My Love-Hate Relationship with Predictive Analytics

[Former Member]

Have you ever found yourself spending hours mindlessly browsing through products on a website; or when someone sends you a funny video and you end up watching 10 more related videos without even realizing it? This is all thanks to the magic of customized marketing, based on social and predictive analytics. It helps provide product and service suggestions tailored for each customer. As a consumer, I seem to have a love-hate relationship with this – they know exactly how to make me spend my time and money! For businesses however, this opens doors to increase successful sales, and profits. Online shopping is becoming increasingly popular, and the preferred way to shop among many consumers. It is ever more important for businesses to take advantage of this trend and employ ways to maximize their profits online.

KXEN InfiniteInsight Social with SAP Sybase IQ is the brain behind predictive analytics that many businesses opt to use.  You don’t have to take a student intern’s word for it though; HMV is an example of the success that businesses are achieving with SAP Sybase IQ and KXEN. They saw their revenue increase by a whopping 140% in just the first year. The purchasing rates grew 3-15 times, and per transaction revenue grew 1.5-3 times.

Predictive analytics requires exploring diverse sources of historical and real-time data about a customer, including: CRM, web data, or even social platforms like Twitter. This analytical data set is often comprised of hundreds or thousands of columns and millions of rows. Predictive analytics is not just limited to product recommendations, and can be used to optimize every step in the customer lifecycle – acquisition, cross-sell, up-sell, customer retention/ churn, and next best activity. It also has uses in industries other than retail, like banking, healthcare, and fraud detection. One of our banking customers declared that they identified 92% of fraud cases with a high degree of reliability in just one day!

SAP Sybase IQ and KXEN combined offer a perfect solution for businesses looking to take advantage of this remarkable technology, with unparalleled speed and performance. SAP Sybase IQ stores large volumes of data, while KXEN accesses the data at blazing speeds, up to 100 or even 1000 times faster than traditional relational database solutions and data mining systems. SAP Sybase IQ 16 was built to handle the huge loads encountered in predictive analytics, and has no limit on the number of columns. This is a huge advantage when building the analytical data set, including complex aggregates or derived variables that are used in predictive analysis. InfiniteInsight is also tightly integrated with the in-memory Event Stream Processing (ESP) solution from SAP. This enables powerful analysis of real-time data.

You can learn more about the joint forces of SAP and KXEN here: http://www.sybase.com/files/sites/Sybase-Marketplace/kxen.html