Information Builders is enhancing its flagship business intelligence (BI) software, WebFocus, with data mining capabilities.

Full details will be presented at Information Builders annual user event, taking place in Tennessee next week.

The new data analysis capabilities will pit Information Builders against specialist vendors such as SAS and Stata, said Rado Kotorov, Information Builder’s technical director of strategic product management. But unlike those firms, Information Builders' technology can be used by everyone within the enterprise, and not just a small subset of power users, he added.

The new capabilities are the product of a new partnership between Information Builders and the R Project, an open sourced community that was formed by a group of developers who developed statistical software. The R software provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques.

“The outcome of the partnership is a single integrated environment in which reported data can be transformed into data models,” said Kotorov. He said the models can be used to predict business outcomes with far better reliability than relying on human judgement.

Kotorov said the benefit of statistical analysis is that it is subject to less error. “Humans do not always understand the weight that should be given to each variable,” he said