Hélène Clary Co-founder and Director of Sales
Telmo Silva Founder and CEO
VOL 10 ISSUE 01 2021
T
he power of data for optimizing processes, enhancing customer experiences, and scaling a business cannot be denied. But given the mammoth data available with every company, processing them for powerful analytics to improve day-to-day operations and expanding customer base is impossible for businesses. Here is where business intelligence (BI) solution providers come to the aid. They collect, retrieve, process, and analyze data to make informed business decisions necessary for its growth and competitive advantage. They automate internal data as per the business needs and boost its performance. Hélène Clary
Telmo Silva
Co-founder and
Founder and CEO
Director of Sales
VOL 00 ISSUE 00 2021
Marking Your Presence in the Digital World
Gone are the days of spreadsheets and other tools that companies used to store and analyze data. Today, business houses understand the benefits of digital tools and are prepared for the makeover. Making impactful decisions without data is difficult in a power-packed data world. Companies are outsourcing data to BI solutions providers who simplify complicated tasks.
Incorporating BI software is an integral part as companies undergo digital transformations. BI software is the fastest growing software. Using various BI tools, the solution providers understand the company’s data and source it into a single platform before analyzing them for better outcomes and scaling businesses. Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data warehouse, and analytics are being used in a big way to provide BI solutions to entrepreneurs. Soon, BI and AI would be working in tandem for easy, quick, competitive, and accurate solutions to businesses. Though there is a huge demand for BI solutions, there is a dearth of skilled persons providing business intelligence. Those who have gathered the expertise have established their foothold in the domain. We featured few such exceptional BI solution providers in our latest edition of Insights Success, The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021.
We are sure this edition will open the gateways of opportunities for BI seekers. Read this interesting edition to learn about BI’s significance, developments, and advantages in today’s data-driven world. Have an exciting read!
Sumita Sarkar
Cover Story
08
Empowering Businesses to Scale Intelligently
22 WHERE TO NEXT? Is Automation Really the Answer for Businesses Post-COVID-19
Articles
34 WORLD VIEW The Evolution of MarTech and What to Expect
Contents 16
Aures Analytics The Right Technology to Grow your Business
30
Neener Analytics Enabling Financial Risk Decisioning with Superior Accuracy
26
CloverLeaf Analytics Architecting the Best Business Intelligence Solutions
38
SG Analytics Ve n t u r i n g To G o B e yo n d Excellence
Editor-in-Chief Sumita Sarkar Senior Editor Anish Miller Managing Editor Abhishaj Sajeev Assisting Editors Trishika, Vinayak Visualiser David King Art & Design Head Priyanka Rajage Art & Design Assistant Mrunalinee Deshmukh Co-designer Paul Belin Art & Picture Editor Rohil Shinganapurkar Business Development Manager Sherin Rodricks Marketing Manager Joseph D'souza Business Development Executives Kelly, David Sales Executives Mark, Alice Technical Head Jacob Smile Assistant Technical Head Amar Sawant Technical Consultants Pratiksha, Aditya, David Digital Marketing Manager Alina Sege Assistant Digital Marketing Manager Amol Wadekar SME-SMO Executives Gemson, Renuka Research Analyst Eric Smith Circulation Manager Tanaji sales@insightssuccess.com
October, 2021 Corporate Ofce Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-859-2600 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com
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Company Name
Featuring
Brief
AbsolutData absolutdata.com
Anil Kaul CEO
Absolutdata - an Infogain company, its products, and services deliver scalable business impact across the enterprise by combining cutting edge AI and ML with its heritage in analytical frameworks, business understanding, and technology.
Antivia antivia.com
Mark Hudson CEO
Antivia by insightsoftware.com is a business intelligence (BI) software company that helps organizations realize more value from their data by getting information into the hands of frontline decision-makers.
AUREUS ANALYTICS LTD. aureusanalytics.com
Anurag Shah CEO
AUREUS is a Customer Intelligence & Experience company that enables Insurers & Agencies to deliver superior customer experience leading to greater customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.
ClicData clicdata.com
Telmo Silva CEO and Founder
ClicData is a leading provider of cloud-based dashboard systems that are designed to improve business efficiency through better reporting.
Cloverleaf Analytics cloverleafanalytics.com
Robert Clark President and CEO
Cloverleaf Analytics’ end-to-end insurance BI solution improves an insurance company’s profitability and reduces risk by consolidating data across the enterprise for advanced analysis and cutting-edge visualizations.
Ducen ducenit.com
Vish Ramesh Founder
A Sryas Company. Ducen is a trusted technology solutions provider that aims to empower Fortune 1000 companies through quality solutions and services.
Neener Analytics NeenerAnalytics.com
Jeff LoCastro CEO and Founder
Neener Analytics provides alternative risk assessment and marketing conversions for Lending, Insurance, Product Leasing, Real Estate Tenant Management, Marketing, Human Resources/Hiring.
SG Analytics sganalytics.com
Sushant Gupta CEO
SG Analytics is a leading provider of data-centric research and contextual analytics services globally to companies across BFSI, Media & Entertainment, Technology & Healthcare sectors including Fortune 500 companies.
SIBIA Analytics sibiaanalytics.com
Angshuman Bhattacharya Founder and CEO
SIBIA provides predictive analytics and decision support solutions to a diverse set of industry challenges. The customizable services are curated to solve core business concerns through the most effective use of big data analytics.
Simplify360 simplify360.com
Rohit Gupta Founder and CEO
Simplify360 is an AI powered omnichannel customer experience platform, with a social first DNA.
Hélène Clary Co-founder and Director of Sales
Telmo Silva Founder and CEO
W
ith the constant evolution of technology, entrepreneurs are realizing that they need to become more datadriven to stay competitive. Impactful decision-making without data on hand is getting complicated by the day; thus, deeming it important to have a data-driven game plan if you want to be successful in today’s market. Whether you’re running a small or large business or looking for new opportunities in the market, understanding analytics is critical. This is where business intelligence solutions come into play. Business intelligence solutions have become a critical need for entrepreneurs. They are just as important as having the right product and marketing strategies if you want to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace.
