Why the cloud is a crucial component to creating effective analytics-ready data

Rosslyn Analytics believes the world of data is at tipping point, with organisations slowly waking up to the fact that data is critical, but struggling to translate that effectively into informing business strategy.
The company thinks that the legacy business intelligence (BI) path is littered with expensive failures and systems that no longer work.

Combine this with a rapidly evolving data and technological landscape, with data that is exploding at a hitherto unseen velocity and complexity, and it's clear that existing solutions are simply not up to the job, according to Rosslyn.

Data is entering crisis mode and visualisation tools are only as good as the clean data they are provided with. Rosslyn Analytics CEO Charles Clark explains more about the how the company's cloud-based platform, RAPid and its IP-patented technology, is helping to solve data issues.

TechRadar Pro: What is Rosslyn Analytics, and what does it do?

Charles Clark: We focus on developing technologies that allow our clients to integrate critical data, and then cleanse and enrich it with multiple other external relevant data sources, making it far more valuable than the data they are currently being provided directly from the data warehouse.

Anyone who analyses data in any detail will appreciate the single biggest bottleneck is the data itself, not the analytical or visualisation tool. And with data now everywhere and in multiple different formats the problem is increasing.

One of the main hurdles our clients have is the quality of the raw data and in almost every case it is questionable, and with volumes exploding at exponential rates, it is fast becoming the mother of all headaches for senior management teams.

We enable clients to integrate all their enterprise data , and then connect this to other sources of data, whether those sources of data be private, such as a spreadsheet with a unique data source such as company KPI's, SLA's or savings metrics, to public data sources such as social media and news, to premium data sources like DnB credit ratings.

Our mission is to provide our clients the most valuable foundation of data from which to drive insights that give them a distinct advantage. To visualise this data and access it, rather than develop our own tool set we enable our clients with leading tools such as QlikView. Think of us as the 'hub' for data.

TRP: What is 'analytics-ready' data and why is it important?

CC: Analytics-ready data is more than clean data, it is data that has been integrated, cleansed and enriched and in an environment which enables users to easily add additional data sources, tag data, change and manipulate data, and categorise data on-the-fly whilst concurrently visualising it, and for the experts to mine it. We enable users to "program their data".

This is unique to Rosslyn and is what differentiates us from all other approaches. The ramifications of not having these facilities and in essence using untransformed dirty data can be highlighted throughout all firms, and can be seen in some of the most simple and obvious areas.

Procurement teams consistently struggle with financial data which is littered with different terminology for the same thing, for example laptop and notebook, mobile and cell. One of our clients is a large financial institution which over the years has grown by acquisition.

The marketing and sales teams struggle to get one trusted view of the client, as their details and what they own are in multiple different systems and formats. You can only imagine the impact that has on wider reporting and data analytics for the company.

The importance of having data that is ready can be no more evident than in the last few weeks, when the UK was flooded. For a number of clients it was important to immediately understand their exposure from a supplier and customer perspective.