WALLDORF, Germany, Nov. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the general availability of SAP® Predictive Analysis software. This advanced analysis solution helps organizations gain a competitive edge by uncovering and predicting trends in their business. SAP Predictive Analysis can be deployed stand-alone or with other SAP software, including the SAP HANA® platform, to unleash powerful predictive capabilities.

"We have been using business intelligence solutions from SAP to analyze our business and the adoption of SAP HANA has brought tangible benefits," said Luca Baccarini, chief information officer, CIR Food. "We now need to predict, more accurately, the fluctuation of demand and the habits of clients to optimize sales cycles and employee allocation on different tasks. For this reason we chose SAP Predictive Analysis, which will allow us to reach these targets in a simple and integrated way. We expect the combination of predictive analysis tools and SAP HANA will improve the decision process and will allow us to better serve our clients."

SAP Predictive Analysis provides:

• An intuitive, easy-to-use environment for designing predictive models
• The ability to acquire and manipulate data as well as visualize results with embedded SAP® Visual Intelligence software. 
• Accelerated predictive analytics, expanded data scope and improved model scoring by leveraging the embedded predictive analysis library in SAP HANA
• Interoperability of R with SAP HANA to open up all the statistical functions available in one of the world's most popular open source projects  

With SAP Predictive Analysis, data analysts can intuitively design complex predictive models for activities. These activities include forecasting demand or product sales; identifying key influencing factors for sales opportunities or purchasing behavior; uncovering impactful trends; understanding business and data correlations; and spotting anomalies. These capabilities are of value to all data-intensive functions such as sales, marketing, risk, governance and security.

Cognilytics is a leader in helping companies monetize data as a strategic asset through solutions built by its strong team of statisticians and machine learning experts. The company will work with SAP to help drive further innovation.

"We are excited to be on the leading edge of SAP's launch into predictive analysis," said Gary Gauba, chairman and CEO, Cognilytics. "With predictive analysis, organizations can take the logical next step from business intelligence to predicting behaviors in their business and customers in order to take actions on these insights."

SOURCE SAP AG

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