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Permalink Reply by Fadi Micaelian on June 9, 2012 at 10:14am

If you look at the field of Analytics, there are three main threads:
1. You collect data, massage it, cleanse it, store it and manage it: Datawarehouse, Pivotal Transformation, ETL, Large Database Management Systems, Storage, Virtualization, Big Data, etc...
2. You summarize the vast amount of data and try to make sense out of it: Reports, Dashboard, Statistical Analysis and other Bayesian techniques, etc...
3. You make a decision: Decision Trees, Pro-Con Analysis, Rule Based Systems, Neural Networks, Tradeoff based Decisions etc...

Looking at the spectrum this way,something jumps out: if you map the companies and where they have invested in the past 3 decades,
in 1) you see a multitude of large companies including Oracle, Teradate, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, EMC, etc...We're talking about the "big guns"
in 2) you find SAS, Hyperion -now Oracle-, Business Object -now SAP-, Cognos and SPSS -now IBM-, even Google jumped in this field, etc...
I think you see the trend... ;)
in 3) You'd be hard pressed to list decent sized companies. Yet, the single reason why you are conducting the entire effort, is to make decisions...
Also it is key to note that 3) the decision, requires 1) & 2)

As a result, it becomes pretty clear that in the next decade I can see part of the R&D spend shifting from 1) and 2) to 3). What I am saying is that there will be a focus on the decision. I predict we will see a move that will put Decision in Decision Support Systems.

if I focus on decisions, the most promising area is the Tradeoff based decisions. This is how humans make decisions. Tradeoff based decisions incorporate require Big Data, Reporting, Stastics, as well as Knowledge Based systems ... as these other fields further evolve, the field of Tradeoff Based decision becomes ripe for prime time.