The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solu on Providers 2021
Pertaining to this, we at Insights Success came up with this edition – The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021. Through this edition we bring into spotlight, exceptional companies that strive to deliver the best BI solutions and truly empower your business. Featuring on the cover of this edition is one such prominent player in the BI solutions niche – ClicData, a next generation platform for Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, and Analytics. Thousands of businesses around the world use ClicData to connect their data from hundreds of systems and databases, create data flows to match and cleanse data and to perform analysis and produce dashboards. ClicData is a 100% cloud-based platform, available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, with an intuitive browser driven design and no installation required. Its innovative architecture can provision private data warehouses in 7 countries within minutes of creating an account and manages all security, backup, and maintenance of the data. The platform optimizes data in vertical and in-memory so that its ready for analytics. By amalgamating the connectivity, loading, transformation, data warehouse, visualization, and publication all in one platform, ClicData provides all the necessary functions for any type of business, allowing for smarter and faster decisions while maintaining a single point of truth. In addition, for those users requiring more advanced functionality, the company provides direct access to the data for advanced statistics and Machine Learning using Python, R, and many others via its API or Dedicated Database offering. With the base platform, customers can also take advantage of other features such as: Ÿ
Alerts: Monitor key indicators and be alerted to when they cross thresholds by receiving a dashboard or an email.
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White Label: If customers are providing ClicData’s platform to their clients they can make it their own by enabling the White Label feature and use their own colors, logos, and URLs.
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Data Stream: Push data out to third party systems with our Data Stream module. Not everything is about visualization. Sometimes is just about pushing small and large data volumes from one side to another.
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Security: Ensure that dashboards and data is secured by teams, roles, and users. Included in the platform is an extensive security management system.
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Embedded Visualization: Our dashboards can easily be embedded into any web site, portal, or application simply by adding a link.
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Mobile: Our free to use Android and iOS mobile apps can be used to access any dashboard or dashboards in seconds.
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low-Code Data Entry: Instead of embedding visualization in dashboards, embed data forms in dashboards. Enter data and immediately see the impact on your KPIs.
All the above advantages and more are changing how ClicData’s customers work by creating more advanced and interactive reporting and analytics. “Traditional tools, typically split into ETL/ELT and Data Visualization, Editor and Viewer, Client and Server are not able to achieve the same through their number of interfaces and scripts. And this is the real key impact to ClicData’s customers,” says Telmo Silva, the founder and CEO of ClicData.
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We provide direct access to the data for advanced statistics and Machine Learning using Python, R, and many others via our API or via our Dedicated Database offering.
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The idea behind BI is that by analyzing data collected from multiple sources, you can make more informed decisions about how best to grow your company and develop products that consumers will love; however, many entrepreneurs don’t know where they should start when it comes to choosing the right BI solutions.
Exemplary Expertise Telmo Silva—through his role as the CEO and founder of ClicData—has been pivotal in driving the company towards zeniths of success along with the Co-founder, and Director of Sales (Europe), Hélène Clary. Telmo, having experienced the pains in small and large companies of implementing local, regional, and global data centric systems, mostly in retail and pharmaceutical, saw an opportunity to tackle this problem that even after 25 years, ‘BI’ vendors were still not able to solve. “The challenge of implementing efficient, simple, and rapid Business Intelligence solutions complete with a Data Warehouse was apparent. After years of implementing different types of enterprise solutions and observing that the end-user would still go back to spreadsheet exports was a clear sign that the solution is not just pretty charts and expensive servers,” Telmo expressed. Those challenges inspired him to create a platform where you can connect external data and centralize it and provide immediate access to it. “The concept was more ambitious, as instead of defining data models and catalogues preemptively, we built fixed data flow interfaces between systems and scripting or modelling to describe data flows in
different tools. Doing it all in one platform that is aware of changes to the data, that does not pre-aggregate metrics based on pre-defined sets by the editors or developers, and that has all the tools required to notify users when data changes by immediately changing downstream views and dashboards, was the outcome we achieved.” “Maintaining the data lineage and being smarter by knowing where the data comes from and where it goes is part of the solution. The other part is how to make it available within seconds or minutes and how to scale across the world and across all types of data and connectors,” Telmo adds. As excerpts from his professional journey, sharing valuable pieces of advice to entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the BI solutions market, Telmo says, “Do not be afraid of the status quo. Companies will always look for simpler, better, and faster alternatives to the heavy duty, 20-year-old players such as Tableau and PowerBI, Talend and even older Informatica, Business Objects and Cognos. A new age of workers and mindset will look for more intelligent solutions not traditional solutions. So, if the concept is sound and volume, security, and performance are part of the offer, then don’t worry about the others that are there today.”
As for Hélène, she is a seasoned Marketing and Sales professional with more than 20 years of experience. She has worked for pharmaceutical organizations as Brand Manager and Product Managers before she co-founded and took over ClicData’s global business development and growth strategy. Overcoming Adversities Talking about the initial challenges that he and his team faced during the pandemic and how they managed to sustain operations while ensuring employee safety, Telmo says, “At ClicData, we work with our customers remotely, and some of our teams were already working from home even before the pandemic, so from a logistical point of view, the impact was kept to a minimum. However, many members of our team do still want the social context of an ‘office’ and that presented a problem not only because of
different rules by office regions (United States, Canada, France, India) but also because of the ever-changing rules.” “As such, during the lockdown period, we strongly encouraged our people to work from home, we purchased additional equipment whenever needed, we started doing Monday Morning Messages, where Telmo would broadcast top of mind topics going on with the company or simply just share thoughts on what was going on plus tips on doing some work better or new tools or even what is in store for the releases,” says the team. Opinions that Matter We asked Telmo for his opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine
learning had on the BI solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future, to which he said, “AI and Machine Learning have a place in the industry from a consumer perspective specifically for those companies that have a chance of using it in a dynamic way. Today’s challenge with ML/Advanced Statistics is that it remains a very topic-oriented subject, requiring a developer with strong statistical skills to continuously build and prove or disprove models.” “In data, segmentation, trending, and prediction are used to forecast and make assumptions as to the future but often we see that customers do not validate the outcome of the models months or years after they were produced and used for decision making. Much like the rest of BI, ML needs to
Towards a More Intelligent Future Sharing his vision on scaling ClicData’s operations and offerings in 2021, Telmo says, “We are planning to add more functionalities such as a report designer, an insights data playground, Data Flow, a simple way to manage your data processing, more visualization, more low-code screen data entry and more automation, and customization. Building a great product is our priority.” “We are now concentrating our operations where our Professional Services team is closer to our commercial teams to better assist customers by ensuring they are picking us for the right reasons and that we can solve their business problems faster.”
“
A new age of workers and mindset will look for more intelligent solutions.
“
be embedded in the data management and analysis process in a tighter way and can’t be the series of ‘one-offs’ that it is today,” he adds.
“We are expanding into India and Latin America, where a product such as ours is ideal both from a cost perspective but a functional and regional data protection perspective,” concludes Telmo.
