Michael Zeller: Interesting news, Steve. IBM certainly has the most visible marketing campaign, but there are many innovative companies that push the envelope in analytics. We are just at the beginning of a tidal wave in advanced analytics, where statistical, data-driven decision models will allow us to optimize existing business processes as well as automate new processes with more intelligent, complex decisions. On the technical side, open standards like the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML – www.dmg.org) will foster model exchange among various vendors and applications, while the advent of cloud computing will lower the cost to deploy and execute predictive models in real-time and on-demand. Exciting times for analytic scientists and business leaders!  Nov. 17, 2009, 1:21pm