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Developers are rarely shy about sharing their views on new tools and technology. I appreciate their passion and healthy scepticism, in fact I seem to have developed my own slightly cynical perspective. So when I heard we’d added SAP InfiniteInsight (formerly from KXEN) to the SAP OEM offering (it’s my job to build OEM marketing content), I quietly wondered how relevant the solution was going to be for our OEM partners.
As I gathered solution information my sceptical attitude soon began to shift to one of pleasant surprise at how ‘cool’ the functionality was. I knew that predictive analytics was about looking at data and forecasting the likelihood of future events, and yes that is cool, but that’s not what impressed me. My own experience of working with in-house data scientists (dudes with PHDs in statistics and analytics) had shown me that creating a predictive model for optimizing campaign lead follow-up takes weeks, if not months. The process required the identification of predictive variables and development of a consistent model for using those variables to score prospects based on how likely they were to buy, and then involved lots of iterative testing.
What I hadn’t expected was SAP InfiniteInsight’s ability to self-learn from historical data… and identify the predictive variables without a data scientist in the room. In fact, the software can continuously relearn and adapt its scoring based on current target audience actions.
Next I’m thinking, ok this would be great value-add for any partner building customer management solutions or operations software but it must be pretty tricky to integrate… and I was once again pleasantly surprised. SAP InfiniteInsight’s core functionality resides in 4 DLLs totalling just 1.5 MB with comprehensive APIs.
That means our OEM partners can relatively easily embed the technology, point the solution at an historical database and let it figure out the predictive characteristics and then use those variables to score a net new target individual or target dataset of many individuals. This can even be done in real-time so if someone is surfing my ecommerce site and has selected to purchase an item I can instantly offer up the next-best three items as suggestions – based on what others have typically bought with the 1st item.
This really gets the brain cells firing in terms of the all the potential scenarios where SAP InfiniteInsight might extend existing application value, and drive increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are just a few of the scenarios that I thought were appealing.
For CRM related applications:
- Optimize direct marketing campaigns to boost response rates
- Analyze customers’ website touch points to improve their online experience
- Target customers that have a high propensity to churn with new customized offers
- Analyze customer purchasing histories to deliver targeted up-sell recommendations
For business operations:
- Predict how market-price volatility will impact production
- Foresee changes in demand and supply
- Analyze streams machine data to build proactive maintenance schedules
- Forecast customer demand and optimize inventory
in real time
For finance solutions:
- Analyze sales transactions to identify unsafe investments
- Predict patterns of fraud within Big Data
- Perform credit score analysis in real time
And I almost forgot, if you’re interested in turbocharging your predictive analytics performance you can also pair InfininieInsight with the in-memory computing power of SAP HANA for a real-time experience.
In the end, my mind set had completely reversed from one of skepticism to one of optimism but for those of you that have that skeptical bone in your body, I invite you to do your own investigation. I’ve included a couple of links to speed the process.
SAP InfiniteInsight Industry and LOB scenarios
SAP Predictive Analytics OEM eBook
SAP InfiniteInsight Introduction and Overview Blog
If you’re interested in learning more about…
- building predictive models in minutes or hours, not weeks or months
- integrating automated predictive modeling into your applications
- increasing your application footprint at existing customers
then please reach out to our OEM team. Many SAP OEM partners are already using SAP InfiniteInsight to differentiate their offerings and open new revenue streams.
Get the latest updates on SAP OEM by following us @SAPOEM on Twitter
For more details on SAP OEM partnership and to know about SAP OEM platforms and solutions , visit us www.sap.com/partners/oem
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