IBM to acquire SPSS
IBM announced its intention to acquire SPSS - a leading provider of Predictive Analytics & Optimization software. This is a significant event for clients wishing to deploy predictive analytics solutions.
With SPSS, IBM has a complete suite of products across the data analytics spectrum - ETL (Ascential), database (DB2), predictive analytics & optimization (SPSS), in-database mining (IBM Intelligent Miner) and a visual workbench for predictive analytics (SPSS Clementine). This, combined with IBM global services, can offer a compelling combination of integrated hardware, software and services.
With this acquisition, IBM is bound to integrate SPSS with its popular database software, which could impart capabilities to work with large databases. Today, SAS is the only vendor that integrates data management, reporting, predictive analytics, optimization, and an intuitive user interface into a single integrated package. There are other vendors too - including KXEN, Oracle, Statistica, etc. who have different vision and execution strengths. The most serious challenger amongst them is Oracle. Oracle is continuously improving its data mining capabilities, providing a robust data mining work-bench, a reasonable set of algorithms, the ability to handle large data volumes, and a fully integrated suite of products. Even pure-play Business Intelligence (BI) vendors such as MicroStrategy, offer the ability to score predictive models developed using other packages (through PMML). Open Source tools such as R, Weka and RapidMiner offer the ability to build advanced data mining solutions through cutting-edge algorithms. However, they do not have the ability to work with large databases (this is changing).
Given this scenario, IBM's acquisition is bound to challenge the market leader, SAS, in the predictive analytics and optimization space. This is good news for all those who value diversity (clients and solution providers).