Oracle bolsters BI with Sigma Dynamics buy

Oracle's newly-acquired "guided decision making" software will assist in call-centres and other niches

Oracle has continued its push into the business intelligence market this week after shelling out an undisclosed sum to acquire the intellectual property assets of analytics software start up Sigma Dynamics.

The company said Sigma Dynamics specialises in predictive analytics or guided decision making software that analyses firms' historical and real time data and uses it to recommend the best course of future action. Predictive analytics software is already well established in a number of niches, including managing which promotions to offer certain customers, routing calls to the right call centre agent and detecting fraud.

Oracle said it would continue to sell Sigma Dynamics tools as standalone products, but will also integrate the technology with its existing business applications and Fusion Middleware platform. The company added that Sigma Dynamics' functionality is already tightly integrated into its acquired Siebel Real-Time Decisions product for aiding CRM decisions based on individual customer needs.

Paul Rodwick, Oracle's vice president of product management, said in a statement that the combination of Oracle and Sigma Dynamics functionality would help firms optimise business processes and increase the profitability of each customer interaction. "The combined solution integrates with CRM, ERP and legacy systems to allow organisations to continuously adapt business processes and to leverage real-time learning to deliver the next best action for each customer, resulting in increased cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, customer retention, and customer satisfaction," he argued.

Alys Woodward of analyst Ovum said that there is growing demand for guided decision making, particularly in call centre environments where it is being used to immediately notify agents of good up-sell opportunities.

"BI aims to help you make decisions, but giving someone an OLAP cube and saying make a decision doesn’t work in a lot of cases," Woodward said. "People want more automation and this type of software helps close the loop between making the decision and taking the resultant action."