Today at Dell World, Dell Software announced the start of a collaborative effort with Microsoft aimed at delivering predictive analytics in a hybrid cloud setting. Dell Software is also upgrading its Statistica (formerly StatSoft) advanced analytics platform with enhanced big data capabilities through integration with Kitenga.
In addition, Dell Services has rolled out digital business services designed to help customers redesign business processes to improve operational efficiency and engagement in the customer experience through digital technologies.
Enhanced Analytics Software Capabilities
Dell Software’s new collaborative effort with Microsoft is aimed at enabling customers to perform powerful predictive analytics capabilities within a scalable, cost-effective hybrid cloud environment.
The initiative will enable customers to use Dell Software’s recently acquired Statistica advanced analytics platform with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Service. With the combination of Dell Statistica and the Azure Machine Learning Service, customers get the robust predictive analytics capabilities they desire while enjoying the many advantages of a cloud deployment, all while maintaining proper compliance and security.
This combination is intended to give customers the ability to leverage the more than 16,000 analytical options available in Statistica, as well as its model management and secure compliance capabilities, while moving core modeling to the cloud, where Azure’s Machine Learning engine offers process power, scale and economic advantage.
In addition, with the combination, customers can use a hybrid cloud architecture, with sensitive data remaining within the local private cloud, and less sensitive data processed at scale. This is particularly critical for companies in industries such as banking, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, where strong regulatory, compliance or privacy mandates makes maintaining proper data governance an absolute must.
New Big Data Analytics Module
Dell Software also announced the launch of a new big data analytics module within its Statistica advanced analytics platform. The new module embeds capabilities from Dell Software’s existing Kitenga big data analytics platform – including various NLP, machine learning, predictive modeling, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and visualization capabilities – directly into the Statistica user workflow, giving customers access to an integrated technology that directly connects with and enables advanced analysis big data.
The integration gives Statistica users the ability to crawl various forms of unstructured data, including web content and publicly available social data from sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as write that data directly to Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) to further facilitate in-depth big data analytics. This unstructured data can then be combined with large-scale structured data, enabling data experts to enhance understanding of customer behavior and market opportunities. In addition, Statistica is now also fully integrated with Dell Software’s Toad Intelligence Central solution, providing users with direct access to a broad range of data types, including data residing traditional relational databases, NoSQL databases, and unstructured databases such as Hadoop and Cassandra, and cloud sources such as Salesforce.com.
The first phase of Dell and Microsoft’s collaborative effort is underway now, and customers worldwide can now use Statistica in tandem with Azure Machine Learning.
The first iteration of the new Statistica big data analytics module will be available to customers worldwide in Q4 2014.
Digital Business Services
Available today, Dell Services has also unveiled a new, dedicated service line called Dell Digital Business Services (DBS), which includes Digital Transformation Consulting and Digital Technology Services, to help customers better understand their end users’ preferences and transform business processes using digital technologies.