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November 18, 2014

FICO Improves Its Big Data Score with Trio of New Apps

FICO is best known as the company behind the software that calculates credit scores. But in fact the company does a whole lot more, and last week the company flexed its analytics muscles with the unveiling of several new offerings, including a new Hadoop app, a real-time streaming analytics app, and text analytics tool that can mine email and Twitter.

The new Big Data Analyzer offering is a native Hadoop application that’s based on the technology FICO obtained with its acquisition of Karmasphere earlier this year. The software, which will become available in January, is an end-to-end application that helps customers do everything from finding patterns hidden in big data sets to operationalizing applications that take advantage of those insights.

There are two main components to the product, which has been upgraded and enhanced from the Analyst product that Karmasphere sold when it was an independent company based in Cupertino, California. The first is Customer Analytics, which is used to perform segmentation and categorization of customers with the goals of building personalized customer recommendation, doing churn analysis, and campaign optimization. The second is Operational Analytics, which is used to understand how customers use products, to support products, and to build better products.

With Big Data Analyzer, FICO is focusing on making the process of building these types of big data-powered applications easier. The key to that will be the new Analytics Hub that will be introduced with the product, says Martin Hall, who was the founder of Karmasphere and is now employed by San Jose, California-based FICO.

“The analytics hub is the place where all analytical assets that are available to users of the product–data scientists, analysts, and business users–to be searched and discovered then reused,” Hall tells Datanami. “We believe analytics shouldn’t be built every time from scratch. It should be an assembly process wherever possible.”

Everybody can’t be a data scientist, Hall says. “But we need to make sure the hard core work of data scientists building, for example, predictive models can be made available downstream in the business to their data analyst and business user colleagues, and ultimately can be deployed operationally,” he says.

One of the interesting things that Big Data Analyzer brings to FICO and its vast customer set is the capability to run a variety of predictive models in in Hadoop. For example, data scientists who have built models using SAS tools or the language R can run those on Hadoop via the Big Data Analyzer, Hall says. “That capability is something that’s new through the marriage of Karmasphere and FICO,” he says.

Karmasphere was one of the early leaders in the Hadoop application space. Today FICO continues that tradition with a fully YARN-compliant Hadoop version 2 application that leverages the power of HDFS, MapReduce, Hive, HCAT, and Sqoop. The software, which also run on older Hadoop 1 clusters, may adopt the latest Apache Spark capabilities in the near future, Hall indicated.

There is a strong connection between the Karmasphere technology and FICO’s existing

FICO has traditionally been very strong in the financial services sector, where nearly every major bank uses its fraud detection capability. But through tools like the Big Data Analyzer and Karmaphere’s existing customer base, FICO is gaining traction in telecom, retail, and technology sectors.

Big Data Analyzer was unveiled at last week’s FICO World show in San Diego, California. The show also provided the backdrop for two other new products, including a real-time streaming analytics product and a text analytics product. Both of these products, which apparently do not have a name yet, are slated to become available in January 2015, along with the Big Data Analyzer product.

The text analytics software will be particularly useful in picking out trends and anomalies in social media data, which is an area where FICO customers are looking to invest, Hall says.

“There’s huge interest in big data, huge interest in specific use cases around customer analytics and how social media data can be applied to the business,” he says. “The world of big data is about how can you can take every piece of information that’s relevant to your business and use it to the benefit of your business, and ultimately to the betterment of your customers.”

FICO’s chief technology officer Dr. Stuart Wells previewed the new Hadoop apps and the text and streaming analytics products during a keynote at last week’s show. It’s all about simplifying access to big data analytics, he says.

“Today, enterprises are trying to crunch data with tools that either cannot handle big data, or are so complex that they require specialized skills,” Wells says. “All three of the new technologies we are demonstrating today greatly simplify the ability to glean insights and make decisions from a variety of data types and sources. They also work together seamlessly to form a big data analytics platform that any enterprise can use.”

When it’s available, Big Data Analyzer will be available on any Hadoop distribution or through FICO Cloud.

Related Items:

FICO Adds Big Data Analytics for Hadoop to Analytic Cloud

Karmasphere Ushers in New Hadoop Partner

Karmasphere Makes Hadoop Work Overtime

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