SAS

In most respects SAS sets the standard for breadth of functionality in a statistical analysis suite. However, not everyone needs that level of functionality (or cost), and so here is a list of free alternatives to SAS statistics that many users will find quite adequate. Dataplot is a free, public-domain,…

Sapiens is just one of a handful of suppliers who provide a Decision Management platform. The others include IBM, SAS and FICO. Unfortunately there is no single definition of what a decision management platform should look like, and so each vendor defines its product suite as the complete decision management…

The things we do with business analytics technology right now do not represent the ultimate purpose for these technologies. It is all very immature, and so it may be useful to some to understand where this current fascination with business analytics is headed. But first of all let me give…

Prescriptive analytics is touted as being a form of ‘uber-analytics’ – the final frontier. It can loosely be defined as a workflow that takes a business from data to insight, to hypothesis, to action. Well, what the hell does all that mean? In a nutshell it means prescriptive analytics not…

Prescriptive Analytics – Business Efficiency Redefined. The central problem for most businesses is this: how to best use a limited set of resources, given various constraints, so that some measure of performance (profit usually) is maximized. The resources of a retail business for example, will include shelf space, staff, warehousing…

Streaming data processing and analytics is gaining momentum as businesses gear up for real-time processing of streaming data – typically from devices and sensors, but also other sources such as financial data and news. Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system. Storm makes it easy…

Text Mining Tools 2015 AlchemyAPI AlchemyAPI (now part of IBM) provides cloud based text analytics services to support sentiment analysis, marketing, content discovery, business intelligence, and most tasks where natural language processing is needed. An on-site capability can also be provided if needed. The capabilities offered by AlchemyAPI go beyond…

There are many sentiment analysis tools for smaller businesses, but not so many that will incorporate internal documents and bespoke formats (call-centre records for example). The products listed below will do this, and many provide an API for application integration. Methods used vary, and include text mining, natural language processing…

As data sources proliferate so the need for good ETL tools increases. Here is a fairly extensive list of ETL tools currently available. Free ETL Tools Talend Open Source Data Integrator provides multiple solutions for data integration, both open source and commercial editions. Talend offers an Eclipse-based interface, drag-and-drop design…