What is Search-Powered Analytics?

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2 Big data is a big deal right now. IDC predicts that worldwide revenue for big data and analytics will grow from $130 billion in 2016 to $203 billion in And they estimate that created data will increase tenfold by 2025, reaching 163 zettabytes. With the pace of business faster than ever, the present way of doing data analytics won t work. Today, business users typically share their reporting requirements with their technical counterparts. Analysts spend months building out reporting. Business users ultimately get a dashboard of their key metrics as identified when the reporting project began. If they want additional reporting, they have to submit a new request. And likely wait days or even weeks to get the data back. The current state of data analytics drives decision cycle times that aren t sustainable for businesses looking to gain a competitive advantage. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 2

3 In a recent Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report, Gartner describes a tipping point of enterprises moving toward self-service options. The evolution and sophistication of the self-service data preparation and data discovery capabilities available in the market has shifted the focus of buyers in the BI and analytics platform market toward easy-to-use tools that support a full range of analytic workflow capabilities and do not require significant involvement from IT to pre-define data models upfront as a prerequisite to analysis, says Gartner. Gartner also singled out search-based data discovery and natural language query as a way to provide analytics to more users. This ebook explains search-based data discovery and its benefits. We also describe eight qualities you should consider when evaluating search-based analytics tools. Whichever solution you select for your company, we believe the future of analytics is powered by a user experience that s as simple as an Internet search. And we call that Search-Powered Analytics. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 3

4 Why Search-Powered Analytics? In this Age of the Internet, the paradigm we use most for finding answers is simple: a search box. Researching vacation spots, finding phone numbers, settling trivia bets all answers are waiting on our next visit to a search browser. Search-based data discovery tools give you answers in seconds rather than days or even weeks. Because of this, you can ask additional questions very easily, and on an iterative basis. It s almost like having a conversation with a data analyst. The greater volume of discovery leads to a much deeper understanding of your business and your customers. Business users can develop new theories about their business and verify these theories with their data inquiries instantly. Once they ve made their discoveries, users can immediately develop new initiatives to improve their company performance. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 4

5 8 Keys to Search-Based Data Discovery 1. Natural Language 2. Search Guidance 3. Data Visualizations 4. Data Access 5. Scalability 6. Transparent Logic 7. Security 8. Rapid Implementation What is Search-Powered Analytics - 5

6 1. Natural Language: In Plain English The easiest search-based tools rely upon questions asked in natural language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been around since the 1950s. The challenge historically has been the scope and complexity of human language. In recent years, products such as Wolfram Alpha and Apple s Siri have narrowed those limitations. Similarly, tools that only focus on learning a company s terminology, policies, and performance indicators are able to give much more precise answers. Each implementation of AnswerRocket focuses on that particular company and its use cases. AnswerRocket learns everything about the data for those chosen use cases: events, important concepts, and key measurements. The AnswerRocket platform also knows business concepts and can: Natively handle terms like compare, average, share of, and so on. Interpret natural expressions for dates ( last quarter or from April to August ) and ranking ( best salesperson or top-selling product ). Apply financial concepts such as growth, retention, profitability, value, cost, etc. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 6

7 1. Natural Language: In Plain English (cont.) Some other search-based data discovery tools only work with specific keywords. Phrasing questions in a specific way for a machine to understand can be frustrating, especially when it comes to adding new users or data sources. In everyday life, we rely on natural language to quickly exchange thoughts. Pausing to convert those thoughts into a machine-ready form disrupts the creative process. Likewise, limiting your inputs to metrics and dimensions can severely restrict the information that can be extracted. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 7

8 2. Search Guidance: May We Suggest To deal with the inevitable ambiguities associated with natural language, search-based BI tools should, like Internet browsers, help users with their questions. Two such features are found in AnswerRocket: Highlighting If a term is recognized as being important to your data, you ll see it highlighted in the search bar as you re typing. Search Suggestions As you re typing, AnswerRocket offers suggestions on important terms that you might be looking for. This is both based on your data as well as past questions asked. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 8

9 3. Data Visualizations: The Future is Easy to See Data visualizations have become fairly common analytics outputs. They help tell a story more quickly than just words or numbers. MIT reports that up to 85% of our perception, learning, and cognition are done visually. It s also easier to illustrate your point when sharing visuals with executives or other business groups. Here s where AnswerRocket is different: Direct Answers After asking a question, you want an answer not a link to a page, which may or may not contain your answer. AnswerRocket gives you immediate answers to your questions, in the form of visualizations. Smart Visualizations Based on the data returned, AnswerRocket knows which visualizations work best. A ranking of top products might generate a bar chart. A request to compare category sales by quarter and region may produce a heat map. AnswerRocket automatically selects a visualization, giving business users one less thing to worry about. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 9

10 3. Data Visualizations: The Future is Easy to See (cont.) Of course, users have ultimate flexibility over which visualization to use. Make your line chart a scatter plot, or turn your bar chart into a geographic map. You can also customize your visualizations - change the color scheme, flip the X and Y axes, stack bars, and more. Dashboards Have a Place, Too Most legacy business intelligence solutions have a dashboard. But when users have follow-up questions, they must make a separate request to IT to get more data. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 10

