The Last Mile of Analytics: Making the Leap from Platforms to Tools

Leaping from the Lab to the Office

Models are fine if you’re a data scientist, but when you’re looking for insights that translate into meaningful actions and real business results, what you really need are better tools. The first generation of big data analytics vendors focused on creating platforms for modelers and developers. Now there’s a new generation of vendors that focuses on delivering advanced analytics directly to business users.

This new generation of vendors is following the broader business market, which is more interested in deployment and less interested in development. Now that analytics are considered more normal than novel, success is measured in terms of usability and rates of adoption. Interestingly, the user base isn’t entirely human: the newest generation of analytics must also work and play well with closed-loop decisioning systems, which are largely automated.

This is a fascinating tale in which the original scientists and innovators of the analytics movement might find themselves elbowed aside by a user community that includes both humans and robots. In some cases, “older” analytics companies are finding themselves losing ground to “younger” analytics companies that understand what users apparently want: tools with advanced analytic capabilities that can be used in real-world business scenarios like fraud detection, credit scoring, customer lifecycle analysis, marketing optimization, IT operations, customer support, and more. Since every new software trend ...