NCS, Progress Software team up for real-time data analytics

Singapore IT company NCS has partnered United States-based Progress Software to launch a real-time data analytics suite targeted at companies in the banking, financial services and insurance, manufacturing and public sectors in Asia-Pacific.

According to Rachel Goh, vice president of business applications at NCS, these sectors were specifically chosen because they are, compared to other verticals, more subject to "onslaught" of structured and unstructured data to be analyzed and quickly conclude or provide recommendations for the next step.

For instance, financial organizations handle a lot of transactional and non-transactional data of customers, she said in an interview Monday. Manufacturing companies increasingly have machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions giving rise to machine and sensor data, while government agencies want to analyze real-time data such as social media feeds to help with citizen engagement, policy planning and feedback, she added.

Keith Budge, vice president and managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Progress Software, who sat in at the same interview, said the ability to deal with data in actual real-time is increasingly important for businesses today.

Public sector agencies, for example, do not just have to track and understand what citizens are saying at any given point in time, but also correlate it with other events and data, he explained.

Analyzing data in real-time can mean the difference in deciding whether something is a threat or an opportunity as events, which goes beyond the mere management of a large volume of data, the NCS vice president said.

The partnership will see NCS's software, along with its customer and business knowledge, system integration (SI) experience, being provided via Progress Software's "Decisions Analytics" platform, she explained.

Goh said the targeted markets will be the ones that NCS has continuously focused on--Singapore, Australia, China and Hong Kong.