulate data as well as visualize results with embedded SAP Visual Intelligence software; accelerated predictive analytics, expanded data scope and improved model scoring by leveraging the embedded predictive analysis library in SAP HANA; and interoperability of R with SAP HANA to open up all the statistical functions available in one of the world's most popular open source projects
With SAP Predictive Analysis, data analysts can intuitively design complex predictive models for forecasting demand or product sales; identifying key influencing factors for sales opportunities or purchasing behavior; uncovering impactful trends; an understanding business and data correlations; and spotting anomalies - capabilities that are of high value to data-intensive functions such as sales, marketing, risk, governance and security.
Cognilytics a provider of solutions that help companies monetize data as a strategic asset, will work with SAP to help drive further innovation.
"With predictive analysis, organizations can take the logical next step from business intelligence to predicting behaviors in their business and customers in order to take actions on these insights,” notes Gary Gauba, chairman and CEO, Cognilytics.
For more information, go to www.sap.com