Editor’s note: Dell is evolving its Statistica analytics package to make it more accessible – thus “democratize” – to business people, increasing the effectiveness of analytics in driving business improvement, explains Technology Business Research analyst Ezra Gottheil.

HAMPTON, N.H. – Dell is evolving its Statistica analytics package to make it more accessible to business people, increasing the effectiveness of analytics in driving business improvement.

Dell is following a trend in which software companies are competing to bring more power to nontechnical business people by giving them more direct control in interacting with their data. By reducing the need for technical middlemen, business users can conduct many more analyses and leverage their business understanding for increasing insight into data.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella outlined a similar goal in announcing the Cortana Analytics Suite last year. Dell uses the term “citizen data scientist” to describe empowered business people working more directly with their data. The citizen data scientists are important because they integrate business knowledge with powerful analysis, and because data scientists are in short supply.

Dell’s Statistica pitch: “Easy-to-use predictive analytics software brings the analytics to the data”

From its website:

Drive innovation and solve business challenges with Dell Statistica. By embedding analytics everywhere and empowering a wider community, you’ll transform your business and achieve new levels of success.

Make analytic-based decisions the fuel that powers your organization:

  • Embed analytics everywhere: Run any analytics, on any data, anywhere, to drive better decisions across your organization ― without breaking the bank.
  • Empower more people: Improve collaboration among data scientists, business analysts and business users within a single workbench.
  • Accelerate innovation: Quickly and easily uncover hidden opportunities by analyzing all data ― streaming or at rest.

Read more at:

http://software.dell.com/products/statistica/

Statistica has two main tools to broaden the use of analytics: templates and analytic models. Templates graphically embody entire analyses, giving less-technical users a collection of analyses that can be run as needed as new data becomes available. Analytic models can be exported from Statistica and run on any PC and most other devices, also operating on new data as it becomes available.

These exported models do more than make analysis available to business people. They are especially useful in Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems, and other applications in process control and monitoring. Dell calls this “edge analytics,” and the Statistica team works closely with the team behind the Edge Gateway, Dell’s flagship IoT product.

Statistica helps Dell position itself in the rapidly growing IoT and big data analytics markets. The team’s emphasis on making analytics available to business people is an astute direction. Dell’s challenge will be in communicating Statistica’s benefits to this population.

(C) TBR