Rapid-I wins most highly rewarded European start-up prize: Rapid-I and RapidMiner receive Open Source Business Award 2008

The Open Source Business Foundation, a European network for the open source sector, has presented this year's Open Source Business Award. The winner was announced at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg in Germany. Carrying a total of 75,000 Euro (111,000 US$), the Open Source Business Award has the highest price money of all business plan competitions in Europe. The decision of the high-ranking jury, which consisted of 17 members, was unanimous. All award winners were commended as outstanding, innovative examples for the European open source sector. The first place, earning prize money to the tune of 50,000 Euro (74,000 US$), went to Rapid-I, an open source data mining specialist from Dortmund in Germany. The second prize, carrying 15,000 Euro, was taken by OpenBravo S.L., an open source ERP company from Pamplona in Spain. The third place and 10,000 Euro were presented to brox IT solutions from Hannover in Germany, a specialist in data organization and personalized search.

With its open source data mining software RapidMiner, the software and consulting company Rapid-I offers one of the world-leading products for the intelligent analysis of large amounts of data. The discovery and leverage of unused business intelligence from existing data and predictive analytics enable better informed decisions, process optimizations, and forecasts. Rapid-I and RapidMiner already help many companies to significantly improve their efficiency and profitability with innovative data mining and business intelligence solutions. In the financial sector, the US investment bank Merrill Lynch, the second largest US bank, Bank of America, and the leading European bank, BNP Paribas, employ RapidMiner. In the automotive industry, Ford and Honda are among the users of this software, and in the electronic industry Nokia, Philips, and Miele. Insurance companies, telecomunication providers, bio- and gene-technology as well as pharmaceutical and and chemical companies apply RapidMiner, e.g. Austria's leading mobile phone service provider mobilkom austria, Akzo Nobel, Aureus Pharma, PharmaDM, and Cyprotex. Also IT companies like IBM, HP, CA (Computer Associates), and Cisco trust in the data analysis capabilities of RapidMiner.

Open Source Business Award 2008, from left to right: Richard Seibt, Board Member, Open Source Business Foundation Manel Sarasa, CEO, OpenBravo (Spain) Hans-Christian Brockmann, General Manager, brox IT-Solutions (Germany) Ralf Klinkenberg, Co-Founder and General Manager, Rapid-I (Germany) Markus Sackmann, State Secretary, Bavarian Department of Trade and Industry (Germany) Oliver Michel, Board Member, MAX21 AG (Germany) Dr. Roland Fleck, City Councilor, City of Nuremberg (Germany)

In these companies, the data mining software RapidMiner covers a wide range of applications including customer relationship management (CRM), churn reduction, customer retention, personalization, direct marketing, optimization of direct mailing activities, automated e-mail routing, market basket analysis, product recommendation, up- and cross-selling, transaction analysis, fraud detection and prevention, credit default risk prediction, accounting and controlling, audit, tax fraud detection, preventive maintenance of production machines, prediction and prevention of machine failures, load prediction, demand and sales forecasts, financial time series analysis, stock market and currency exchange rate prediction, information extraction from web pages, automated news or e-mail filtering and sorting of electronic documents, automated online market research and sentiment analysis in web blogs und in internet discussion groups as well as the interactive explorative data analysis based on two- and three-dimensional visualizations. RapidMiner can connect to all common databases and read text files as well as Excel sheets and unstructured data from web pages and text documents as well as audio and time series data.

For companies and decision makers that would like to estimate and evaluate the potential of data mining in general and RapidMiner in particular for their enterprises, Rapid-I offers a quick overview and thorough introduction to these topics with specialized trainings and individual consulting. In addition to introductory, application specific, and methodological courses on topics like predictive statistical time series analysis and forecasting, classification, clustering, and regression methods, text and web mining, Rapid-I also provides domain-specific trainings e.g. for data mining in production factories, for data mining in accounting, controlling, and auditing, for data mining for CRM and marketing, for data mining for investment funds, banks, and insurance companies as well as for developers who would like to integrate RapidMiner into their own products or who would like to adapt or extend RapidMiner according to their needs. Individually tailored courses are also available inhouse at the customer's site. Rapid-I also offers professional support for RapidMiner users via e-mail and telephone within guaranteed response times.

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