UPDATED 10:58 EDT / OCTOBER 02 2012

Opera Makes Pact to Run Big Data Analytics on Oracle

At Oracle OpenWorld 2012, October 1, Opera Solutions announced a deal to allow its unique Big Data analytics to run on Oracle. Similar to its previously announced deal with SAP, this basically means that Oracle users who subscribe to the Opera Big Data analytics service will be able to integrate that with their Exalytics installations and integrate their internal data into Opera’s Big Data analytics.

Opera is unique in that has a large number of pre-developed analytics that search huge amounts of data, mostly from public Web sources, to discover signals that relate to any of a large number of specific business questions in near real-time. These analytics are developed and run by its staff of 230 data scientists, who can customize both data feeds and the analytics, or develop entirely new analytics, to meet the needs of each client.

They provide very specific information to complex business questions. These include, “Which of our credit card holders are about to commit fraud,” for the major credit card companies; or “Which of our subscribers are falling off our program and likely to end their subscriptions” for online weight loss, dating, and similar Web-based personal services. In many cases these analytics go beyond identifying specific individuals to recommend specific actions – in the second case, for instance, the analytics will identify individuals to call and provide a custom script for each with the three or four things the caller should discuss with the customer and the specific deal that should be offered to retain the customer.

It can provide very specific recommendations on what a CEO should do to increase top-line income or bottom-line savings for his company based on analysis of huge amounts of marketing data, including what competitors and customers are doing.

The reason it can do this with great accuracy is that it is analyzing tremendous amounts of data. “A company has 5% of the data,” said Shawn Blevins, Opera’s EVP and General Manager, on SiliconAngle.tv from the Cube at Oracle OpenWorld. “It has no knowledge of what it’s customers are doing in the 23 hours a day they don’t interact with it.” By combining the huge amounts of data available on the Internet with the user’s internal data, Opera can develop a 360° view of the customer, whether that is an individual subscribing to a diet service or a client company of a B2B supplier. It can look at those customers individually to anticipate their needs or concerns or in aggregate to help Opera’s client develop new products and services for them, or as part of the larger market to help Opera’s client strengthen its overall business strategy in ways designed to achieve major success.

It also can analyze the internal operational data of a large company to identify places where it can save money, for instance by eliminating waste, negotiating better contracts with major suppliers, or taking discounts or rebates that are available to it.

Because Opera is a Platform-as-a-Service company, all of this runs on its computers and only the results are delivered to the clients. Therefore, it’s clients do not have to invest in building and running a Big Data infrastructure. And because these analytics are developed, pre-loaded, and massaged by its large staff of data scientists, getting results takes a fraction of the time of a consulting project to build a custom analytics platform. A typical client, Blevins said, can expect to get valuable results from its analysis in 8-12 weeks. In a typical case, it took Opera 55 work days from start to finish to create an analytical engine customized for a large airline.

Opera customers pay an upfront licensing fee and then a monthly subscription fee. The Oracle agreement means that Oracle users will be able to integrate the Opera front-end with their Oracle systems, making it faster and easier to upload their data to Opera and receive the results of its analysis as an integrated part of its Oracle system.

“Our value is the ability to rapidly find and extract the signal from all the data sources out there,” Blevins said. “If you want to increase your market share, for instance, we can analyze these huge amounts of real-time data to identify specific actions you can take to get the result you want with a 98% probability of success.”

The Cube will be webcasting live from Oracle OpenWorld with Wikibon’s David Vellante, SiliconAngle’s John Furrier, and other Wikibon analysts interviewing the movers and shakers of the Big Data movement over SiliconAngle.tv through Wednesday, October 3. Recordings of the interviews can be seen at on the SiliconAngle channel on YouTube.


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