The Right Technology to Grow your Business
A
rtificial intelligence is impacting the future virtually for every industry and every human being. AI and ML have acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics, and IoT. It will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future. Cloud technologies are bringing in more agility to business processes, while AI and Machine Learning have the power to influence business outcomes/decisions. The artificial intelligence and machine learning driven platform works with data from carriers, agents, brokers, and MGAs that allows them to know their clients on a deeper level, predict what is likely to happen next, and help them act on those predictions at the right point in time.
Aureus Analytics provides customer experience analytics solutions to the insurance industry. The company offers customer intelligence solutions to its wide insurance client base and enables them to deliver the best customer experience through customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value. This is done by leveraging AI and Machine learning technologies and delivering actionable insights in natural language at the point of decision. These technological advancements are looked after by Ashish Tanna, COO and Co-founder of Aureus Analytics. In addition to his deep domain expertise and analytics expertise, Ashish’s passion for big data and data science helps him drive the customer experience business for the insurance industry. Embracing Technological Advancements CRUX - Insurance-specific AIpowered platform. AI platform learns and builds metadata across customers. A real-time AI platform that uses predictive analytics and machine learning to provide business and analytics users the ability to capture data from a variety of both internal and external sources. The application is available across all device form factors. Hence, it gives any business
user the ability to access insights that the solution produces at any time and on the device of their choice. The AI platform CRUX has processed more than 65 million policies for key customers in India that include SBI Life, Bajaj Allianz Life, TATA AIA Life, Bharti AXA Life, and Kotak Life. SentiMeter® - A standardized metric to calculate the customer experience and understand the sentiment of all policyholders on a scale of 0-100 across the entire customer journey. Aureus’s proprietary algorithm SentiMeter® uses deep text analytics and artificial intelligence to measure the customer experience in real-time for all policyholders. The Aureus SentiMeter® solution helps the carrier define essential insights for every stage of the policy engagement workflow. Predictive models - Predict the consumers’ behavior in real-time and identify the next best action for policyholder retention, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities. The typical use cases predict and identify potentially fraudulent claims, improve crosssell/upsell, and build persistence/retention analytics. Customer One View (COV) - Single view of customer’s entire portfolio throughout the customer journey.
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The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021
Aureus proprietary person de-dupe logic helps create person-level records and unique customer identities by clustering matching records across enterprise databases. Household Analytics - The patentpending householding algorithm provides insurance carriers with the ability to view and understand the portfolio dynamics at a household level instead of just at the individual level. Proprietary person deduping logic, which includes a robust name matching logic and multi-parameter matching algorithm to identify different records for the same person. Proprietary address matching logic for Indian addresses. Erudite Mentor
Ashish Tanna COO and Co-founder
AWARDS & RECOGNITION ◆ Aureus Analytics receives 2021 CT Entrepreneur Honorable Mentions Awards. ◆ Aureus was featured in India's Dynamic InsurTech Map produced by The Digital Insurers in collaboration with India InsurTech Association. ◆ Aureus Analytics was named a Top Data Science Service Provider in India in 2019. ◆ Aureus Analytics included in Singapore's Top 10 High Growth Analytics & AI Startups with the Highest Funding.
Ashish Tanna, currently the COO and Co-founder of Aureus Analytics has previously occupied the position of Vice President at CBay Systems India Ltd., where he was managing global operations. Having worked in industries such as ITES, healthcare, and steel for over two decades, he is a seasoned entrepreneur, who has started and exited previous businesses with success. Expert Advice AI and ML technologies today can predict the behavior of a customer, which helps businesses to act in advance and give a superior customer experience. Using machine learning and Artificial Intelligence-driven models, Aureus has been able to help insurers reduce early claims by more than 50%, improve retention, and cross-sell by 5%. Piercing through the Pandemic The biggest challenge was to ensure employee safety with a smooth
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transition from physical working environments to virtual workstations. Besides also maintaining the best standards of client services and business deliverables with minimal disruption. With HR support, all employees were moved to work from home while taking care of all the required infra/support to work efficiently and service the clients. Keeping the team motivated and virtually connected with weekly catchup sessions with different agendas. A town hall meeting was set with top management executives at least once every month to share company-wide updates and concerns with the entire team. Finally, psychological counseling and training sessions with expert counselors were done to share helpful tips on how to manage mental and physical health in distressed times.
Valuable Guidance “I would say this is the best time to start your venture if you have an idea/product, which solves a business problem. Today the entrepreneurs have a full-fledged ecosystem where the government is helping/creating policies to foster entrepreneurship, venture funds are available, and top of it the availability of skilled resources and technology”, says Ashish. “Keep patience while running your venture as it is going to take time and you will face many hurdles. Always keep your cost in check and think from the customer perspective and the differentiated value you can deliver”, adds Ashish. Journey Ahead Aureus launched the DONNA (www.donnaforagents.com) platform
Aureus’ network analysis algorithm is able to connect customers based on multiple configurable parameters and traverse large datasets e
ciently.
in April 2020. This AI-driven platform is focused on the IA (Independent Agency) market in the US. Since the launch, the platform has seen rapid acceptance by the market even with minimal spending in marketing. Within the past 14 months, the company has onboarded 70+ agencies, 1 Carrier and 1 Agency Association; integrated with 3 of the top 5 AMS systems and processed more than $1.6B of premium. Since its launch, the product has had 1 major release (DONNA 2.0) and the latest release (DONNA 3.0) is currently in its finishing stages. Currently, in the US, there are more than 38,000 agencies. This combined with the carriers represents a huge market opportunity for DONNA. The firm strongly believes that the productmarket fit is now established, and the next phase is to scale the business significantly. For India, it already works with 10-11 top insurers and its focus would be to go deep within existing clients while focusing on acquiring new life insurers.
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Milestones and Achievements Product Milestones: ◆ 15+ active insurance customers that are on the full commercial stage of business. Most of them working on multiple use cases and associated with Aureus for over 5 years. Focus O erings include Sentiment Analytics, Customer One View, Predictive Analytics – Retention, Claims and Fraud, Cross-sell, and Advisor Analytics. ◆ 65Million+ policies processed for mid-sized and large insurers. ◆ Platform capability for large Enterprise Network, deployed for 300+ branch users. ◆ 100% Conversion from Paid POC to Production. ◆ Zero Customer Churn till date. Aureus celebrated the 1st year anniversary of DONNA, an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Platform for Independent Agents. DONNA’s mission is to enable independent agencies to leverage vast data sets that they already own and deliver a superior customer experience to their policyholders. DONNA is an example of how expensive and complex artificial intelligence technology, previously only accessible to large players in the insurance industry, is now available to agencies of all sizes. DONNA is integrated with leading Agency Management Systems, thereby eliminating the need for complex IT integration to get started. Business Achievements ◆ 536.7 crore fraud saves through proactive identification using early claims fraud predictive model ◆ 37% reduction in early claims frequency for a large insurer within a year ◆ SentiMeter® has helped 600+ customer service representatives of a life insurance company improve customer interactions and experience they o er their customers ◆ Improved retention rates by more than 3% pts, cross-sell by 5% pts, and NPS by more than 30 points in less than 6 months. Brand Innovations From time to time, Aureus has collated the views of industry think tanks and published them with in-house expert and SME opinions. One of these e orts was Aureus Insights, an o ine/online yearbook series featuring incisive views from senior executives across the insurance value chain.
