Operations efficiency innovator SAP†has announced its SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software. The new offering aims to equip SMBs with a tool for predictive modeling and advanced visualization.
According to SAP press release submitted to Channel Pro-SMB, the software is intended to “harness and unleash the full value of ‘Big Data’ when coupled with the HANA platform.” The SAP HANA platform combines high-volume transactions with analytics for business intelligence purposes.
Predictive modeling has traditionally been the domain of statisticians and data scientists. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, however, is intended to bring predictive insight to the business analyst. With the software, analysts can create models either by using the predictive algorithms included or by integrating algorithms from the widely-used R open-source data analysis and statistical language.
SAP plans to enable SMBs to gain insight into large data volumes as part of opportunity and risk assessments. Examples include:
- Understanding how historical sales, costs and other keymetrics translate to future performance.
- Seeing the ways in which predicted results compare with goals.
- Revealing the causes of customer satisfaction and employee turnover.
- Showing the ways in which past and emerging trends impact the bottom line.
- Finding correlations in data for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
- Locating anomalies and clusters for targeted analysis.
USAGE WITH SAP HANA
While SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is planned for availability via standalone deployment, the software is also intended for use with the SAP HANA database, which provides a data mining and statistical function library. Access to data sources outside of SAP HANA is planned, including universes, SAP Sybase IQ server, and more.
Once data (structured, unstructured or both) is loaded into SAP HANA or an alternative data source, data and business analysts will be able to benefit from intuitive predictive modeling. Insights can then be delivered to dashboards, alerts and mobile devices, or accessed by other such SAP solutions as SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platform, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence†software as well as Microsoft Office applications.
