News

SPSS offers analytics via ASP model

• By Rich Seeley
• November 12, 2003

For organizations seeking to outsource the tracking of Web site usage, Chicago-based SPSS Inc. has outlined plans to offer its Web analytics tools in ASP, MSP and service bureau models.

Sales and marketing managers, as well as editors and publishers, can get sophisticated OLAP capabilities from SPSS to track the effectiveness of everything from banner ads to the popularity of articles posted on their Web sites, said Jay Henderson, senior product manager at SPSS. The company will now provide "completely outsourced analytics" that IT departments can offer to their business users, he added. However, if IT wants to keep it in-house, the software is still available in "the traditional licensed model," according to SPSS.

The combination of two SPSS products -- NetGenesis, which measures the impact of content, online transactions and marketing efforts; and Clementine, a data-mining workbench -- won the praise of an analyst who follows the sector. Guy Creese, a research director covering knowledge management and analytics at the Aberdeen Group, said SPSS' decision to offer analytics via the ASP model gives a new meaning to "net present value" by providing sophisticated analytics applications without burdening IT departments with maintenance chores.

The new outsourced models evolved out of the traditional model as the products became Web enabled.

"Historically, we've provided licensed software to our customers," said Henderson of SPSS, which was founded in 1968 to sell statistics tools and claims more than 250,000 commercial, academic and public sector customers for its software. "But we're able to provide all the interfaces to the product via Web browsers. This lent itself to the application service provider model where we're hosting the hardware and the software for the customer, and then end users can just access that system through a Web browser."