Empowering businesses with the ability to improvedecision-making by predicting future outcomes, SAP announcesSAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software.

The new offering aims to equip business users with a graphictool for predictive modeling and advanced visualization. Thesoftware is intended to harness the value of big data, enablingorganizations to reveal and act upon untapped opportunities andhidden risks.

“There is a lot of untapped insight that could be exposed fromexploding internal and external, structured and unstructured datasources,” says Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analyticssolutions, IDC. “Predictive capabilities help businesses exploreand identify the opportunities and risks hiding in the sea of allthat big data. SAP's integrated approach to predictive analyticshelps more users learn not only what has happened, but alsounderstand why it happened, what might happen, and what the bestcourse of action is.”

Predictive modeling has traditionally been the domain ofstatisticians and data scientists. However, SAP BusinessObjectsPredictive Analysis is intended to bring predictive insight to anunder-served user community—the business analyst. With thesoftware, analysts can create models either by using the predictivealgorithms included or can integrate and use algorithms from the Ropen-source data analysis and statistical language.

SAP plans to enable customers to use the software for instantinsight into large data volumes to anticipate future opportunitiesand risks. Examples include:

• Understanding how historical sales, costs and other key metricstranslate to future performance
• Seeing how predicted results compare with goals
• Revealing the causes of customer satisfaction and employeeturnover
• Showing how past and emerging trends impact the bottomline
• Finding correlations in data for cross-sell and up-sellopportunities
• Locating anomalies and clusters for targeted analysis

While SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is planned foravailability via standalone deployment, the software is alsointended to uniquely unlock the value in “Big Data” when utilizedwith the SAP HANA database, which provides a data mining andstatistical function library.

Once data—structured, unstructured or both—is loaded into SAPHANA or an alternative data source, data and business analysts willbe able to benefit from intuitive predictive modeling, beautifuladvanced visualizations and data exploration, all with adrag-and-drop interface for data selection, preparation andprocessing.

Insights can then be delivered to dashboards, alerts and mobiledevices, or accessed by other analytics solutions from SAP.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis and SAP HANA areimportant steps in SAP's goal of bringing predictive insight toeveryone in the organization. This means extending predictivecapabilities to where people work: into business applications, BIand collaboration environments, and on mobile devices.

SAP has already delivered predictive applications powered by SAPHANA to numerous industries, and is aggressively expanding itspredictive applications portfolio.

“Analytics solutions from SAP are powering adecision-making revolution for businesses that recognize the futurestarts a second from now, not a week or a year from now,” said JohnSchweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics,SAP. “That's why predictive applications must be intuitive, wherepeople work and powered by real-time performance. With SAP'scomprehensive approach to predictive analytics, more people in thebusiness can explore, visualize and share insights from explodingvolumes and varieties of data.”