Scala is a digital signage software maker that’s making a major push into the cloud and analytics, the two buzzwords that have been competing for the spotlight lately.  Its latest product is Advanced Analytics, a hosted app that the company plans on offering up to its retail customers in conjunction with the rest of its offerings. The end goal is to make what is already a very direct form of marketing even more targeted with the addition of insight gained from big data.

“Scala Advanced Analytics can digest millions of data records on sales, products, customer habits, trends, pricing changes, weather, time of day, day of week, season of the year and much more. Then, the application uses predictive analytics to determine the probability of what might happen next in a retail environment based on a retailer’s business rules and goals.”

Scala says that their solutions also features automated machine learning, in the form of the cloud’s app’s ability to “feedback loop” and essentially optimize itself for the specific business that’s using it over time. The product has a lot of advantage for this particular industry: retails leveraging analytics can better manage inventory based on customer purchasing trends, on top of actually boosting their marketing.

Some vendors, especially in the BI area, are focusing on integrating analytics and components such as Hadoop into their portfolio. On the other hand another portion is already working on refining their analytics offerings, and simplicity has been one particular emphasis we’ve seen come up a lot lately. The goal is to make the data more accessible to the business user and easier for the data scientist to understand–an objective Tableau and Attivio hope to accomplish with their new partnership as well.