The data mining market has experienced steady consolidation over the last few years. Mergers, acquisitions, and product discontinuations have reduced the number of available products. Fair Isaac now owns the Trajecta technology through its merger with HNC in 2002. Business Objects offers KXEN as either a standalone application or part of its Application Foundation suite. Oracle's offering is Oracle 9i Data Mining analytics. Data mining products that offer cross-functional collaboration features and predictive modeling will have a market advantage. Data mining tools also need better productivity enhancements. The capability for collaboration between business analysts, statisticians, and IT data preparations staff is essential to a product's success. Some predictive data analysis problems are churn, attrition, cross-selling, and up-selling. Demand-planning and just-in-time inventory have good solutions available. Solutions to less well defined problems remain elusive. Now is a good time to buy predictive analysis software because a buyer's market exists. Buyers should adopt open standards like Predictive Modeling Markup Language (PMML) to reduce the risk of technology lock-in. Another recommended practice is to buy applications from marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise application vendors that sell predictive analytics applications.