Business intelligence kingpin SAP launched Precision Retailing  on Tuesday, a solution that offers customers an Amazon-like experience at the point-of-sale with item recommendations and custom suggestions.   The software is joined by a new app, the Retail Store Ops Manager, which was also unveiled at this week’s SAP Retail Forum North America.

“Today’s companies want to become more customer-centric, they want to gain insight about each consumer’s behaviors and proclivities based on the volumes of rich data before, during and after each shopping activity,” said Greg Girard, program director, merchandise strategies, IDC. “Businesses that are able to do this and deliver personalized and contextualized offers in real time will delight the consumer with increased value and, at the same time, be able to shape profitable demand.”

Precision Retailing is built on top of SAP’s NetWeaver web service platform, and the data analytics part is carried out in HANA. This combo of cloud and big data has a very strong value prop: SAP says that client organizations have realized increases of up to 20 percent in promotional conversion rates, 15 percent increase in average basket sizes and a 10 percent boost to revenue from recommended items.

Precision Retailing is not just for kiosks. Societe de Transport de Montreal, the largest public transit company in Quebec, is using the platform to increase overall quality of service.

Consumer-facing firms and other enterprises that are out to gain a business edge over their peers are becoming bullish about analytics, and so are the big name IT vendors that list them as clients.

Just like SAP, Big Blue is also stepping up its big data strategy. Word was leaked that IBM plans to debut a new PureSystem appliance specifically designed for analytical workloads later this month.