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Is
Automation Really the Answer for Businesses Post-COVID-19? T
he automation technology, which was already being adopted by many large corporations gradually worldwide, has accelerated its growth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies that relied almost entirely on human labor became vulnerable as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Entire companies and businesses had to shut down, and those that were considered necessary had to face the risk of spreading the disease. Productivity was down, unemployment was up, and the economy was almost on the verge of collapsing. These factors led to the increased adoption of automation technology, which eased the business processes. When it comes to testing, tracking, and tracing the spread of the virus, robots are currently assisting with testing, sanitization, surveillance, and more, all without putting anyone in danger of infection. They are, however, helping firms get back into the swing of things. Even when employees are not in the office or factory, automation keeps businesses running and ensures a smooth flow of supply chains. Robotic automation is expected to play a significant role in accelerating manufacturing processes and assisting post-Corona rebound economies. Robots will alleviate the present labor availability issues while also enhancing precision and improving quality.
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Where to next?
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Although automation isn't new, the need to invest in, acquire, and integrate new automated systems and services has never been greater than it is now. The key to our economic revival may be automation. Let's take a look at how robotics can help businesses adapt and grow in the post-COVID era, possibly saving or creating new jobs in the process. Changing Priorities Companies realized the need for robotic and automated projects even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Automation boosts productivity while minimizing harmful and timeconsuming chores, benefiting both firms and employees. According to a report of McKinsey Global Institute that was released in late 2017, automation will disrupt 400 million to 800 million employments. Recent events, however, may only serve to exacerbate this trend. Even if there isn't a recession, the rate of automation rises. According to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, over three recessions have occurred in the last 30 years. Businesses look favorably on automation and robotics—92 percent of business leaders agree that they are necessary to survive and thrive. Still, only 51 percent of business processes are automated, according to the K2 study. With COVID-19 affecting virtually every industry, companies have a renewed sense of urgency to accelerate the Automation of their business processes. Adopting Automation Automation boosts productivity and makes the workplace safer and less tedious. During economic downturns and times of crisis, automation suffers the brunt of the damage. Most corporate leaders may have been caught off guard by COVID-19, which forced them to shut down warehouses, factories, and offices to protect their employees. Those that had automated systems or technology in place, on the other hand, were able to mitigate the effects of the global epidemic. Could the economic damage caused by COVID19 pandemic have been avoided if the workforce had been more automated? Yes, according to the research. To deal with the current COVID-affected reality, a staggering 60% of businesses said they need to adopt new ways of working. Almost the same number of people are having trouble making the necessary changes. Investing in future outcomes may go
against the instinct to stay put and wait out the storm, but it could be a missed opportunity. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the cost of robots has reduced and is continuing to decrease, allowing for widespread use. South Korea now has seven robots per 100 workers, with China accounting for one-third of all new robots. According to Oxford Economics, China is expected to automate 12.5 million manufacturing jobs by 2030. This number could rise dramatically in the COVID era. Companies emphasize the ability to "respond swiftly to any scenario and reuse any current production lines," and as a result, they are in the search for adaptable Automation that allows them to maintain company continuity. The Synergy of Humans and Robots Robots have been a source of concern for workers in the past, with alarmists forecasting complete automation of the workforce and widespread unemployment. While automation is intended to streamline operations and save costs, employment that demands an adaptable and creative mind will continue to exist. Many businesses are experimenting with ways to mix robotics and manpower to improve warehouse operations, such as integrating collaborative robots into DMS warehouse management systems. Collaborative robots typically have limited capacity, but they can be taught to carry packages swiftly and effectively to a precise area, where a human subsequently runs a forklift to stock the product. Conclusion In times of crisis, the flaws of a non-automated society are also shown. This ambiguity is particularly crucial in the event of a global pandemic when safety protocols such as social distancing, masking, and handwashing are recommended. Robots do not need to take precautions and can perform things that would be dangerous for humans on a regular basis. Meanwhile, those employees may focus on safe, interesting, and adaptable work, allowing them to work from home or from a distant location when necessary. Building a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines helps keep employees safe—and the company running smoothly—for these reasons.
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-Trishika Rokade
& & 20 The
Most
BUSINESSWOMEN to Watch, 2020
kimberly Khoury
Paving her Way in Sustainability Development
Architecting the Best Business Intelligence Solutions
R
ecently the word Business Intelligence (BI) has popped out from the dictionary of B2B world, which is now well-known in the B2C sector as well. BI has evolved with time. BI is a multi-faceted word, it is an umbrella term that comprises data mining, reporting, visual analysis, data preparation, statistical analysis, etc. BI eliminates the inadequacies in the business and lets it adapt to the market. It helps companies to create a comprehensive view of the market. BI provides solutions to companies by delivering the present and the preceding data within the business framework. In this fast-paced world, companies are dependent on valuable insights for their growth. Looking at the demand for Business Intelligence, many companies started their endeavor. One such company is Cloverleaf Analytics, which is dedicated to providing an affordable and end-to-end insurance BI solution. In our quest for 'The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021', we collaborate with Robert Clark, CEO and Co-founder of Cloverleaf Analytics, where he sheds light on his company's journey, its services, and the future prospects of the company. Following are the highlights of the interview: Please brief our audience about Cloverleaf Analytics, its USPs, and its position as a leading player in the Business Intelligence solutions niche. We are the first and only insurance-specific BI provider. We compete against large horizontal technology companies that
We bring decades of insurance and technology expertise coupled with advanced machine learning to give insurers a fresh perspective on how to increase revenue, profitability, and reduce risk.
