NASHVILLE — Information Builders Inc. is entering the predictive analytics arena with a new version of WebFocus that uses the open source RStat technology, which one analyst says will provide a richer set of models.
WebFocus RStat is billed as “the first BI platform to enable data miners, statisticians, BI developers, and analysts to collaboratively build predictive applications for field and operational employees.”
Gerry Cohen, chief executive officer of New York-based IBI, said predictive analytics are a perfect fit with WebFocus, as the flagship product already collects, analyses, and transforms data, and works on every platform.
“It’s ideal because it’s not about what happened, or even what’s happening today, but about what will happen,” Cohen said.
Costs are kept down via the integration of RStat, an open source statistical library product used by universities around the world.
One of Information Builders’ mantras is “ease of use,” and that was present in the product announcement, which stressed a product that could be used by more than just the data nerds and power users. Cohen joked as Rado Kotorov took the stage to demo the product that “he’s not even a PhD!” The demo showed a simple interface that allowed the user to call on data and variables to pull up a visualization of predictive results via a user-friendly Web form.
There will be different types of models available (from decision trees to neural networks). It can also place the information into WebFOCUS. Cohen even joked about “a certain three-letter company.” And what does SAS have to say to all this? Bring it on, according to Gaurav Verma, business intelligence marketing manager for the company.
“We think it’s all good,” Verma said. “They’re not the first one to do it, and it does a great job, validating our own strategy and making people pay more attention to predictive analytics.”
He said that this move is typical in the market right now. “Whenever you introduce feature functions, any one of the rest of us can follow within weeks! This year, we saw that classic business intelligence needs to be able to differentiate, and predictive analytics is a big driver in the market: people are done with the historical view,” said Verma.
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