Big Data analysis tools: STATISTICA, KNIME, Rapid Miner, Salford Systems top rated; R on the rise

Rexer Analytics just released results of its 5th annual Analytics Data Miner Survey. For those interested in tools to gain insight from the Big Data explosion, this report is a must read. It’s a comprehensive survey of 1,319 data miners from over 60 countries.

A few highlights I’d like to share from the report.

• Data mining / analytics can be used for a wide variety of problems in the enterprise. But for the past 5 years running the study had found CRM/Marketing as the top field. Data miners said that “improving the understanding of customers” and “retaining customers” were popular goals.
• Text mining is on the rise. About 1/3 of data miners currently use text mining and another third plan to do so in the future. Key applications include customer survey analysis (verbatims) and making sense of the Social Web.
• Based on this chart below, you can see that STATISTICA, KNIME, Rapid Miner and Salford Systems received the highest marks in overall satisfaction. I was somewhat surprised that IBM (SPSS) and SAS didn’t score better. You can see a noticeable gap in the top 4 in top box (extremely satisfied) vs. the rest.

  
  

• R (the open source tool) usage is ramping up dramatically. Over the past 5 years R usage has more than doubled to 47%. According to the report:
  

  R users report preferring it for being free, open source, and having a wide variety of algorithms. Many people also cited R’s flexibility and the strength of the user community.

  
  

• Finally, companies with more “sophisticated” analytics capabilities perform better than peers. Thankfully, the study notes that this is self-report data and correlation analysis. As we all know (right?), correlation doesn’t imply causation. There are lots of factors in company performance; analytics prowess is just one.

There’s lots more in the 37-page report. Learn more here or request your free copy by emailing [email protected].