focus on multiple industries with the same product instead of being experts at insurance data. However, we bring decades of insurance and technology expertise coupled with advanced machine learning to give insurers a fresh perspective on increasing revenue, profitability, and risk reduction. What other products/solutions does Cloverleaf Analytics offer, and how are these impacting the industry and your clients? We combine machine learning, predictive analytics, and other emerging technologies with our insurance-specific data model in a platform that features dozens of customizable reports and visualizations. Our solution gives insurers the best clear picture of how to improve customer relationships, products, and internal business processes.We give insurers a competitive edge by efficiently unifying disparate
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The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solu on Providers 2021 policy and claims systems comprising thousands of data points into one data platform within weeks. This has enabled the rapid creation of new insurance programs and products that have opened the door for new revenue streams that had never been considered before using Cloverleaf. Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the BI solutions niche, and what more could be expected in the future? AI and machine learning have accelerated interest in BI across many industries. As these and other new technologies are used together, I believe these technologies will be intertwined like a rope. In the insurance industry, we are now approaching a point where the industry is taking AI, ML, and BI more seriously. After the last few years of having new insurance technology entrants from within and outside of the industry launching innovative products leveraging these technologies, the traditional insurer has taken notice. Unfortunately, prior to Cloverleaf's launching in 2015, there weren't many other options for insurers that wanted to be ahead of the curve other than trying to do it themselves or apply a horizontal BI solution from a multi-billion-dollar company that does not have deep insurance expertise to derive meaningful insights. Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time? Cloverleaf was designed to make the maximum impact through the power of our technology and industry expertise without having to hire dozens of employees. This has enabled us to operate lean while rapidly scaling growth. When the pandemic started, we weren't concerned as much about our business but about if carriers would realize that BI could help keep their doors open in the current environment, where traditional insurance like auto has not been in use much. Since the pandemic began, insurers have become increasingly concerned with operating more efficiently, improving pricing, and creating new products. All these areas weren't in focus as much before the pandemic. So, smaller, and mid-sized insurers were not properly prepared for how to grow and increase margins when this challenging time began.
Robert Clark CEO, and Co-founder
About the Leader Robert Clark is an insurance BI and advanced analytics expert, a successful entrepreneur, and a trusted senior executive respected by some of the top insurers in the world. In his 25+ years of insurance industry experience, Rob has served in technology leadership roles for AXA, including being a virtual CIO, and founded three successful technology start-ups, including Cloverleaf Analytics. Throughout Rob's career, he has been an active advocate and partner of senior insurer leaders, helping to identify how to solve some of the insurance's toughest problems with his mastery of insurance data. Rob's passion for all things insurance gives him a unique perspective in this new decade to guide insurers in how the power of BI can give insurance intelligence and flexibility to meet rapidly changing insurance customer needs.
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However, we believe the challenges faced during the pandemic are only a symptom of a bigger problem the insurance industry had in being hesitant to use powerful technology to take an honest look at their business operations and customer relationships. The status quo can be comfortable while revenue is being generated and cash flow is positive. Today's environment has opened the eyes of insurance executives to realize whether their business was already strong or like a house built with a bad foundation due to not having a handle of how to understand the data in an insurance carrier. In terms of Cloverleaf's operating model, we already had a structure that encouraged our employees to work remotely. This has been in place since day one, and so there wasn't much pivot there. Where we have been impacted is where almost every company has been in the past year and a half with the lack of in-person engagement at annual tradeshows to meet customers and prospects. What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the BI solutions market?
Being an entrepreneur requires pouring your heart and soul into your company, employees, customers, partners, and most importantly, your family as they support you in your venture. Surround yourself with talented individuals that are excited about your company's mission and that can play multiple roles in the early days of your business. Now more than ever, be mindful of cash flow and protect it with great financial discipline. Get out and be proactive at in-person and virtual industry events and meet-ups for likeminded entrepreneurs. Find the right mentor, someone who has done this before, to guide you through the initial startup years. Lastly, have fun as this is a journey, not a destination. How do you envision scaling your company's operations and offerings in 2022? We will continue to scale by being active in strengthening relationships with insurers across the US and by expanding our partnerships with existing relationships like Guidewire and looking for new alliances that can add value for the insured. Additionally, we will continue to drive innovation with our insights gleaned from helping insurers to strengthen our solution features.
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Jeff LoCastro Founder and CEO
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The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solu on Providers 2021
Neener Analytics
Enabling Financial Risk Decisioning with Superior Accuracy
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ince the rise of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, people are more connected to global trends. Previously, these platforms were the mediums of communication and exploration of personal views. Talking about the business perspectives, they were only limited to the brand awareness of business organizations. However, the increasing number of social media users opened new doors for business. These platforms became the advertisement boards for the companies, through which they were connecting to their audience. But to understand the exact approach of consumers, it was important to read their minds. This necessity was fulfilled by social media analytics. In this process, the customer's social activity data is collected and used to make decisions for the companies. By analyzing this data, companies can sell their products accordingly. Realising the immense scope in this field, Neener Analytics, a company specialising in media analytics was formed. Neener Analytics is spearheaded by Jeff LoCastro, the Founder and CEO of the company. In an interview with Insights Success, Mr. Jeff LoCastro shared his journey and future perspectives about Neener Analytics. Following are the highlights of the interview: Jeff, Please take our readers through your journey being at the helm of Neener Analytics. This answer could be its own book! But look, we are a start-up. And we are still small but growing fast. I am not
only the CEO, but I am also the founder. So, I wear a hundred hats. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was, "You have to be constantly ready to switch gears." So, on any given day, I wear the hats of finance, bookkeeper, controller, HR, strategy, governance, product development, business development, sales, press agent, fundraiser, chief negotiator, tea maker, soothsayer, evangelist, and fortune teller. Constantly switching gears, trying to move seamlessly from one discipline to the other and then back again. It is a thrill every day, and I don't know how to do anything else except building the stuff. Describe your company and its products, which address all the needs of your customers. We have come up with a solution for 1-click AI-based financial risk decisioning technology using human data; a regulatory compliant AI-based financial risk decisioning technology using social media or any media used socially to help lenders, insurance companies, and all risk-based businesses to make better decisions and understand specific, individual, risk outcomes for thin-file, no-file, and creditchallenged consumers. Besides, the company is building a delivery platform around its decisioning platform core. The platform will engage the potential borrower at multiple points of contact, including POS using web, postal, email, chat, QR, mobile, app, or text/SMS, and include all the KYC, including facial recognition, income verification, and employment validation.
