Business Objects Partners with ThinkAnalytics for Enhanced Predictive Analysis Capabilities

Business Objects, the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, and ThinkAnalytics, a leading real-time predictive analysis company, today announced the signing of an original equipment manufacturers (OEM) agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Business Objects will integrate ThinkAnalytics predictive analysis software within Business Objects performance management applications. This agreement expands the ability of Business Objects to provide statistics and data mining technology to business users as part of the company’s performance management applications in BusinessObjects™ XI.

Business intelligence users often struggle to make proactive, rather than reactive, decisions that help improve their company’s performance. These users want to take pre-emptive action before something goes wrong in their business. Predictive analysis helps people analyze historical information and real-time operational data to reliably forecast what may happen in the future. By using predictive analysis as part of a broader performance management solution, organizations can better anticipate things like customer behavior and more accurately forecast demand in order to improve performance.

ThinkAnalytics provides an open and scalable platform that delivers integrated predictive modeling for enterprise deployments. The integration of ThinkAnalytics with the Business Objects performance management applications will enable companies to easily access dynamic data sources from a data warehouse, and then analyze and predict future results based on industry standard algorithms. In addition, customers can write back the results to tables stored in the data warehouse for additional reporting using the full range of Business Objects end-user BI solutions.

“Many companies have pockets of statistical tools somewhere in their organization, but historically this has only been used by expert statisticians and data miners,” said Eddie Young, CEO of ThinkAnalytics. “Our real-time, scalable data mining platform helps companies get statistics and data mining out of the back room and into the light of day by integrating it with all areas of the enterprise, including business intelligence, CRM, ERP, and supply chain applications. We are excited to work with Business Objects to provide an advanced and open solution that enables companies to integrate a variety of statistical and data mining techniques into their enterprise analytic applications, performance management dashboards, scorecards, and reports.”

Expanding Operational BI Capabilities
With this agreement, Business Objects continues to expand its operational BI capabilities. In June, Business Objects announced the launch of BusinessObjects XI Built for Operation BI. That launch was part of a strategic initiative by Business Objects to bring insight to all users in an organization by making BI more process-aware and real-time enabled. Strengthening the predictive analysis capabilities of the Business Objects performance management applications further extends the ability of organizations to use Business Objects solutions for operational BI.

As business intelligence becomes more closely tied to everyday business processes, it is no longer adequate to simply deliver information about what happened yesterday, last week, or last year. Whether it is a marketing vice president looking to figure out which new product to sell to a customer based on his or her existing “basket” of products, or a credit risk manager wanting to predict what action will most likely result in debt recovery from customers, the combination of ThinkAnalytics software with the Business Objects suite of performance management applications will deliver useful, actionable, and predictive analytics across the enterprise.

“The use of business intelligence in an operational setting is expanding quickly, and Business Objects has taken a leadership role in providing the solutions required for operational BI,” said Donald MacCormick, vice president of performance management applications at Business Objects. “The objective of an operational BI system is to allow users to react faster to business needs, to anticipate business problems in advance before they become major issues, and to take advantage of new business opportunities as they emerge. Our OEM agreement with ThinkAnalytics expands our ability to deliver advanced, predictive, real-time analytics to business users. Having the ability to anticipate future results using predictive analysis helps organizations react quickly to changing environments and enables them to make better business decisions.”