Cloud Computing: Alpine Makes Big Data Predictive Analytics Collaborative
March 2, 2012
According to Alpine Data Labs, the two-year-old Big Data start-up incubated inside Greenplum, all that stuff bulging out of your storage is useless. Unless it’s susceptible to predictive analytics, but finding those nuggets of insight can be a pretty pricey exercise.
Alpine set out to take the sticker shock out of the equation with its initial product, Alpine Miner, which simplifies the process of building predictive models for massive datasets without using a single line of code…
It’s supposed to be fast and intuitive, streamlining and enhancing data scoring and fully capturing organizational knowledge basically on the cheap. It works in the enterprise data cloud or in the data warehouse to make sure you’re using everything and are therefore accurate. Fancy that.
The widgetry was advertised as the first predictive modeling solution for Big Data.
Having got that out the door, Alpine has now progressed to the next step – Illuminator, a web-based collaboration framework built on Miner that turns Big Data analytics into a collaborative, iterative process so entire organizations can work on pressing business challenges in a single place.
It’s also said to be the first of its kind.
Everybody gets to put their two cents in, including expertise that mightn’t have been solicited before or rubbed shoulders before like IT, data scientists and business users. Since it’s in one place Alpine imagines a fluid active exchange of ideas throughout the predictive analytics development process, not the usual stagnant process.
Alpine’s chief product officer Steven Hillion says, "A collaborative, web-based approach is taken for granted in modern business intelligence and reporting applications, but until now, there has been no way to extend this functionality to something as complex as the predictive analytics workflow."
He figures predictive models need to be deployed, shared and collaboratively developed to ensure the highest return on the effort and the biggest value back to the company.
Illuminator offers the tools to track the development of predictive models over time. A lucky thing since predicative models change as the business changes.
There’s version control, model history, auditing, a scheduling engine and e-mail alerts. It also lets users run predictive analytics directly from the browser without any additional installation, so anybody on the team can run churn models, analyze fraud, forecast sales trends and create new customer segments.
There’s also supposed to be easy access to all historical results, including charts, tables, model details and model scores. Workflows can be shared and immediately executed on any dataset without moving data around or deploying code.
Per-user licenses with named users start at $7,500.