A tier below the leaders, Forrester listed Tibco, Oracle, StatSoft and KXEN as strong performers with unique approaches. In general, the strong performers had lower architecture scores than the Leaders. Tibco's Spotfire advanced data visualization tool offers core support for the S+ and R programming languages, which makes it attractive to data scientists who know those languages, Forrester said. Oracle's solution centers on offering in-database R and the strength of its in-database analytics technology.
StatSoft has a comprehensive number of analysis algorithms and is very strong in manufacturing use cases. KXEN collapses the normal predictive analytics life cycle by automating the predictive model discovery process; it also offers strong social network analysis.
Coming in a tier below the strong providers are the contenders, which include Angoss, Revolution Analytics, and Salford Systems and have a narrower focus, Forrester said. Despite the narrower focus of these smaller vendors, customers have good reason to consider them, Forrester said.
"Angoss offers the best tooling for decision trees that we have seen and offers cloud solutions that firms can use to improve results quickly," the Forrester report said. "Revolution Analytics aims to be the de facto commercial provider of solutions based on the very popular open-source statistics programming language R; other vendors in this evaluation offer or plan to offer R-based solutions.
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"Salford Systems claims superior implementations of analysis algorithms, including CART, MARS, TreeNet and random forests; it has made a strong name for itself in particular among data scientists who have an interest in the algorithms that Salford supports," the Forrester report said.
The Forrester report also calls out Oracle to do better. "Oracle can do better than R," the report said. "Oracle's solution centers on in-database analytics capabilities and prepackaged solutions within its widely adopted enterprise RDBMS [relational database management system], applications, and Exadata appliance rather than predictive analytics tools that are database-agnostic."
