Why the cloud is a crucial component to creating effective analytics-ready data
Allowing people to "program" data
Every name and address in our system is automatically cleansed and given a longitude and latitude whilst we were able to integrate the flood information from the government websites. In a matter of a few short minutes our clients were able to immediately assess the impact and in some cases the opportunity!
TRP: How has cloud shaped the evolution of data analytics, and why is it so crucial now?
CC: Cloud analytics is only just emerging. We are a young and disruptive few in a market dominated by on-premise traditional software companies. The Cloud fundamentally changes the potential of analytics by being able to support a connected ecosystem of users, clients and developers, and allows for exciting social interaction between the platform and its users.
The client is king, not the vendor. Our patented IP is based on sophisticated machine-learning algorithms which makes your data more valuable the more data that flows through the platform and the more users that interact with it.
As Google memorises your search habits, the Rosslyn algo's memorise and apply all the tagging, connections and interactions to the data. We call this hyper-connectivity. This is transformational and is not available in any standalone visualisation tool.
The platform allows our clients to rapidly develop and deploy apps in real time and in an ever changing world where the business requirements are in constant flux, this is essential. We now all think for a living and with so much dependent on the accuracy of your decision making, clients need to move at speed and be constantly innovating. Current on-premise platforms simply don't facilitate this agility.
TRP: Which companies invest in data analytics, and how does it transcribe into real value?
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CC: Any company wanting their managers and employees to make fact based decisions will require some form of analytics. Companies need to reduce their costs, increase their revenues, looking to reduce their risks, maintain their regulatory reporting requirements and use their data to innovate and outplay their competitors.
One of the largest companies in the world has adopted our platform recently because it used to cost them c.$100,000 to test and prove an analytics project. They had to buy, build and configure and then test out the idea on an unproven technology stack.
As a result they didn't get many projects done and they were crying out for analytics in every corner of their vast empire. The cloud has now enabled all these knowledge workers to be continually testing and innovating with ideas for a fraction of the price.
And when something fails it does hurt – in fact the CIO encourages them to "fail quickly". As something emerges the platform allows them to scale immediately. From an ROI perspective, our clients are making a material ROI within weeks/months.
TRP: What are the main challenges of working on a big, international project?
CC: For traditional on premise analytics providers, international projects are incredibly challenging. If a problem occurs then they can't be there in five minutes.
As a Cloud platform, if a problem occurs we can instantly be there from our London office or the clients themselves can address it on a self-service basis. We have no geographical barriers and we have folks in countries I rarely read about using the platform. It's really exciting.
Language is also no barrier - we enable our clients to translate all their data into a common language . We're dealing with a global manufacturer at the moment and all data from around Europe and Eastern Europe is translated into English.
TRP: Data analytics is a constantly evolving discipline. What's next?
CC: Data is exploding, it is everywhere, it is all unconnected, and it needs to be ordered and made universally available and usable. It's a massive challenge to bring it together. In my view, the next shift will be to platforms, like Rosslyn's, delivering companies a single source of information that will allow them to achieve their analytical objectives.
In turn I think there is going to be a tectonic shift from analytics being on premise to in the Cloud, which will be painful for a number of the on premise players. But like it or not the world of data analytics is moving to the Cloud!
The analytics field, up until very recently, has been dominated by a number of players who have sold a visualisation tool product - they are simply product companies. I think the visualisation tools are going to start struggling. Not because the market isn't there, but there are so many of them and it's tough to differentiate between one and the other.
Programmable data delivers unprecedented opportunities and I feel that will influence the next few steps in this exciting industry.
I also expect some consolidation, and my guess is Microsoft will soon pounce on a leading visualisation tool. Big data is hugely important and valuable but technically we are still early in its evolution and there remain technical gaps to be filled.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.