Dell Statistica Update Expands Advanced Analytics Access

Dell has just launched a major overhaul of Statistica, the company’s advanced analytics platform, updating the user interface, making the platform easier for a wider range of users, expanding in-database analytics to systems including Apache Hive, and adding edge analytics. Fresh off updates that won it promotion to the Leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Advanced Analytics Magic Quadrant, Dell is issuing another update to the Statistica platform. The two most recent updates address something that’s been an issue for advanced analytics and big data analytics in general: making the systems accessible to users beyond the data scientists and statisticians.

Dell’s latest updates to Statistica are focused on making the platform easier for other kinds of users, including business analysts, line of business experts, and “citizen data scientists.” That’s according to Shawn Rogers, chief research officer at the Information Management Group at Dell, who spoke to InformationWeek in an interview during the recent Strata + Hadoop World event in San Jose, Calif.

Dell Statistica marks Dell’s continued investment in improving the platform since the company acquired StatSoft in 2014. Rogers said the 13.0 release of the software was all about an overhaul of the user interface to make it easier to consume. It also included in-database analytics and Hadoop-native operations. Version 13.1, adds all the other features that were pushed off so the company could focus on the UI. The new features include simplified pricing and packaging, collective intelligence, network analytics, collective analytics, and analytics at the edge.

Put both of these updates together and they add up to a major overhaul and modernization of the software, who can use it, and what they can do with it. Rogers said Dell sorted its Statistica users into four different personas: experts/managers/executives; data scientists and statisticians (“the difference is what side of 30 they are on”); manufacturing and industrial engineers; and citizen data scientists or line-of-business experts. The updates to Statistica are designed to provide a way for all of these users to interact with the data to get the information they need.