SAP has made a series of updates to its InfiniteInsight predictive modeling software and Lumira data-visualization tool in a bid to shore up its foothold in the analytics market.
InfiniteInsight 7.0 adds the ability to use geospatial dimensions such as latitude and longitude within predictive models, according to Thursday's announcement. "This allows you to make the most of geographic data and provides you with much more information than simply using ZIP codes," SAP said in a recent blog post on the release.
Many companies use predictive modeling to take informed stabs at how customers will behave in the future, based on data sets that describe actions they took in the past. Support for geospatial data means an analyst could examine sequences of places customers visited, as well as segment customers based on their location, SAP said.
InfiniteInsight 7.0 also boosts the application's database support, adding coverage for Hadoop Hive 11 and 12, along with Greenplum.
The application is the result of SAP's acquisition of KXEN last year. InfiniteInsight is meant to be friendly for use by business analysts, versus highly specialized data scientists.
SAP also announced an updated version of Lumira on Thursday, with a key advancement being integration with BusinessObjects BI 4.1 SP4, the newest version of its flagship (business intelligence) suite.
Lumira is geared toward business users who want to easily generate visualizations of their data and create infographics. Now that it's tied in with BusinessObjects, they can tap many more data sources and in turn, IT administrators will have a governance framework for sharing information with Lumira users.
Lumira is SAP's answer to competing products such as Tableau, made by the fast-growing company of the same name.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com