Dear Visitor,
After a long and productive summer we come back to you with many exciting news: we have new products (including a free one…), libraries and solutions to offer. We also report about the great synergies resulting from integrating our analytic platform with SAP HANA™ in close cooperation with SAP™. From “small data” to “Big Data” – you can now do it all with ANKHOR FlowSheet.
Releasing ANKHOR FlowSheet 1.1 and the free Community Edition
Today we can proudly announce the availability of the latest official release of our unique visual In-Memory Data Analytics/Processing tool and platform. ANKHOR FlowSheet’s In-Memory processing engine has been significantly improved, making it one of the fastest data mining products on the market. The improved graphical, dataflow based construction principle provides the highest degree of flexibility for the efficient design of analytic processes and solutions. New libraries now offer a large variety of algorithms for Advanced Analytics supporting prediction and simulation, making ANKHOR perfectly suited for Next-Gen Business Analytics applications.
The best of all, however, is the availability of the new ANKHOR FlowSheet Community Edition that replaces the previous “Home Edition”. It is free for non-commercial use so everyone can now get to know the power of visual interactive data mining and analysis in real time for an unlimited period. Check out the features in comparison with the commercial versions in our Online Shop. You can download it there and start using it immediately after requesting a free license key for activation.
Some of the many new features included in ANKHOR FlowSheet 1.1:
- All editions now available as 64 bit versions
- New libraries for OLAP and Advanced Analytics including Bayes Nets, Neural Nets, Cluster Analysis (k-Means), Decision Trees, Linear Regression
- Extended capabilities for data import, export and preparation (ETL)
- Simplified Wizard-based construction of Dashboards
- Much improved documentation and support facilities
At the same time we also introduce ANKHOR FlowSheet Workstation that makes optimal use of powerful hardware to tackle problems demanding big resources. It also extends the feature set of the existing Professional edition by remote collaboration and sharing of FlowSheets over the network. It supports the creation of stand-alone solutions that can be deployed with the ANKHOR FlowSheet Player, our favorably priced runtime for distribution and stand-alone execution of FlowSheet based solutions. The Web Application Server contained in the ANKHOR FlowSheet Enterprise edition enables the deployment of analytical workflows as Web Services (JSON, XML based) and interactive dashboard solutions accessible from browsers and mobile devices (direct HTML/JavaScript output).
“R”- and Python-Plugins Available Soon
Experienced data analysts will like to hear that we are working on plug-in adapters enabling the integration of scripts written in “R” and “Python” into the dataflow graphs. This allows tapping into the huge number of algorithms created by the R and Python communities and complementing them with ANKHOR FlowSheet’s enhanced data import and visualization capabilities. You can use ANKHOR FlowSheet to much more efficiently design ETL processes preparing the data for the consumption by R or Python based analyses. The results of the R/Python algorithms can then be visualized in interactive dashboards that are quick to design and adapt thanks to ANKHOR FlowSheet’s graphical work environment. The release of the plug-ins is planned for November 2012.
Support for Advanced Business Analytics Applications
ANKHOR FlowSheet offers many libraries out-of-the box covering a wide range of applications. In addition, ANKHOR separately offers dedicated libraries for the fast deployment of business applications based on advanced analytic algorithms including predictive and artificial intelligence methods. These allow the very efficient implementation of powerful analytic solutions, giving your business a head start. Together with the consultants of our partner network, we can offer you the cost-effective development of turn-key solutions based on these libraries that are tailored to your needs. Please contact us at info@ankhor.com to find out how we can help you get ahead of the competition with our libraries, solutions and services. Our current focus is on the following areas, for which we created dedicated solutions and libraries providing the required “toolboxes”:
- Customer Analytics in retail (basket analysis, cross-/upselling, next best offer, recommendations, customer retention, customer value detection, customer segmentation etc.)
- Fraud detection and prevention (text mining, pattern recognition, social analysis, process surveillance, auditing)
- Media and games (improvement of ad targeting, player behavior in multiplayer games, real time promotions, fraud detection)
- Business process analysis and improvement (Process Mining, decision support)
- Energy (virtual power plants, smart grids, smart meters)
- Data quality (connectivity, fast and flexible creation and adaptation of ETL processes)
- Asset management and optimization of real estate value
- Big Data problems on structured and unstructured dataDue to its flexibility, the ANKHOR FlowSheet platform is also well suited for many other problems.
ANKHOR FlowSheet and SAP HANA™
A complete In-Memory Computing Platform for Big Data
ANKHOR has been a pioneer of In-Memory analytic computing since its inception in 2006. From day one, ANKHOR FlowSheet was designed to store the data in compressed columns in main memory to exploit the SIMD processing capabilities of modern multi-core CPUs to their fullest. When SAP™ released their In-Memory data base HANA™ in 2010 we immediately recognized the synergies of combining HANA™’s Big Data In-Memory processing capabilities with the flexible graphical design methodology of ANKHOR FlowSheet, which provides an ideal front end for real-time interactive data analysis on huge amounts of data. Since 2011, ANKHOR has been cooperating with SAP™ to integrate the FlowSheet platform with SAP HANA™. As a result, all of HANA™’s analytical capabilities (including the Predictive Analytics Library (PAL) and Business Function Library (BFL)) can be transparently used in ANKHOR FlowSheet’s graphical development environment, enabling the fastest way to model and deploy analytical processes with SAP HANA™. It allows ANKHOR to offer arbitrary scalability of advanced analytic solutions built with ANKHOR FlowSheet when required (of course ANKHOR FlowSheet continues to work as a stand-alone product for problems not requiring the data storage and processing capabilities of SAP HANA™).
The value of combining the two products has also been recognized by SAP™: In May 2012, ANKHOR was chosen as the first German participant to join the SAP Startup Focus Program. This program supports companies building solutions that exploit the full potential of HANA™ with new types of business applications. The goal is to provide competitive advantages to businesses with solutions applying advanced analytic algorithms (e.g. prediction, association analysis) to the ever growing amounts of data. At this time, the unique combination of ANKHOR FlowSheet with SAP HANA™ is the only complete In-Memory Computing platform according to the definition by Gartner.
Watch this video and visit a blog by our CEO, Dr. Ulrich Sigmund, on SAP's Experience SAP HANA Web Site to learn more about the possibilities of ANKHOR FlowSheet together with SAP HANA™. Contact us at info@ankhor.com if you are already using SAP HANA™ or plan to evaluate and learn about the benefits it can bring to your business. We are there to help you: our platform supports the quick and efficient evaluation of possible solutions built on HANA™ (see above regarding the focus of our current solution offering).
Deployment of ANKHOR FlowSheet solutions with SAP HANA™:
