ACADEMIA

SPSS, a leading worldwide provider of predictive analytics software, today unveiled a significantly enhanced version of its flagship statistical software package, SPSS 14.0, to further extend the reach and power of predictive analytics. Organizations worldwide now recognize that statistical and predictive technologies are key corporate assets. To fully harness these technologies, organizations must shift them away from isolated desktop environments to enterprise-level, open and integrated systems. SPSS 14.0 will facilitate and accelerate this process with full data management and enhanced reporting capabilities, easy data validation, easier and more powerful forecasting, extended programming and expanded structural equation modeling options. “SPSS statistics software has grown into an enterprise-class, server-based tool,” said SPSS President and CEO Jack Noonan. “The new SPSS platform allows analytic developers to integrate their algorithms with the SPSS system and also gives applications developers the ability to easily add predictive analytics to their applications.” Customers and Industry Analysts Praise SPSS 14.0 “The new functionality in SPSS 14.0 is excellent,” said the Vice President of Aon Consulting, Inc., Ray Levesque. “SPSS has opened up the product by improving the power and by making the SPSS line a powerful platform for developing important programs and applications.” “With the release of version 14, SPSS is clearly moving into the enterprise space. The algorithms added to SPSS 14.0 will enable organizations to deal with large amounts of data that are common in today’s enterprises,” said IDC’s Research Director Dan Vesset. “The opening up of SPSS to third party programming languages will further help extend the reach of SPSS into the enterprise.” “ The release of SPSS 14 is a significant step for the company that will benefit existing customers and help attract new ones" said Mike Schiff, Vice President, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Current Analysis Inc. "While still maintaining its strong desktop position, the company continues to evolve its core statistical software to meet the expanding needs of the enterprise." “SPSS 14.0 is an exciting new release of SPSS. SPSS 14.0 will be of great value to existing customers, while opening up SPSS to different types of users,” said Dr. Howard Barkan, Research Methodologist and Biostatistician, Kaiser-Permanente. “For example, existing customers will save significant time with the new data-management capabilities; while enterprise-class organizations will be able to use the increased time series forecasting to improve their modeling and predictions, and the improved programmability to create programs and target the situations in which they are conducted,” he added. “All of these modifications will improve the users' ability to run their organizations." Overview of SPSS 14.0’s Capabilities: More powerful data management in SPSS 14.0 provides a number of new features to save time, work with new file types, increase accuracy and reliability—and better manage data. Users can now open multiple datasets within a single SPSS session, read/write Stata® files, import data from SPSS’ Dimensions, and more. Enhanced reporting capabilities revolutionize the way users create graphics in SPSS, and even enable the creation of custom charts. The new Chart Builder interface enables users to drag thumb-nail sized pictures of chart and element types to a canvas to preview—and create—charts. The Graphics Programming Language (GPL) allows the creation and saving of any chart imaginable. A new add-on module enables easily validation of data. The SPSS Data Validation add-on module streamlines the data validation process, eliminates labor-intensive manual checks—and reaches more accurate conclusions. Easier and more powerful forecasting with improvements to SPSS Trends. Users can save time by automatically determining which model best fits their time-series and independent variables. Users can also forecast hundreds of time-series models at once rather than one series at a time. A new programmability extension enables third party programming languages to control the flow of syntax jobs based on variable attributes, procedure output, and error codes. Extended structural equation modeling options. With Amos 6.0, users can reliably fit structural equation and related models to smaller samples. They can also impute data using one of three methods now available in this software. SPSS Server 14.0 enhanced for multiple simultaneous users and large data. New administration functionality allows for more efficient use of resources available from overall network traffic to individual user prioritization. New functionality is included to increase productivity when utilizing large datasets and expand the set of predictive analytics available to the analyst. Naïve Bayes and Feature Selection are new in SPSS Server 14 and allow analysts to reduce large amounts of information down to smaller and more precise subsets for more exacting creation of predictive models. For more information on SPSS 14.0, please visit: its Web site.