IDG Online (http://www.idg.com.sg)
December 18, 2000

This data mining product was so hot, that Bill Gates and his Chief Technical Officer stopped by to view it at COMDEX in 2000.

Made by Singapore-based Cygron, DataScope is a professional data mining and decision support tool. It helps companies extract knowledge hidden in data, understand relationships and support effective decision making through special visualisation techniques.

Looking at a particular set of data, for example, an employee in a bank could identify the most profitable customers, who can then become targets for direct promotions and other revenue-enhancing activities. Supply chain managers could analyse inventory flow and spot bottlenecks, reducing costs and upping decision times.

DataScope’s is a simple philosophy: that the human mind perceives patterns better visually than in any other media. Web-ready, the suite comes in four modules, which can act as a stand alone application or integrate with most industry standard data mining processors. The Explorer lets companies combine database graphics with clustering, relationship finding, data transformation and decision modelling tools.

The Predictor lets users “model” customer behaviour, for instance, whether or not the bank’s customers will make repeat transactions if a particular promotion is launched. The Scheduler and Datamap update the relational databases upon which DataScope sits, and enable data specialists to construct data schemes.

The emerging field of business intelligence applications is becoming an enormous market. Researchers IDC predict that the demand worldwide for analytic application software should grow from US $1.9 billion two years ago to US $5.2 billion in 2003.

Cygron Chief Executive Roger Wolf estimates that, for the company at least, 45 per cent of that growth should be driven by demand from its Asian clients.

Clearing initial hurdles to business intelligence, such as helping companies recognise data mining as being an integral need, have been done, observes Wolf. “The practice and need for proper business intelligence has become accepted,” he says. “What is lacking is an easy way to do it.” An issue which the company hopes to deal with in the coming year, with refinements and improvements, including more powerful visualisation tools scheduled for rollout by the middle of this year, as well as enhancing its compatibility with higher end data management and ERP systems such as Siebel’s.