Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

“Predictive analytics can be applied almost everywhere,” he told me in Orlando. “Whether it’s in manufacturing, the political environment, the military, healthcare – the applications are practically endless, and they can be executed in real time.”

In his 15 years at the SPSS helm, Noonan has seen the company's revenues multiply by nearly ten … and, he says, “the industry still has lots of maturing to realize yet.”

The sheer amount of data being collected – and, more importantly, analyzed and used – will just continue to grow, he says. “By 2010,” he asserts, “the world’s data will double every few hours.”

Good news for SPSS, perhaps, but is it potentially troubling news for people who hear “Identity theft” alarms going off? Noonan doesn’t think so.

“As any technology evolves, legislation is put into place,” he says. “When the automotive industry started out, it quickly became obvious that we needed things like the stop sign and speed limits. The same holds true for manufacturing, the Internet, and in this area.”

Looking globally, Noonan says the U.S. still lags behind Western Europe in the important field of finance, especially banking and insurance, thanks in part to those legislative regulations. “We’ve been slower to adopt technology here than elsewhere,” he says, adding that in the Pacific Rim, Japan is unsurprisingly taking the lead, even utilizing PA in some fitness centers.

“In Eastern Europe,” he notes, “the economies are growing, but they’re still in the early adoption stage” of PA, while throughout Latin America, where economies are generally struggling, financial institutions are again leading the way, with some retail and governmental applications also being seen.

Moving ahead, Noonan says the future looks bright both for SPSS and PA as a whole. “It’s really about hiding the technology,” he says. “It’s becoming more about people not needing to know how it works – just that it works.”