News

Statistica Advanced Analytics Upgrade Heads Dell Big Data Moves

• By David Ramel
• October 27, 2015

Among numerous Big Data-related announcements at its recent user conference, Dell Inc. released an update of its no-coding-required Statistica advanced analytics software platform.

Statistica 13 simplifies and improves enterprise deployment of predictive models directly to data sources whether they reside inside a firewall, in the cloud or in partner systems, the company said.

"An easy-to-use solution that requires no coding and integrates seamlessly with open source R, Dell Statistica delivers a full range of data blending, data discovery and advanced and predictive analytics tools that help organizations tap into all data to predict future trends, identify new customers and sales opportunities, explore 'what-if' scenarios, and reduce the occurrence of fraud and other business risks," Dell said in a statement issued from its Dell World 2015 show.

Dell said new features of the update include a revamped GUI, better integration with the R language favored by statisticians, deeper integration with its own new Statistica Interactive Visualization and Dashboard engine to enhance communication with data consumers, and a new tool that provides optimized modeling recommendations.

Also added was new Native Distributed Analytics (NDA) functionality, which lets users run analytics directly in the database where data is hosted and work more efficiently with larger data sets.

"NDA functionality pushes predictive algorithm model-building and scoring functionality directly into the data source," Dell said. "This eliminates the time-consuming and data-limiting process of pulling data to an intermediate server or desktop, allowing all analytic processing to occur directly in the database and enabling organizations to leverage the power of Hadoop clusters, database appliances and other high-performance platforms."

At first, Dell said, the Statistica upgrade will provide NDA capability for Microsoft SQL Server databases, while it plans to support additional databases in future releases.

The Texas-based company's Dell Services arm also expanded its Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) offerings with services targeting specific industries to help users discover insights, predict business outcomes, and improve critical business processes. The new services address fraud, waste and abuse management; predictive analytics for claims denial insights; and churn management to help retain customers.

"ESG's research continues to show that companies of all sizes and across all verticals are looking to data for answers to their critical business questions," the company quoted Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Nik Rouda as saying. "Getting those answers not only requires modern advanced analytics tooling, but also a full range of supporting capabilities, including data integration and data and database management, as well as the servers, storage, and ready-to-go appliances that provide the engine. Dell has not only put together an increasingly comprehensive portfolio that delivers those critical capabilities, but has continued to build a complementary ecosystem of strategic partners, supporting vendors, and professional services that enables it to help customers wherever they are in their big data and analytics journey.”

Both Statistica 13 and the new services are available now.