A major portion of my career has been in analytics. One of the most exciting areas for me in the past few years, and an area of largely un-tapped potential for our OEM partners, is the area of predictive analytics for use by their customers. The drawing below has been used often in SAP presentations, but I think really shows how predictive analytics plays into the rest of the analytic story.
If you look at this chart, SAP via BusinessObjects started the journey of BI over 20 years ago with the concept of enabling end users to help answer questions of their data such as “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?” Analytics needs to continue to move forward, and we see this at a rapid pace today. Your customers are demanding more of data within your solution to answer questions such as “What will happen?” and the nirvana of analytics….”What is the best that could happen?”
Ok, so you may be thinking, “we have our road map built out for our customers already, and although predictive is interesting, I don’t have the development staff to build, and maintain predictive capabilities into my solution.”
Let’s look at some interesting statistics…
- 68% of organizations that used predictive analytics realized a competitive advantage- source Ventana Research
- Demand for deep analytic talent in the US could be 50 to 60% greater than its projected supply by 2018- source McKinsey Global Institute.
Could adding predictive to your solution give you a competitive advantage? Even moving the needle in small increments for your solution could reap your company significant revenue. To me, the second bullet is even more of an eye opener. That’s less than two years in the future! Most of your customers will not have the talent to analyze data efficiently- a huge potential for you as a partner!
This is where advancements in predictive capabilities at SAP can help you create a truly powerful solution.
There are many, many tools out there that can create predictive models. You as an OEM have the added challenges of typically having a small development staff to create predictive models, and you don’t have the luxury like some large organizations to be able to re-train these models on a regular basis as new data is applied to the model in production. You need a sustainable way of both creating models, and automating model management.
- With SAP Predictive Analytics, the data preparation capability allows you to create 1000’s of derived variables, faster—and without writing a line of SQL.
- SAP’s unique method of automated predictive modeling chooses the best performing model for you yet allowing the flexibility to decide what’s best for your business.
- Model management allows complete model life cycle administration on production models, scheduling refreshes like re-scoring when you need it.
- You have complete breadth of connectivity, with access to both departmental (like Excel) and enterprise (like databases) data sources
- This is no black box—we provide full support for R and Bring Your Own Analytics (BYOA), and automated means “simplified,” so you’ll always have full control over the process.
- We also provide incredible scalability—you can start with a template model and use it to automatically create dozens to 100’s more automatically.
SAP OEM Partners such as Carvechi are leading the charge to provide unparalleled insights for their customers using predictive capabilities. They look at areas such as purchasing patterns delivering relevant and personalized content as well as messages for fan re-engagement.
Also check out this great blog post from Pierre Leroux on Predictive Analytics in 2016 and The Future of Predictive Analytics is Here with 3.0! from Ashish Morzaria.
Please contact us if you would like to find out more on how you can embed and OEM some of SAP's technology into your own products. Thanks for taking the time to read, and love to hear your comments!
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