Super-Powering Business Intelligence with Best-of-Breed Big Data Analytics

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1 white paper Super-Powering Business Intelligence with Best-of-Breed Big Data Analytics»» Summary Business Intelligence (BI) is an arena that is ripe for Big Data analytics. Traditional BI solutions are critical to strategic decision making, but they often lack the power to effectively analyze voluminous and dynamic streams of Big Data. Without predictive analytics, enterprises are missing out on opportunities to drive profitable customer engagement with real-time, analytic-powered decisions based on immediate business objectives. Until now, the process of identifying analytics requirements, selecting solutions and integrating them into an existing operational infrastructure has been lengthy, laborious, complex and costly. Few beyond the largest enterprises have been able to rationalize the investment in order to reap the benefits of predictive analytics. FICO has taken on the challenge to make best-of-breed analytics easier, faster and less costly to acquire, integrate and deploy. The result: the FICO Analytic Cloud and its foundational component, the FICO Decision Management Platform. This paper explores: The challenges that enterprises face in integrating analytics with exiting BI solutions and processes. The FICO Analytic Cloud: what it is and how it can accelerate effective analytic deployment for companies of every size. The FICO Decision Management Platform: the tools, technologies and resources available for any size company to build, integrate and deploy best-of-breed analytic solutions. Make every decision count TM

2 »The» Challenges of Identifying and Integrating Best-of-Breed Analytics Technologies Business intelligence solutions represent the state of the art in analytics in many organizations. And they are very important in strategy, planning and decision making. However, with the rise of Big Data, conventional business intelligence methodologies have much more difficulty delivering business value. Big Data streams are too large and change too fast for tools that were designed for a more casual view of past actions. Businesses that don t enhance their analytic capabilities to take advantage of Big Data risk being left behind. Simply identifying and selecting best-of-breed analytic solutions from among the myriad available is daunting. Trying to integrate them into an existing infrastructure and overcome interoperability issues is an even bigger challenge. Moreover, businesses looking to integrate and expand their use of analytics have to consider a number of difficult questions: Do you have the analytic talent internally to manage a profound shift in analytics breadth and depth? Are you confident that your analytics provider is proficient in every area of the analytics supply chain? Is it a best-of-breed supplier? How are you going to manage the task of component-level integration? How are you going to integrate analytics into your enterprise applications? Do you know where and how to start the process? FIGURE 1: ANALYTIC MATURITY EVOLUTION Building Analytic Sophistication and Advantage Summarize Past and Current Behavior Predict Future Behavior and Adapt Tools Solutions Scores Tools Solutions Decision Optimization DECISION VALUE Business Intelligence Descriptive Analytics Predictive Analytics Understand the trends in business Make different offers to groups of customers ANALYTIC CAPABILITY Target each decision to a customer s future behavior Automatically take the ideal action on each individual 2014 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 2

3 Toward Faster, Easier and Economical Adoption of Analytic Solutions FICO was founded and has focused on all things analytic. Over the last 50 years, FICO has developed solutions for all components of the analytics lifecycle including business intelligence, modeling and adaptive decision management. This evolution has led to the FICO Analytic Cloud, the solution to the cost, complexity and interoperability challenges facing analytics professionals today. With the launch of the FICO Analytic Cloud (FAC), businesses of all sizes will have easy access to open analytics best practices, as well as integrated and interoperable tools, frameworks and applications, along with a marketplace to buy and integrate components, data or complete solutions. Embracing Interoperability and Openness Even with FICO s analytic expertise, we understand the need to make it faster and easier to incorporate innovative techniques and technologies being produced by a growing ecosystem of academics, commercial vendors and open source communities. Interoperability, integration and support for third-party best-of-breed technologies are key differentiators for the FICO Analytic Cloud. As an industry leader in predictive analytics and decision management solutions, FICO s own IP and product portfolio provide a strong basis for the most innovative enterprise analytics solutions available. These solutions, however, are advanced in nature. Companies often start with a data reporting and visualization problem, as in business intelligence, and aren t yet ready to consider advanced decision management. Just as importantly, many enterprises have invested in SAS, IBM or Experian for business rules or analytic modeling. Alternatively, companies may have seen tremendous value in open source tools such as Drools or R to creating PMML models for advanced analytics. In order to create the most compelling and truly differentiated analytics platform, FICO made the critical choice to include technology alternatives and embrace open standards. We have also extended the supported analytics infrastructure to include solutions that FICO has never offered, such as unstructured data analytics, visualization and reporting, and SAS and PMML models. By integrating technological alternatives, embracing open source and extending the analytic platform with an open marketplace, FICO has created a flexible, innovative, one-stop analytics solution for customers of any size, skill level and preference. To help customers better understand the richness and value of the FICO Analytic Cloud, this paper will take a look at some of the integrated technologies available to first-time users, with a particular focus on one key component: the FICO Decision Management Platform Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 3

