Just finished an incredibly insightful article on how Predictive Analysis is driving new efficiencies in plant production environments.  We all know that predictive analytics adoption is accelerating.  It is no longer enough to collect, organize, and present historical data that tells us how the organization is performing relative to its goals.  While a complete and accurate picture of our products, people, and financial performance is as important as ever, it fails in its ability to tell us what is likely to happen next.  Data mining and predictive have offered us the promise of such insight, but was inaccessible to most organizations due to cost and complexity.

I was just listening to an interview from last week’s SAP’s Sapphire user conference where SAP’s Co-CEO, Bill McDermott reported that SAP’s cloud business grew by 380% in Q1.  He didn’t break it down, but one can reasonably assume that the bulk of this growth occurred in business applications like core ERP, SCM, SFM, HCM solutions.  It got me thinking about where we are with Analytics in the cloud.  A report published last fall by noted BI analyst Howard Dresner tells how adoption of analytics in the cloud is still in the early innings.  This makes sense.  As business applications move to the cloud, more businesses get familiar and comfortable with this new computing model.  Perhaps more importantly, it puts business data—the lifeblood of analytics—out in the cloud making the move to cloud BI a natural next step. 

In Enterprise BI, adoption is everything. You can bring together the most relevant business data and deliver it within a beautiful BI application, but if your users don’t use it, it doesn’t matter.  One way to drive user adoption is to embed analytics directly into front line applications like SCM, CRM, or Customer Care systems. 

If I were a C-level at a company that is considering an investment in In-Memory technology, I would take heed of the key message in this insightful Aberdeen paper.  The author presents the results of a recent Data Management for BI survey that clearly shows In-Memory technology is being leveraged by Best-In-Class organizations to leap further ahead of their competitors who are slow to adopt.

Ok, full disclosure up front: I am a big proponent of Data Mining and Predictive Modeling as being the next logical step in the evolution of business intelligence and decision support capabilities for the business user. So it should not be a surprise that my reaction to the recent CIO Magazine webcast on SAP’s new Predicative Analysis software solution is enthusiastic.