Cognos and SPSS Partner on Predictive AnalyticsCognos and SPSS Partner on Predictive Analytics

Cognos, an IBM company, announced yesterday that it will partner with SPSS to bring predictive analytics capabilities to joint customers in retail, financial services, insurance and other industries. The deal fills an important gap in Cognos' portfolio, and it follows closely on the heels of a parallel arrangement, announced in December, between Business Objects and SPSS.

The Cognos-SPSS partnership is a joint marketing deal under which both companies will promote existing integrations between SPSS Clementine and Cognos 8 while also adding Cognos-compatible blueprints for predictive applications.

"We're building joint assets with SPSS that will include the predictive models as well as the BI and performance management around these solutions," explains Jennifer Francis, vice president of market development at Cognos.

Consumer product placement, campaign management, and financial and insurance risk management are the starting point for the partnership, but blueprints are envisioned for other applications as well, says Francis. For instance, joint customers are already doing customer churn analysis, she says. The predictive modeling churn analysis is done in SPSS Clementine while the scoring is then handled by Cognos 8 Reporting.

The joint marketing approach leaves Cognos free to add blueprints from other partners or, more likely, from within IBM. When it finalized its acquisition of Cognos in February, IBM announced it would bring its own analytics capabilities — including predictive analytics — to the Cognos suite.

"We have applications in supply chain optimization, work force management and other areas that could be deployed within six months, but it depending on Cognos' priorities," said Brenda Dietrich, vice president of Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences at IBM.

Under the Business Object-SPSS OEM deal, SPSS Clementine software is to be rebranded, sold and supported directly by Business Objects, which signals a deeper commitment to rely on SPSS for statistical and predictive analytics capabilities.

The loser in all these deals seems to be SAS, which was quite vocal, during last year's BI consolidation spree, in pointing out that Cognos and Business Objects lacked predictive analytics capabilities. Now SPSS, a SAS analytics rival that doesn't compete in the reporting and analysis space, is benefitting from the considerable market penetration and marketing muscle of the top-two vendors in business intelligence.