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There was always a lot of talk about 'Big Data', and everybody cheered it. But big data is not a new concept. It's been around for a hundred years, and it is pretty basic stuff. But most people don't really know what it is. Essentially, big data are aggregations or bins of motivations, behaviors, or affinities. Everyone you think who exhibits those motivations, behaviors, or affinities gets tossed into that bin. But what does it mean? Well, you are not really sure, so you need more aggregations and bins to toss people into. Basically, big data is the practice of, "I don't know you, but I know people like you." What a horrible way to make a decision or form an opinion about someone! In fairness, big data is a perfectly acceptable way to make, for example, marketing decisions. But it is a terrible way to understand authentic outcomes, especially financial risk outcomes. Big data, by its very nature, creates disparate impacts. There had to be a better way. Before big data models, how did people make (accurate) decisions about other individual human beings? How did my grandfather get his first home loan back in 1940? He just walked into the bank, said he wanted a home loan, and the banker said, yes, I know you." The keywords are 'I Know You'. But how did he know? The banker didn't have a lifetime record of all my grandfather's transactions. And he didn't have a collection of his complete payment history.
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What makes your organization a preferred choice of your clients over the competition?
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We are pioneering the idea that the consumer is their own data, and the consumer as their own source of data is the future of all consumer engagement.
But he knew my grandfather would pay him back. That banker knew this based on the conversations and communications he had with him over time. He knew this by having listened to how my grandfather talked about the things in his life, his words, and his communications, exactly what human beings do with other human beings. This is the innovation, except not using big data. This is not sentiment analysis or likes & friends or keywords or phrases. We have cracked the code on Small Data. And Small Data = I know you. What is your idea of impactful leadership? What style of leadership do you personally prefer and have implemented at Neener Analytics?
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Leaders don't lead by themselves. Leaders lead people. So, I think the most important job of any leader, and CEO, is building that team to lead; the priority is putting great people in the right place to succeed. Great leaders attract talented people and put them in a position to win. I don't like to put too many boundaries on people and what we do. People should not be afraid to make mistakes. When your daily task is innovation and not caretaking, if people are afraid of you at worst stagnate, and die or at best move super-slow and fall behind and die. 1. Hire only people that have shared values. I'd rather have the second-best player who shares our values than the best player who doesn't. 2. Give people the freedom to make mistakes. Encourage failure (so-to-speak). When people aren't afraid to fail, they try all kinds of crazy things.
Exhibiting Brilliance Chris Barry, Product Innovation Manager, FIS Global - "Neener Analytics is a FIS portfolio company. We invested because they are solving a fundamental problem faced by virtually every one of FIS's global customers: how to say yes to more borrowers without increasing their risk threshold. We hadn't seen anything like them before. They are receiving a ton of positive attention from internal lines of business as well as from our client base. Jeff LoCastro as a founder and CEO, is highly innovative, and along with co-founder & CTO Marc Thomlinson, CTO, we don't see a ceiling on where this could go.”
Give your opinion on Data Science after the pandemic. What is at the core of what COVID exposed? It exposed the horrific nature of big data's historical, transactional, and relational-based credit decisioning systems. It exposed the ugliness of the definition of big data: "I don't know you, but I know people like you." It exposed the clear need for human-based AI solutions, individual decisioning; Small Data, not big data, and the clear need to use authentic AI (not machine learning) to say to someone, "I know you.” What would be your advice for the emerging and aspiring business leaders? I’ll give the same advice I always give – find something to lead and lead it. Leadership can be practiced. Yes, some people are innate leaders, and some people are just better at it. But you will never know until you start practicing it. Form a group, join a club, learn to organize. Dint wait for your job to deliver leadership to you. Do it yourself. And be prepared to make mistakes. What were the challenges you came across in your career as a business leader? This is a huge question. This could be an entire book. But one of the biggest is facing just how difficult to change other people. And I think it is because they are conditioned to avoid failure or to talk about failure. Change can lead to failure because it is a big unknown. I find that hugely frustrating and is a daily challenge (outside of my organization).
Mahesh Raghavan, Associate Partner, Digital Strategy and Innovation at Infosys - "We partnered with Neener Analytics because they have solved the most fundamental aspect of banking that is broken - assessing a person's financial risk. Current FICO-based models are backward-looking and do not enable lenders to really know their customers. Neener Analytics fills this whitespace bringing back a person's worthiness based on their unique characteristics and ability to pay in the future, and not a series of past payments like FICO does.”
What have you envisioned for your company's future in terms of expansion, the introduction of new services, and talent acquisition? We are really pioneering the idea that the consumer is their own data. And the consumer as their own source of data is the future of all consumer engagement. We are currently in 11 countries, and I see us owning specific market regions in the next ten years. We've already built out two product lines, each delivering five decisioning products. We have another line slated for 2021 and are on track for a new line each of the next 5-years while continuing to expand our decisioning capabilities. We've budgeted for global offices to connect banks, lenders, insurance companies, real estate companies, and others with 4 billion currently invisible consumers globally.
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n this fast-growing world, technology is on the rise with a plethora of innovations. As a result, we can experience improvement in the various industries globally, through advanced tools that are drastically improving. Sooner or later, the new and evolving trends in technology will diversify the marketing industry. The current background of martech aids with a gamut of marketing activities, including marketing attribution, content management, and customer relationship management. Technology has managed to provide the industry with every essential requirement. So far, technology has transformed marketing by making campaigns more personalized and efficient and has created a more integrated system for the customers and the marketers. New emerging trends in the technology in marketing have infused the infrastructure and the systems on which the companies are built, giving value to the procurement, and adding to the bottom line. Martech has introduced engaging ways between brands and customers. This is the crucial reason why marketers require a correct tool and understand the fundamentals of technologies towards the business goals. Looking at a scenario around a few years back, this was a critical task to execute as martech was in the infancy phase with few tools available at its fingertips. The marketing
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industry had a massive development when the software-as-a-service model was introduced. Later, CRM systems developed and increased their efficiency. Since then, many tools have been introduced and catered to diverse companies with various marketing roles. The rapid growth of martech empowered marketers to automate, enhance, and reorganize many characteristics of their day-to-day marketing activities. As technology upgrades to new zeniths, brands are adopting new standards, setting up contemporary trends with the customers with their loyalty and transaction history. It was a challenging task before these martech tools existed. It is the effect of the technology that marketers can now look at the insights and data related to a particular field provided by people, and marketers can see that if the people are clicking ads and getting distracted by an inaccurate call to action (CTA). With this data, marketers can make the required changes, observe the results, gain efficiency, and implement their marketing strategies accordingly. Also, they can continue to refine and personalize their content. The more relevant their messages, their customers are going to engage in a conversation, which eventually can lead to a good connection between the marketer and its customer. The tide will soon change, from software to enhanced allin-one solutions that will empower new tools and coordinate the teams altogether. Martech is quickly catching up with the developing businesses. On the other hand, innovation in digital marketing technology is on the climb sharply as frameworks and technologies make it easier to build, integrate, and operate platforms. Codeless platforms are on the rise now, which is enabling non-developers to build and scale their solutions. This is an accessibility of the martech with enhancements for the innovative marketing platforms with advanced features and progressive capabilities. Fresh marketing solutions and platforms pop up every day, as these solutions are built with personalization options.
companies could apply for task execution, and marketing professionals can rectify the tools for the marketing analysis with creative and innovative experiences that can drive the engagement and provide value towards the prospect and customers. It will also provide them with the following capabilities: Ÿ
Attribution: The ability to understand how every marketing and sales investment is impacting customer retention, customer values, and acquisition.
