When I was working in Presales at Oracle, doing penance by trying to sell Oracle Applications, I got my butt constantly whopped by Peoplesoft.

Why?

Sex Sells!

Yes they had a few features we didn’t (date effective GL hierarchies were a killer), but we had “the stack”, scalability, and a raft of features they didn’t.

Is that why they won? No the won because their product looked damn sexy! As I have mentioned Gartner have  released a new Advanced Analytics Magic Quadrant, with 4 vendors in the leaders quadrant.

2014-Magic-Quadrant-for-Advanced-Analytics-Platforms

So I wonder how sexy they look?

SAS Enterprise Miner | IBM SPSS Modeller

AdvancedAnalytics

RapidMiner | Knime