4 »FICO» Decision Management Platform The cloud-based FICO Decision Management Platform provides tools and analytics capabilities that make it easy for customers to build, implement and scale analytics and decision management solutions. Built on the FICO Analytic Cloud, a secure, compliant and scalable infrastructure, the Decision Management Platform hosts capabilities available in three Developer Studios (see Figure 2). FIGURE 2: FICO DECISION MANAGEMENT PLATFORM FICO Application Studio: Rapid Application Development Tools Decision Modeler FICO Decision Studio: Decision Management Tools FICO Visual Insights Studio: Data Visualization and Reporting Data and Analytics Analytic Services Analytic Modeler Data Connectors Optimization Modeler Analytic Data Store Templates & Frameworks 1. FICO Application Studio a rapid application development and deployment solution to integrate analytic and other platform components and those from the FAC marketplace to develop an application UI. This application development tool powers the quick and easy orchestration of analytic components and delivery of analytics-powered applications. Applications built in the FICO Application Studio are optimized to run anywhere (online, offline, mobile, cloud, etc.). 2. FICO Decision Studio contains the essential tools for developing decision management solutions. It includes decision, analytic and optimization modeling tools along with quick-start frameworks and templates to make it easier for new users to build solutions from scratch. 3. FICO Visual Insight Studio a state-of-the-art visualization and reporting tool for mission-critical business intelligence analytics. The next section of this paper will look at each of these three tools in more detail. The Decision Management Platform provides a cost-effective and easy way for customers to evaluate, customize, deploy and scale state-of-the-art analytics and decision management solutions. And they can develop new solutions that leverage FICO s analytical tools, data sets and decision modeling, along with an extensive range of technologies provided by partners and other vendors. What makes the Decision Management Platform unique is that it is an integrated and optimized collection of best-of-breed tools and functionality designed to make it easy and seamless to deploy run-anywhere analytically powered applications. For businesses looking to integrate analytics into their business decision process, the Decision Management Platform provides the most natural starting point to learn and use the FICO Analytic Cloud. Let s look at the technologies and capabilities that make up the platform and its corresponding solution stack, and how all the components work together to create decision management solutions Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 4

