Analytics or Intelligence?

During a presentation at SAS Global Forum, a statement from Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS, has made several posts were written about the same issue.

Jim Davis said: “Business intelligence is an over-used term that has had its day, and business analytics is now the differentiator that will allow customers to better forecast the future especially in this current economic climate.” and also said: "I don't believe (business intelligence is) where the future is, the future is in business analytics."


James Taylor commented in a post entitled Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?: "This distinction between Business Intelligence (what everyone else does) and Business Analytics (what SAS does) struck me as a distinction without a difference.", and finished with: "I guess I just don't see the difference between BI and BA..."

Peter Thomas, in a post called Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence, made a good analysis on what Jim said. "Maybe the marketing terms business intelligence and business analytics (together with Enterprise Performance Management, Executive Information Systems and Decision Support Systems) should be consigned to the scrap heap and replaced by the simpler Management Information", Peter said.

Neil Raden was there at the forum, and wrote a good post: From 'BI' to 'Business Analytics,' It's All Fluff, where he said: "SAS as a company makes most of its money on its classic product that is almost completely complementary to BI.SAS has vastly expanded its product line over the years to include all sorts of BI tools such as performance management, OLAP, visualization and data integration, but judging by the attendees I met there, most of them are involved with the flagship product that crunches datasets, performs statistical, stochastic, data mining and predictive modeling." He also said: "My guess is that SAS wanted to craft a message that rained on the BI vendors that lack the experience and loyal customer base in analytics."

Neil Raden summarized with: "Bottom line, it's all fluff."

I agree with them. In my opinion, this is pure marketing. SAS is taking advantage of analytics as buzzword, to say that their products are better than the other BI vendors.