Version 17? Yes, SPSS has been at this a while. Today they announced version 17 of their Statistics package. While this has some new features to handle more data and some improved asset management (an analytic repository), the big features are really about bringing more business users into the analytic fold. One feature in this area was a new interface to allow marketing professionals to do Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) analysis - a very common marketing analysis. Another allows collaboration between technical and non-technical users by allowing technical users to create business-friendly interfaces for their users. This allows business users to do their own analysis on common tasks using custom-designed interfaces built right into the tool and reducing the learning curve.

For power users they have added a syntax editor for SPSS Statistics programmers to make programming SPSS Statistics faster and easier. Integration with Clementine and Dimensions to share data access, analysis and reports makes this release more integrated into analytic processes across the enterprise while mulitple imputation for missing values (always a problem in analytics) and better integration with Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat round out the release.