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Real-time data monitoring: Observe every interaction and activity in real-time rather than wait longer to generate appropriate reports to optimize marketing efforts.
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Easy communication: Marketing professionals can speak to their customers via a medium or channel through an integrated system. This can reduce the efforts and time required for this process.
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Enhanced intelligence: Through the new, improved machines that can analyze, summarise, personalize, and execute the right message to the right time and place for their customers, marketers can execute this process in a brief time, with improved accuracy.
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Improved monitoring: With these systems, the marketers can observe every interaction, can serve their customers as per the requirement, through an effortless process, with improved efficiency and productivity.
Thrusting the constraints With the martech leading the marketing industry into a development era, it is for sure to experience the latest trends and high-end tools to act and redefine the structure of the sector significantly over time.
Additional usage of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-end automation platforms can generate the precise information and data required to enhance the marketing efficiency and insights on the overall buying journey. This helps the companies manage and find out where to put efforts and what would be the outcome of acquiring new customers. As these systems will get smarter over time, as an advantage, they will offer enhanced automation that marketing
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-Abhishek Joshi
SG Analytics V e n t u r i n g To G o B e y o n d E x c e l l e n c e
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he leading business intelligence solution providers cater to their clients’ requirements with better planning and analysis options along with increased accuracy. These companies help their customers with increased sales forecasting and enhanced pricing and offers. One such dominant company making a mark owing to its dedicated efforts is SG Analytics. Established in 2007, it is a leading provider of data-centric research and contextual analytics services. In the following interview, we get to know the company’s journey, its services, its challenges, achievements, and its future plans. Below are the highlights of the interview: Please brief our audience about your company, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the Business Intelligence solutions niche. Founded in 2007, SG Analytics is a leading provider of data-centric research and contextual analytics services to Fortune 500 companies across the globe. Headquartered in Pune, the company has its presence across 7 locations in India, the USA, the UK, and Switzerland. At SG Analytics, we understand our clients’ businesses. We offer research and analytics services that deliver holistic rather than just functional solutions to our clients across BFSI, media & entertainment, technology, and healthcare sectors. Our contextual understanding of our clients’ businesses and data and sector expertise helps us provide actionable, ‘differentiated’ insights to our clients, which help them scale faster. SG Analytics is a specialist in servicing global clients in data analytics, business intelligence, data science, and engineering spaces.
For a company like ours, it is the meaningful mix of our brightest and budding talent with that of global, multidisciplinary, seasoned experts that bring together best-inclass expertise in analytics, business intelligence, data engineering, and visualization. Our experts not only develop solutions, but also consume and implement them to solve real-world business problems. We specialize in creating interactive user-centric dashboards by implementing business intelligence expertise, thereby enabling our clients with impactful, realtime, and scalable solutions. However, what really sets us apart is that we lead with business outcomes: we take time to understand the business goals of our customers, and then apply the right set of intelligence and engineering solutions coupled with business context brought in by a team of domain experts to create compelling business outcomes for our global customers. We have been serving our clients across several domains including BFSI, automotive, media & entertainment, and technology sectors. Our partnership with a leading US media & entertainment conglomerate with a global footprint has now strengthened with the seal of our excellence in data analytics and engineering. Speaking of partnerships, we recently onboarded the largest technology company in the world as our client and will be partnering with them in the area of customized reporting and visualization. We have remained focused in sharpening our capabilities in the field of business intelligence and are determined to strengthen our positioning as the most competent yet enriched player in the BI solutions niche. What other solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
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The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021
Rajesh Viswanath Global Lead for Analytics
With businesses having an endless stream of unorganized data flowing into their systems, companies need to build strategies to control their data and market it efficiently. That’s where SG Analytics comes into play by combining data, machine learning, and software & engineering to build intelligent applications in which our teams have developed authority and expertise. We combine this expertise along with the latest technology frameworks and tools such as Python, Oracle, MySQL, Databricks, Informatica, MicroStrategy, Tableau, PowerBI, and D3.JS and cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform to build and deploy relevant data analytics solutions.
We use our customers’ data lakes and combine data through ML and software engineering to build intelligent applications to achieve monumental change in specific focus areas. They are our experts who create actionable insights by using event-based data and regulate reports, making the process run smoothly without a glitch. We aim to help our customers/clients evolve through their journey of digital transformation starting from incubation to the full-fledged use of business intelligence and valuedriven analytics.
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Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the BI solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future? BI has been part of every corporate discussion over the past many years. And yet, challenges persist in democratizing advanced AI insights across large sections of employees. As new AI-powered BI products emerge, silos will be broken, and every user will be able to leverage data analytics and find insights easily. Simple interfaces, personalized insights, and engaging data experiences will become the hallmarks of data analytics in 2021 and beyond. We are going to see smart, intelligent storytelling in the coming days. AI will improve decision-making. BI is shifting to a new paradigm of advanced data analytics with the integration of natural language, natural search, AI/ML, augmented analytics, automated data preparation, and automated data catalogs. This will transform business decision-making processes with high-quality real-time insights.
We understand our clients' businesses and offer research and analytics services that deliver holistic rather than just functional solutions The combination AI & BI will allow users to complete jobs without difficulty, quickly and effectively. Conversational analytics will gain more and more popularity and be readily adopted. Business users can simply ask questions just like you would in a normal conversation and get instant answers explained in a natural language. Automated Insights
Traditional BI solutions give answer to the question “What happened?” by providing efficient analyses. Today, modern BI solutions are giving the answer for “What is happening, what will happen, and why?” As an example, a digital news company may be looking at a dashboard that gives the predicted topics and associations across various customer segments.
In the coming years, storytelling with the help of automated systems will be popular and help businesses derive value out of the data rapidly. Automated insights use artificial intelligence to dynamically spot patterns and trends in raw data and then describe those findings in plain English. Such solutions author insightful, personalized reports around data at scale.
The Future of Business Intelligence isn’t a Tool. Rather, organizations are looking for a solution to simplify the endto-end workflow - from data prep and governance to visualization, delivery, and action. Two important themes that will gain attention are Augmented Analytics and Automated Insights.
