In a sure sign of things to come at the application level when it comes to applying predictive analytics, Teradata this week announced it has embedded that capability into its marketing applications delivered via the cloud.
The latest version of Teradata Customer Interaction Manager cloud service released this week includes predictive analytics capabilities that have been directly embedded inside the application. Rather than forcing users to exit the application environment to access analytics, Deb Woods, vice president of product marketing for customer interaction at Teradata, says the latest version of the Teradata marketing application provides access to advanced analytics directly within the context of the activity that an end user is trying to manage.
While there will obviously be demand for stand-alone analytics applications that are dedicated to more complex usage scenarios, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that most end users are going to be exposed to the benefits of predictive analytics within the context of an application. It’s even unlikely that most of them will appreciate the fact that the functionality they are taking advantage of represents an instance of advanced analytics; it will be just one of the more useful features of the application as a whole.
Of course, it will be a whole lot easier to deliver that kind of functionality through a centrally controlled cloud application than an alternative approach based on a set of applications that would have to be deployed on premise.
In fact, the rise of analytics as a feature within a cloud application may soon wind up being one of the primary reasons that, at the end of the day, more IT organizations will find themselves managing more applications that run inside the cloud than out.