Predictive Analytics Buying Guide: Page 2
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FICO
FICO is best known in the credit report business. That alone gives it the credentials to succeed in predictive analytics. After all, how difficult must it be to score every person in the U.S. on whether they will pay their bills?
“FICO has incredibly deep knowledge about what it takes to make predictive models actionable,” said Mike Gualtieri, an analyst at Forrester Research. “This is apparent in their solution that is geared toward data scientists who are continuously building and deploying models.”
Angoss
Adding predictive analytics can be challenging for those without the requisite skill sets. Angoss focuses on bridging that gap, with an emphasis on support services as well as an easy-to-use interface for predictive model creation. It uses what it calls Strategy Trees to combine customer segments, scores, business rules and calculations to formulate business strategies that minimize loss and maximize profits. As well as forecasting, its predictive analytics software offers fast creation of multiple what-if scenarios.
Alteryx
The goal of Alteryx is to help people quickly get their feet wet in the field of predictive analytics. It does this by concentrating on data preparation, as well as offering an analytical apps gallery that lets users share their data preparation actions and their modeling workflows with other users. This is effectively an exchange and marketplace for pre-built predictive analytics applications.
The aim is to reduce the effort required for analysts in business groups such as marketing, sales and finance to prepare, blend and analyze data. Alteryx Designer delivers a repeatable workflow for self-service data analytics.
Azure Machine Learning
Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, a predictive analytics startup, last year. Forrester Research views a Microsoft Azure offering that integrates the Revolution technology as an impressive new predictive analytics entrant with a lot of potential. While it is far from a mature offering, the analyst firm believes Microsoft could well become a major force in predictive analytics software within a short time. Delivered exclusively as a cloud service, the Azure platform is gearing up for sophisticated model building and analysis.
“The Azure Marketplace offers a distinctive single source for data and analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning,” said Gualtieri.
Wise.io
Wise.io has developed a machine learning engine that learns from past patterns to predict future behavior. Its customer service applications, for example, help business users regain control over the volume of customer inquiries. Applications such as Wise Response and Wise Routing are built on this engine, which then offers a predictive analytics model to automate various stages of customer support and improve the customer experience.
The self-learning predictive analytics software integrates with common CRM and customer support systems such as Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk to automatically detect and mimic the decisions and actions — from routing, to responses, to resolutions — that employees take to serve their customers.
“Traditionally, customer support organizations were forced to scale by adding people or by attempting to write static, complex and often ineffective business rules,” said Jeff Erhardt, the company's CEO. “Wise.io machine learning applications analyze past support tickets and cases, intelligently inferring the criteria by which an organization's best employees make decisions.”
The system then generates a predictive analytics model that can be applied to incoming customer inquiries to facilitate human decision making and automate key processes, continuously improving and adapting over time.
Open Source Predictive Analytics Software
Another option is open source predictive analytics tools, five of which Enterprise Apps Today featured in this article.
Drew Robb is a freelance writer specializing in technology and engineering. Currently living in Florida, he is originally from Scotland, where he received a degree in geology and geography from the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Server Disk Management in a Windows Environment (CRC Press).
