Software AG Platform Targets Predictive Analytics

Software AG is adding high-end predictive analytics tools to its Digital Business Platform as it looks to extend the reach of the flagship analytics platform across retail, manufacturing, financial services and other industry sectors.

The German software vendor said Tuesday (June 23) it has embedded Adaptive Decision and Predictive Analytics (Adapa) from San Diego-based Zementis Inc. into its Apama Streaming Analytics platform in a bid to offer enterprises a “one-stop shop” for business intelligence and analytics. Adapa is billed as an extremely fast, standards-based deployment platform and scoring engine. It uses algorithms that discover patterns in big data that might predict similar outcomes in the future.

Adapa’s proprietary Predictive Model Markup Language deployment and runtime engine is considered to be an emerging industry standard for data mining. With the Software AG deployment, predictive models created with commercial and open source data mining tools could be utilized for real-time scoring, the company claimed.

Software AG said the addition of new predictive analytics capabilities to its Digital Business Platform would enable it to support more applications, including predictive maintenance, smart metering and manufacturing, supply chain optimization, fraud detection along with Internet of Things (IoT) and “connected customer” marketing use cases.

In a survey released in May, Software AG’s U.S. unit based in Reston, Va., reported that a whopping 97 percent of respondents complained they are overwhelmed by the nonstop torrent of data from a variety of new sources like the IoT. However, the survey paradoxically found “an incessant need for more datasets without the ability to use what’s already available.”

The result, according to the survey of about 750 executives at companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue, is that nearly three-quarters believe they face “big data paralysis” unless they can find new tools to analyze and extract value from data.

Software AG is betting that emerging technologies such as in-memory processing, streaming analytics and cloud computing integrated with faster and cheaper computing platforms will make predictive analytics accessible to more enterprises as they upgrade their capabilities.

The addition of the Zementis predictive analytics is the latest step by Software AG in its efforts to expand the its platform’s reach. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with Mosaic Data Science to provide advanced analytics and data science support on its digital platform. The partnership includes the addition of Mosaic’s IoT predictive maintenance tool.

The tool leverages the declining cost of industrial and other sensors that are among the first wave of IoT deployments. As sensor networks generating more real-time data, it can be analyzed for applications like predictive maintenance.

“Users are now able to collect, analyze and react to information and perform maintenance at the right time and place,” the partners asserted. “By identifying failures before they happen, maintenance costs are dramatically reduced.”

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