The new Hitachi Unified Compute Platform 6000 for Predictive Analytics integrates SAP Predictive Analytics software, and while aimed mainly at telcos and media service providers, may have a broader audience than that.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) has announced the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 6000 for Predictive Analytics, a new model of the UCP Platform which uses SAP Predictive Analytics software to create a solution designed to predict and combat customer churn.

“This model of the UCP includes both SAP HANA and the SAP Predictive Analytics Module, and hand-in-hand they work to create predictive customer churn analysis,” said ‎Paul Lewis, CTO at Hitachi Data Systems Canada. “It’s very big for telco and media service providers in particular, to predict the likely movement of customers.” The idea is that this gives the customer the ability to take measures – like targeted retention offers – to improve the customer satisfaction and loyalty of the potential defectors, and retain their business.

While the highly scalable Hitachi UCP 6000 platform handles the large volumes of data from the hardware side, the SAP Predictive Analytics software automatically handles the wide dataset and improves both the efficiency and effectiveness of predictive modeling.

“The predictive analytics itself is a series of machine learning algorithms, and these customers, telcos, are receivers of churn,” Lewis said. “It can see the customers leave other telcos when they come to that one, can look at all the historical data and determine what the inflows and outflows are. This is the real value of predictive analytics, to be able to determine in real time will be the best fit for that particular client to retain their customers.”

The press release announcing the solution is specifically targeted at telcos and media service providers, and that makes sense given that they have large customer subscription lists, but Lewis suggested that the market opportunity may be broader than that.

“The press release focuses on telcos and media companies because we announced this at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and MWC is focused on telcos and media companies,” he said. “It is, however, certainly applicable to anyone who uses SAP Predictive Analytics. Those would be larger clients. A lot in other areas, particularly in retail and manufacturing would likely also find this to be of interest.”

“The need for predictive analytics in the Canadian market is just as strong as in the U.S.,” said Peter Kriparos, Head, Canadian Strategic Alliances, at HDS Canada. “There might be a broader appreciation in Canada to go into other sectors, like oil and gas, and mining, where Canada is especially focused.”

HDS channel partners that sell into the telco space would clearly be interested in this, Kripanos stressed.

“Many of these partners are themselves moving from being a reseller to a service provider or an integrator,” he said. “They are now less focused on hardware and the engine and more focused on closing the gap with the vertical customer and applying more toolsets for that. These are best-of-breed partners building integration capabilities, including integrators, ISVs, consultants and telcos who want an as-a-service offering. How we define channel today is really becoming more about XSP, and less how they procure and the whole supply chain.”

Hitachi UCP 6000 for Predictive Analytics is available now.