The complexity of data management and advanced analytics is daunting to many organizations, but a new emerging class of software enables companies to spend less time managing their data and more time acting on the insights they provide.
In a recent blog post by Forrester Analyst Brian Hopkins titled “Tame The Beast: Forrester's Insight Platform Vendor Landscape” the research firm found one of the big problems data and analytics technology buyers encounter is too many data and analytics solutions that overlap in their functionality and application. Whereas before, Big Data offerings were often "tools" which provided specific functionality (text analytics, search and discovery, business intelligence, etc), these days vendors are moving towards being "platforms" with multiple functionalities within a single software package. Brian's blogpost goes on to mention that they surveyed over 140 data and analytics vendors, including Cambridge Semantics, about their market strategies, data management and insight execution capabilities. Fifty-five percent of those vendors said they had data management, analytics, and technologies to help implement insights in software. These platforms are beginning to be referred to as "insight platforms".
As described by Brian in another recent blog post, “Insight platforms unify the technologies to manage and analyze data, test and integrate the derived insights into business action, and capture feedback for continuous improvement.” Brian has been instrumental in defining and popularizing the concept of insight platforms that “create feedback loops that measure outcomes and provide the tools to experiment, learn, and optimize.”
So why are these platforms crucial to your business?
This kind of data visualization provides a quick, easy and interactive way to comprehend data patterns and hierarchies, allowing companies to better see the relationships between data points. The concept is a step forward for users seeking more efficient ways of understanding complex connected data, which in turn, helps facilitate better research and analysis. Companies such as Amazon and Netflix that can develop and act on the insights derived from their data in real time will continue to take business away from their less agile competitors.
At Cambridge Semantics, we’ve understood this concept for some time. We are dedicated to creating a platform that is insight-driven and replaces single-function software with end-to-end analysis. And we believe connecting the data to action in a closed loop is becoming increasingly critical to customer satisfaction.
For example, we built our Anzo Smart Data Lake® solution with graph-based data preparation, management, integration, analysis and governance. It is an all-encompassing solution that provides users with self-service data discovery, analytics and visualization capabilities across all entities and relationships in the data lake.
To learn more about how Smart Data Lakes turn big data into actions, download our whitepaper here.