5 »» What s New in the FICO Decision Management Platform? Fundamentally, much of the technology available in the FICO Decision Management Platform is not new. However, its availability as part an integrated cloud-based solution to provide an end-to-end analytics offering, along with a state-of-the-art application development engine, is groundbreaking. Likewise, as a portal to mix and match best-of-breed analytic components or solutions into an integrated, easy-to-access whole is also groundbreaking. The Decision Management Platform provides numerous technological benefits for users, including: Tools to rapidly develop rich, intuitive user interfaces The FICO Decision Management Platform solution stack includes rapid application development tools as part of the FICO Application Studio. This allows customers to quickly develop rich, intuitive user interfaces for web applications and mobile devices to drive user productivity or customer engagement, while dramatically lowering the cost and time for development. Visual tools to add processes and workflows Running on the Decision Management Platform, FICO tools enable the definition and development of processes using easy-to-use, drag and drop visual editors. The richness and ease of use of this toolset will enable business users and developers to collaborate on application development, ensuring accuracy in the process developed, while reducing the time and effort to develop and maintain the application. Support for any model type, from any source FICO is including tools to deploy and execute models from any source providing support for SAS models and for the full PMML standard. This eliminates the costly and lengthy process preventing many companies from benefitting from the powerful analytics created for their business applications. Text analytics on unstructured data FICO is providing integration and execution support to access and consume data from a broad range of sources, including unstructured data. This data can be sourced from documents, social feeds, news feeds, and more. And with FICO s text analytic engine, customers can gain insight and improve predictions from these additional sources to improve customer engagement. Learning loop supporting test-and-learn strategies The Decision Management Platform enables customers to monitor and track the decisions within their applications, helping them assess the performance of the application against business goals. Combined with champion/challenger, A/B testing or other model performance test-and-learn strategies, the platform capabilities shorten the time to identify, model and adapt decision strategies to improve business performance. Interactive visual dashboards FICO is adding the power of interactive visual dashboards to applications built on the Decision Management Platform. The FICO Visual Insights Studio provides powerful analysis and discovery tools to help business users understand what is happening within their business, identifying trends and patterns of activity and response, and aids them in directing efforts to improve performance and replicate ideal results. The Applications Powering the Decision Management Platform FICO has not only transitioned its own analytic tools and components to the cloud, but also has assessed numerous third-party and open source technologies to complete the delivery of an end-to-end analytics solution. The company has focused on tools and component integration for ease-of-use and ultimately to ease solutions development. The inclusion of a complete application development solution orchestrating platform services and outputs is a critical part of the platform that ensures the path from tools to application delivery is seamless and easy. With all the work that FICO has done to identify and integrate best-of-breed solutions into this application development environment, we have not lost sight of the fact that what s best of breed to one may not be best for the requirements of everyone. That s why the FICO Analytic Cloud has 2014 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 5

6 open APIs and a framework for delivering any analytic solution components, services, complete applications or solutions, or data via the FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace. (Data can be added via the Marketplace or through the data access tools for use in any analytic solution.) Anything loaded through the Marketplace can be leveraged by the integrated application development solution and seamlessly included in any analytics application developed on the Decision Management Platform. Let s take a closer look at the included technology and capabilities running on the Decision Management Platform: FICO Decision Studio: Building, Managing and Executing Analytic Models Traditional FICO applications, including decision rules engines, financial modeling and industryleading decision optimization, are all essential in building a complete and adaptive decision management solution. These applications and their unique functionality are available initially as component parts but ultimately as fully integrated solutions for developing analytically driven applications and end-to-end decision management infrastructures. FICO decision management tools will be enhanced by third-party tools and capabilities, which will extend the FICO solutions to provide a full complement of analytics tools, capabilities and utility. A clear example of this is the work FICO has done to integrate support for both PMML-based and SAS models into a FICO-authored decision management solution. While FICO is including its own Model Builder tool for the creation of analytic models, customers of alternative analytic modeling tools can bring those third-party developed models to the FICO Analytic Cloud. This functionality will be integrated onto the Decision Management Platform specifically the Analytic Modeler and available without any additional work or bolt-on functionality. For customers who don t want to rely solely on the FICO Analytic Modeler for access to non-fico models, both the PMML and SAS components will be available in the FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace for one-off integration. In addition to the importation of non-fico models, analytic model testing, management and maturation will also be supported seamlessly as part of FICO Model Central solution. Model management will be added to the FICO Analytic Cloud. Another powerful and integral part of the Decision Management Platform is the decision optimization functionality today found in FICO Xpress Optimization Studio and Decision Optimizer. This industry-leading solution is resold by many OEMs and used by some of the largest organizations for identifying and delineating best options for optimal decision making. Optimization is available in the FICO Decision Studio via the new FICO Optimization Modeler tool as well as through an integrated optimizer, or Optimization-as-a-Service capability, included within the Decision Studio portfolio. A significant part of the Decision Studio running on the Decision Management Platform is FICO s business and decision rules engine. Historically sold as a discrete product called FICO Blaze Advisor business rules management system, it is the world s leading business rules management system (BRMS), maximizing control over high-volume operational decisions. Blaze Advisor provides companies across industries with a scalable solution that delivers unprecedented agility for smarter business decisions. Blaze Advisor functionality is now available as a cornerstone component of the FICO Decision Studio and takes the form of the new FICO Decision Modeler. Also included in the FICO Decision Studio are quick start templates and solution blueprints to make it easy for first-time users to get started building analytically powered applications Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 6

7 FICO Visual Insights Studio: Data Analysis and Reporting Another key component of the Decision Management Platform is the FICO Visual Insights Studio, a state-of-the-art analytics visualization, analysis and reporting tool. The FICO Visual Insights Studio provides tight integration with the FICO Decision Studio analytics and modeling functionality to empower users with tremendous real-time analytics insight along with the reporting functionality business users expect. While visualization and reporting are critical to any savvy business intelligence organization, and the starting point for any company considering analytics, the integration with a full suite of decision management tools is a dramatically empowering solution with no competition. For customers who have chosen other analytics visualization, reporting or BI tools, the FICO Visual Insights Studio is not a required part of the Decision Management Platform. FICO Application Studio: Rapid Application Development and Deployment Among the biggest historical challenges for end-to-end enterprise analytics deployment, which has slowed decision management adoption, are integrating, developing and deploying analyticspowered applications throughout a large organization. Many analytic developers have turned to a relatively nascent market to overcome application development and deployment challenges. FICO customers have had significant success in leveraging these tools. Fully integrating an application development solution into the FICO Analytic Cloud and Decision Management Platform was not only natural but also sensible. The FICO Application Studio provides the tools necessary to integrate and orchestrate the numerous analytic components needed to develop enterprise applications, create all the necessary UI components and ultimately deploy the applications directly to end users. As with all the other components, if customers have an existing or preferred application development solution, it can be integrated with other parts of the Decision Management solution and provide distinct value. The challenge with deploying applications today, however, doesn t stop with delivering utility to a computer or terminal desktop. Developers have to take into account the numerous possible communication channels when considering application development and deployment. Some users prefer mobile, some desktop, others web, Facebook or Twitter. This level of complexity often creates significant development challenges. One goal of application development integration in the Decision Management Platform solution stack is to minimize these challenges. The addition of the FICO Customer Communications Services (formerly known as Adeptra) as a complement to the FICO Application Studio will dramatically reduce time to deployment as well as enhance two-way interaction with mobile customers. By integrating the component-level orchestration along with the user interface development and adding specialized channel optimization and communications functionality, the Decision Management Platform enables dramatically easier and faster analytic application development and deployment. In initial trials, analytic-powered applications that used to take 10 months to design, develop, trial and deploy took less than 10 weeks. With pre-defined application and analytic process flow (using templates, blueprints or experienced analytic developers) applications can be developed even more quickly in as little as 10 days. This is why the Decision Management Platform includes an ever-growing number of quick-start templates Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 7