Instead of users spending time determining which insights are more impactful for their business, intelligent storytelling will highlight key findings for them. The system will be able to track changes and build a narrative that’s digestible to the user, point out key findings, and make it easy to deliver through platforms that are consumed the highest. All the BI product providers will add new exciting capabilities in this space, and we are going to see enormous changes in the coming years.
Augmented Analytics In the coming years, we will be able to see BI and AI working together to create augmented analytics and augmented data. Augmented analytics will help businesses to automate the identification of data types, model data from a source, and automate suggestions. We are going to see more smart, automated analytics workflows, and natural language processing makes it possible for all business stakeholders to make confident decisions based on datadriven insights and drive the best possible outcomes without relying on IT or data & analytics experts.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time? The coronavirus pandemic has been quite devastating, at all levels. Every organization, small or big, has faced challenges in running their operations and maintaining business continuity. We have all been in this situation for
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almost about 18 months and counting. At SG Analytics, we all moved into a WFH mode suddenly, which led to some challenges in adapting to remote working. However, in the analytics space, since there is anyway a higher incidence of individuals and groups working from varied locations across the globe, the transition to remote working wasn’t really a challenge for our team. We adopted more collaboration tools to enable seamless communication between teams. Our executive leadership team had regular, informal catchups with teams across the organization to stay connected and involved with everyone within the company. Like others, the analytics team members enjoyed these interactions thoroughly. They had many lively discussions and debates regularly, and Teams and Zoom helped a lot throughout this phase. Gaining momentum was a challenge initially, owing to technical issues with the internet and managing system issues during the lockdown. However, these were resolved over time giving way to a very efficient remote working experience for the team overall. In times of great adversity, SGA has striven to always be present, to always be there for its employees, its partners, and everyone who is part of our family. So, during the pandemic, facing the most adverse of adversities, we knew we had to double-down on our efforts. A fundamental aspect of our employee-first philosophy is ensuring their safety, both physical and mental. Especially during the rough times of the COVID-19 pandemic, our company has been proactive in providing all our people with the connection and nurturing that is hard to come by in such testing times. HR leadership, for example, actively engaged in social mentoring, offering constant support and motivation. Further, our ‘Chai pe Charcha’ initiative saw the senior leadership, including the CEO and co-CEO themselves, directly engaging with SGAites, listening to their concerns, addressing the importance of safety and well-being. Indeed, data-driven through and through, we benchmark employee satisfaction with employee expectation via our company-wide annual Employee Satisfaction Survey. The findings are shared openly so that solutions for improvement can be identified collaboratively, now in virtual meetings. Because that, too, is fundamental. Transparency, the freedom to express yourself, let's not
forget that a sense of community, of belonging, is such a big part of what constitutes meaning and well-being. Before, SGA would regularly organize sports tournaments and cultural events to bolster that sense. The pandemic presented an unprecedented challenge. So, we responded with unprecedented spirit. We celebrated festivals, held yoga and meditation sessions, took breaks for coffee, together, online. But what’s support if it's only supplied at the best of times? In times of dire need, it was moving to witness people offer not just emotional, but also financial support. Medical expenses were paid for by the company and our people. Caregiver leaves were donated. One thing was clear. Without question, the emotional bond we forged during the pandemic would be timeless. A testament to our foundational philosophy. SGA is not a firm. It's a family. What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the BI solutions market? The market size for Business Intelligence (BI) is at the top among the software categories. As per Gartner, global revenue of BI is expected to rise to $22.8 billion by 2021 and foresees additional growth to $29.48 billion by 2022. The business intelligence market is booming and will continue to do so as the market for BI solutions grows as the overall business dynamics have changed drastically due to the pandemic. It foresees additional growth to $29.48 billion by 2022. The business intelligence market is booming and will continue to do so as the market for BI solutions is growing with the overall change in business dynamics due to the pandemic. Here are a few interesting points worth considering for young entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the BI solutions market: 1.
Cloud-based solutions, increasing accessibility, and steadily improving benefits for users are some of the main factors driving the growth of the business intelligence market.
2.
Data security is and is going to continue being a major concern for BI users and providers in the near future. The business intelligence industry will transition from traditional to modern with the help from ML & AI and data scientists are likely to experience role shifts but will remain vital to the day-to-day operation of this industry.
3.
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How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in 2021? We are a research and analytics services provider and continue to remain so in 2021. The market is definitely challenging but then it is wide and large enough for us to find our customer base. Our focus is going to be helping our customers derive insights out of their data assets and improve business operations and generate value for their clients. We will emphasize on helping to build contextual analytics solutions that are useful and are consumed by our client organizations. Certain processes need to be looked at regularly in operations. Our focus is on utilizing ML to automate many such processes. Plenty of solutions are available in the market and many of our customers are using them too. Our goal is to get them insights that are undiscovered, increase the possibility of AI to make the decision-making process sustainable. Our focus is continuously on the following key parameters while developing and executing BI or AI solutions: • • • •
Business value Ease of use Agile and flexible Reduced time to insight
We aim to operate at scale, and we will concentrate on the company’s core competencies. This is where we offer the most value to our clients and customers. The most important aspect of our business is hiring professionally trained data scientists and data engineers. We are laser focused and continue to invest in training our group in these skills. Today is not only about big data, but also about a wide variety of data sources.
About Rajesh Viswanath Rajesh Viswanath is the Global Lead for Analytics at SGA. As analytics continues to evolve, SGA’s mission remains to provide its clients state-of-the-art scalable solutions that simplify the way they meet their business obligations without burdening their operational flexibility. With nearly two decades in the analytics industry, Rajesh has proven knowledge of large-scale implementation of BI and predictive analytics solutions. He and his team designed and developed numerous analytics and BI solutions across domains. Presently, he is serving global M&E giants on their very complex and transformative analytics projects. As part of his journey with the clients, he and his team worked closely with them for successfully implementing BI solutions and generating business value. What clients have to say SGA helped us save a significant amount annually by implementing ML-based automated classification to predict remediation classes basis content of the customer feedback. Automation of monthly and weekly analysis of key business metrics helped us take timely decisions and saved manual intervention. Cross Platform Analytics Lead, Top American Television Network SG Analytics helped us integrate and streamline the sales and marketing campaign monitoring data and create clear visibility into sales and marketing effectiveness, which in turn helped achieve higher conversion. Turnaround time to process sales reports across different groups reduced by 50-60% and also resulted in lower sales reporting cost by 60-70%. Senior Director – Advanced Analytics, One of the leading news & business information services providers in the world
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