Small- and medium-sized businesses need just as much help managing their financial risk and fighting fraud as big businesses, but they often suffer because solutions don't fit their budgets or needs. FICO wanted to reach these customers, but knew that it needed to innovate to reduce costs and delivery time. “The cloud provides the perfect vehicle for reaching globally to a much larger customer base, and providing them solutions much more rapidly,” said Dr. Stuart Wells, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at FICO.

To expand beyond its on-premise solution, the company built FICO Analytic Cloud, a cloud delivery channel that provides customer access to tools and technology to create, customize, and deploy applications and services. “We needed a Platform-as-a-Service layer to do the automated provisioning and management and give us the security infrastructure that we needed,” said Wells.

Using the FICO Analytic Cloud, smaller businesses can take advantage of enterprise-grade tools to manage risk, fight fraud, and optimize operations. FICO now attracts a broader customer set, which generated an additional US$10 million in sales. The solution also improved time to market by 70%, reduced build times from days to minutes, and lowered storage costs by 60%. “Over the next five years, what I see happening is that we’ll start to attract customers that we’ve never attracted before,” said Wells. “We’ll have problems that we haven’t seen before, and we’ll have to innovate to solve those problems.”