8 »»Extending the Value Through the FICO Analytic Cloud While much of this open, interoperable value has been clearly built into the Decision Management Platform and the platform solution stack, the FICO Analytic Cloud itself also has been purpose-built to foster openness, collaboration and ultimately best-of-breed interoperability. Two components in particular have significant value to enterprise customers in aligning and delivering open value: the FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace and the Community. The FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace The FAC Marketplace is at the heart of providing open, interoperable and integrated value. The Marketplace is open to any analytic vendor, reseller, services provider, developer or customer to post and sell analytic solutions. Whether the solutions are simply analytic packs, methodologies, services or complete end-to-end solutions, FICO will ensure interoperability and integratability with everything else sold or built in the Analytic Cloud. The goal is to provide a one-stop, best-of-breed marketplace for anything analytic. This means that the Marketplace will be open to FICO competitors, partners and customers. As customers build unique solutions on the Decision Management Platform, they will be encouraged to share or sell their solutions in the Marketplace. Analytic solution developers will be given FICO Analytic Cloud APIs to publish and leverage data, other analytic components and the underlying Decision Management Platform to create connections and fundamental interoperability between components. In this way customers can increasingly expect that all the heavy lifting integration and interoperability has been done for them. This will fundamentally improve time-todevelopment and time-to-market for analytic-powered solutions for all participants. The FICO Analytic Cloud Community A critical part of the FICO Analytic Cloud is the Analytic Community. This site will be open to anyone and will foster ongoing dialogue between all analytic interested organizations and people. As a central place to ask questions, share best practices, express opinions, and generally collect and distribute analytic information, the Community will also provide a good resource to discover and potentially recruit analytic talent. One of the biggest challenges facing companies looking to more tightly integrate analytics into business processes is the necessary analytic talent to develop and maintain the solutions. The Community can provide a good foundation for businesses looking to start, develop or refine analytics solutions and processes as well as to identify potential integrators, contractors, and other professionals to do the work. Over time, the Community site will house all the quick-start guides, blueprints and templates for creating analytic solutions. It will, in many ways, provide the first stop for any customer, developer or reseller into the FICO Analytic Cloud through a comprehensive index of solutions by industry and business size Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 8

9 »» Conclusion The Decision Management Platform and the FICO Analytic Cloud provide a complete end-to-end infrastructure ecosystem, including on-demand infrastructure, tools, applications, vertical solutions, community and marketplace for Analytics and Decision Management. From its initial introduction, the FICO Analytic Cloud will evolve into a one-stop solutions infrastructure to design, develop, deploy and distribute analytic-powered solutions. The FICO Analytic Cloud supports Big Data, analytics, Decision Management and industry solutions. While FICO s strengths lies in analytics and the development of decision management infrastructure, the goal of the Decision Management platform is to broaden analytic value by leveraging best-ofbreed technologies to provide an end-to-end analytics solution. While the Decision Management Platform provides all the capabilities that any analytic scientist or solutions developer may want or need, the platform has been built to be open and accessible to fit the needs and requirements of the broadest set of customers. These tools will provide enterprise value in: The ability to connect to and leverage Big Data. Faster time to insight and value. Lower costs and minimal barriers to entry. Tighter integration of technologies, components and tools. Lower risk and higher ROI for decision management. Connecting analytics and business strategies across organizations and industries. Creating analytically powered applications in the Decision Management Platform provides unique value for business customers, developers and other analytic solutions providers. For enterprise customers, the Decision Management Platform provides value that directly translates into end customer value. Enterprises can: Increase customer intimacy by leveraging and exploring Big Data. Proactively respond to customer driven events. Leverage multiple channels for an optimized customer dialogue. Have a single repository for analytics expertise, tools, technologies and best practice Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 9

10 about FICO FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading analytics software company, helping businesses in 80+ countries make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. The company s groundbreaking use of Big Data and mathematical algorithms to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire industries. FICO provides analytics software and tools used across multiple industries to manage risk, fight fraud, build more profitable customer relationships, optimize operations and meet strict government regulations. Many of our products reach industry-wide adoption such as the FICO Score, the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States. FICO solutions leverage open-source standards and cloud computing to maximize flexibility, speed deployment and reduce costs. The company also helps millions of people manage their personal credit health. Learn more at For more information North America toll-free International web (0) [email protected] FICO, Model Central, Blaze Advisor and Make every decision count are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 3050WP 01/14 PDF