For more years than I like to admit, I have been focused on the importance of managing data so that it helps companies anticipate changes and therefore be prepared to take proactive action. Therefore, as I watched the market for predictive analytics really emerge I thought it was important to provide customers with a holistic perspective on the value of commercial offerings. I was determined that when I provided this analysis it would be based on real world factors. Therefore, I am delighted to announce the release of the Hurwitz & Associates Victory Index for Predictive Analytics! I’ve been working on this report for a quite some time and I believe that it will be very valuable tool for companies looking to understand predictive analytics and the vendors that play in this market.

Predictive analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal. Hurwitz & Associates defines predictive analytics as:

A statistical or data mining solution consisting of algorithms and techniques that can be used on both structured and unstructured data (together or individually) to determine future outcomes. It can be deployed for prediction, optimization, forecasting, simulation, and many other uses.

So what is this report all about? The Hurwitz & Associates Victory Index is a market research assessment tool, developed by Hurwitz & Associates that analyzes vendors across four dimensions: Vision, Viability, Validity and Value. Hurwitz & Associates takes a holistic view of the value and benefit of important technologies. We assess not just the technical capability of the technology but its ability to provide tangible value to the business. For the Victory Index we examined more than fifty attributes including: customer satisfaction, value/price, time to value, technical value, breadth and depth of functionality, customer adoption, financial viability, company vitality, strength of intellectual capital, business value, ROI, and clarity and practicality of strategy and vision. We also examine important trends in the predictive analytics market as part of the report and provide detailed overviews of vendor offerings in the space.

Some of the key vendor highlights include:

• Hurwitz & Associates named six vendors as Victors across two categories including SAS, IBM (SPSS), Pegasystems, Pitney Bowes, StatSoft and Angoss.
• Other vendors recognized in the Victory Index include KXEN, Megaputer Intelligence, Rapid-I, Revolution Analytics, SAP, and TIBCO.

Some of the key market findings include:

• Vendors have continued to place an emphasis on improving the technology’s ease of use, making strides towards automating model building capabilities and presenting findings in business context.
• Predictive analytics is no longer relegated to statisticians and mathematicians. The user profile for predictive analytics has shifted dramatically as the ability to leverage data for competitive advantage has placed business analysts in the driver’s seat.
• As companies gather greater volumes of disparate kinds of data, both structured and unstructured, they require solutions that can deliver high performance and scalability.
• The ability to operationalize predictive analytics is growing in importance as companies have come to understand the advantage to incorporating predictive models in their business processes. For example, statisticians at an insurance company might build a model that predicts the likelihood of a claim being fraudulent.

I invite you to find out more about the report by visiting our website: www.hurwitz.com