NeoVista Enhances Business Intelligence Software
ACTION ITEMS
NeoVista Software Inc., a leading supplier of business intelligence software and consulting services, has announced release 3.0 of its Decision Series software suite. Release 3.0 makes building business models easier with its new DecisionAssistant, adds three new data mining engines, includes IBM AIX platform support, adds individual cases factor analysis to the tree induction and neural network mining engines and provides native database connectivity for Oracle, Informix, Sybase and DB-2 relational databases.
"The Decision Series produces million dollar results for our customers," said John Harte, NeoVista's president and CEO. "With this release, we're making knowledge discovery even easier to use and more effective for retail, financial services and insurance enterprises. Our business intelligence solutions are considered essential to leading Global 2000 companies and their competitive position."
NeoVista's Decision Series 3.0 software suite is a business intelligence application development environment that brings an array of sophisticated data mining technologies to bear on large corporate databases. The Decision Series ferrets out non-obvious relationships hidden in the terabytes stored in corporate data warehouses.
These relationships are incorporated into real-world applications that improve operational efficiencies and customer intimacy. The Decision Series is the basis for NeoVista's Retail Decision suite that uses store-level point-of-sale (POS) data to determine what products to offer in individual stores, at what time of the year.
According to the June 8, 1998 issue of Discount Store News, Wal-Mart, a NeoVista customer, saved $1 billion in inventory in 1997 while growing sales by 12 percent. "NeoVista's Decision Series has been a key element in a number of our customer retention efforts," said David Holvey, Wells Fargo's senior vice president. "The improved user interface allows us to quickly construct new models and produce results in an afternoon what would have taken us weeks using traditional database analysis methods."
Highlights of Release 3.0:
DecisionAssistant
Corporate analysts can invoke the DecisionAssistant any time they need help building a model. DecisionAssistant not only prompts the analyst, but also supplies tested templates and default values where appropriate. Now, with DecisionAssistant and the product's improved graphical user interface, model building using these sophisticated modeling tools is accessible to an even broader range of corporate decision makers -- from the casual user to the expert.
Three New Mining Engines
Release 3.0 introduces three new data mining engines, DecisionKmeans, DecisionBayes and DecisionCubist.
DecisionKmeans is a clustering algorithm that is used to form groups that allows companies to market their products or services to previously unidentified segments of customers.
DecisionBayes is a predictive algorithm that is based on probability theory that appeals to those formally trained in statistical analysis.
DecisionCubist is a predictive algorithm that is based on regression trees that is similar to Neovista's DecisionTree, but replaces probabilities with regression equations.
Target Dependency Analysis
Target dependency analysis (TDA) is a powerful feature of DecisionAccess that identifies suspicious attributes, ranks attributes based on their predictive power, and determines optimal split points for continuous attributes and groups for categorical attributes. All of these together help automate the model building process, increase the accuracy of the resultant model, and reduce computing requirements.
Individual Case Factor Analysis
Release 3.0 provides individual case factor analysis for DecisionTree and DecisionNet. Case factor analysis gives information about why models predict an individual outcome. For example, case factors are important to insurance companies, since they are required to give an applicant specific reasons if they decline to cover them.
Enhanced Database Connectivity
In addition to supporting ODBC, NeoVista's Decision Series Release 3.0 provides native database support for Informix, DB-2, Sybase and Oracle. This new database connectivity provides a secure encrypted password environment to protect sensitive corporate data and models.
AIX Operating System Support
In addition to Digital Unix, HP-UX and Solaris, Release 3.0 now supports IBM's AIX multi-processor platform.
Pricing and Availability
NeoVista's Decision Series Release 3.0 will be available in fourth quarter 1998. The cost for Decision Series 3.0, depending on options, ranges from $25,000 to $200,000. For more information, see http://www.neovista.com