Dell Software Group announced the next major release of its award-winning advanced analytics platform, Dell Statistica 13.2. The latest release of Statistica helps companies transform their businesses and achieve new levels of success by embedding analytics everywhere and empowering a wider community of users and use cases. Key features include new collective intelligence capabilities to enable native integration with open source and application marketplaces, a new user interface designed to mask complexity and simplify workflows for citizen data scientists, and the ability to distribute data preparation and analytic workflows to any edge device or gateway.
As advanced analytics gain increased traction as the primary vehicle through which organizations drive innovation, predict customer behavior, and optimize business and manufacturing processes, Statistica continues to build momentum. Earlier this year, Dell was positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Leaders” quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms (February 2016). More recently, Dresner Advisory Services named Statistica an overall leader in its 2016 Industry Excellence Awards. With release of version 13.2, Statistica continues that momentum and further moves advanced analytics into the mainstream by democratizing analytics for the masses.
Leveraging analytic marketplaces with collective intelligence
The latest release of Statistica leverages the power of the global analytics community through new collective intelligence capabilities that enable users to connect directly with analytics marketplaces, public data sets, and non-proprietary, standard scripting languages.
To help address the global shortage of data scientists capable of building analytical models, a growing number of analytics experts are now sharing their models via online marketplaces and platforms. With Statistica 13.2, technical and non-technical users alike can now access via inbuilt nodes many of these pre-built models and integrate these into their existing Statistica workflow. This enables them to leverage a wider range of models without having to code and built them manually, while doing so within the validated and controlled framework Statistica provides. In addition to Statistica’s already robust support for R, with the latest release, users can now script in Python, C# and Visual Basic.
Online marketplaces accessible to Statistica 13.2 users include Apervita, a leading marketplace for healthcare analytics, Algorithmia, a fast-growing online analytics marketplace, and H20 Sparkling Water for Spark on Hadoop, an open source math and machine learning platform that enables users to access public data sets such as Amazon Public Data Sets. This compliments the Azure ML node released in version 13.1, which enables users to push analytics to the cloud, and adds significant machine learning, deep learning, and big data capabilities to the platform.
In addition, users can now lock and protect models as propriety IP, a capability developed in conjunction with Statistica’s OEM and Partner network, thus enabling those groups to publish models out to third parties themselves.
Masking complexity for non-technical users
With the majority of analytics initiatives now driven by the citizen data scientist, Statistica 13.2 delivers a series of new features specifically designed to simplify analytics for the non-technical user, including a new citizen data scientist UI. This purpose-built, designer-view interface completely masks the complexity behind data preparation requirements and the analytic workflows within which users work, enabling non-technical business users to drive analytics initiatives without requiring them to code or program. The new release also features the ability to export Statistica objects so that non-technical users can edit them in Excel before importing them back into Statistica.
This new complexity-masking functionality builds on the streamlined data preparation tools and reusable workspace templates introduced in version 13.1, and continues Statistica’s rapid evolution from a solution ideal for statisticians and mathematicians, to one accessible for all users across the organization, including both traditional and citizen data scientists.
Driving analytics directly to the edge
Building on the edge scoring functionality delivered in version 13.1, Statistica 13.2 now includes full edge analytics, giving users the ability to distribute data preparation and analytic workflows to any edge device or gateway. The new release features a Rules Builder node that can be deployed directly on an edge device or gateway, enabling users to perform data prep tasks, execute models, and make conditional model execution and decisions directly where the data lives. This edge analytics functionality eliminates the heavy lifting involved with transporting data back to a central repository, and enables customers to obtain and respond to insights at the speed of business.
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