11 3. Data Visualizations: The Future is Easy to See (cont.) Setting up an AnswerRocket dashboard only takes a few minutes. Every answer is automatically saved as a tile on a dashboard. You can arrange your tiles in whatever order or size you like. As your business priorities change, you can easily adjust your dashboards. If you have multiple responsibilities to your job (and who doesn t these days?), you can set up multiple dashboards. One might contain all of your sales-related reports, and a second one could show your operations metrics. Dashboards are updated automatically as new data becomes available. AnswerRocket s dashboards are also powered by search. Users can search directly from within any report on the dashboard and reframe the original question. Or take it in an entirely new direction. Users can also modify the elements within a report on the dashboard, such as changing the timeframe. Share and Share Alike Share specific tiles or entire dashboards with your colleagues. Or them a spreadsheet of your data. You can also set up s to automatically distribute key data on a recurring basis, or as alerts when certain metrics hit a threshold that warrants attention. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 11

12 Live Connectors 4. Data Access: Here, There, and Everywhere Some companies have fully transitioned to cloud storage. Others need to remain on-premises for now, due to security concerns, sunk costs, or network constraints. And many others are hybrids, with data stored both locally and in the cloud. App Connectors Data access should be a key consideration when selecting a data analytics tool. Make sure your approach gives you the most flexibility in the long run. With the innovation happening in this space Hadoop, Spark, and more you should avoid proprietary technology that may restrict your options and significantly increase your costs. AnswerRocket can handle data anywhere. If you have an on-premises data warehouse with capacity to service BI users, AnswerRocket can access it directly through a growing list of supported connectors, including Spark SQL, SAP HANA, Teradata, and Apache Drill. On the other hand, if you have a private or public cloud high performance cluster, AnswerRocket can also leverage that data. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 12

13 5. Scalability: Bigger than Big You would think when talking about big data that all BI tools could handle a massive amount of data but that s not always the case. AnswerRocket has been successfully implemented on datasets with more than 10 billion rows. We can pull your data from connectors such as Salesforce. com and DoubleClick into a centralized environment. Or we can tap directly into connectors such as Apache Spark and Teradata, making your data accessible through natural language. AnswerRocket leverages Amazon s Redshift cloud database platform. In this hyper-scalable environment, AnswerRocket retrieves data in parallel across multiple database servers on datasets as large as two petabytes. 2PETABYTES Some search-based data discovery tools are based on proprietary database technology and hardware platforms, which can severely limit the amount of data and sources businesses can use. Others limit natural language capabilities to data sets smaller than 250MB. An enterprise-level solution needs to provide a search-based user experience for more than just spreadsheets. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 13

14 6. Transparent Logic: Search Without the Mystery To have confidence in their data, users must be able to see exactly which sources have been used to drive their analytics. Transparency is critical for an enterprise solution. With AnswerRocket, data queries can be easily verifed. Our data certifcates provide a full audit trail for our answer to each question, the age of the data, the SQL that was generated, and what fields and sources were used. Questions can be tracked from natural language through its SQL query on your data model, making it easy for your IT staff to support users and administer the system. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 14

15 7. Security: Safe and Protected Security of your data has to be one of your top priorities. Any business analytics tool you consider should be built with this in mind. AnswerRocket has all the security features your business requires, including SSL to secure data in transit, with optional hardware security module (HSM) encryption for data at rest in our cloud. From a business perspective, it s important that the right people have the right access to the right data to do their jobs and nobody else. AnswerRocket s built-in roles and permissions keep data secure by row - so regional managers only have access to their region s data, for example. AnswerRocket also secures data by column, so only users you specify have access to sensitive data such as employee salaries or customer contact information. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 15

16 8. Rapid Implementation Connect Companies that select AnswerRocket are typically able to start asking questions of their data within a few days or even hours. That immediately transforms a department such as marketing or operations into an entire group of citizen data scientists. Read Generate Stats We quickly developed habits of looking at things more often and from more angles, says Adam Levy, President of SnapAV. AnswerRocket s speed and easy access to data was a game changer. And the analytics team that had been so overworked with routine report requests? With AnswerRocket in place, they re now freed up to support more sophisticated queries. Generate Domain Model Part of what makes our implementations so fast is our Agile-style approach. Our domain-model approach bridges your physical database, your users, and your business processes. AnswerRocket is trained to know how a business user s key metrics and focus areas correlate to the stored data. Refine Domain Model When business users develop complex questions (such as cohorts or correlations) and aren t quite sure how to search for that data, they can flag the question in the system. Either an analyst colleague or AnswerRocket specialist can provide immediate support, showing them how to answer these questions in the future. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 16

17 8. Rapid Implementation (cont.) Analysts can make these more sophisticated concepts readily available throughout the business by associating them with simple, natural language terms. In that way, AnswerRocket is continually learning and becoming more powerful to your business. Your administrators have complete access to add, modify, and remove users. They can also easily add new data, data sources, or data criteria no waiting for an AnswerRocket resource to assist. Other search-based data discovery tools may require months of data preparation and consolidation. Those tools may be based in machine learning but not be equipped to quickly understand your corporate language. Once you re up and running on other tools, you may still be reliant upon the tool s provider whenever you need to add users, update profiles, or to bring in new data. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 17

18 AnswerRocket: Expanding Search-Powered Analytics Search-Powered Analytics is about natural language processing, intuitive data visualizations, and handling large-scale data. But it s so much more than the technology. Search-Powered Analytics is about transforming the way your business works. About empowering your business users with data quicker than they ve ever experienced. And enabling your technical analysts to focus on more complex challenges, benefitting the entire enterprise. Search-Powered Analytics lets you understand your business more deeply than you ever have before. And with that knowledge, the opportunity to reach new heights is limitless. What is Search-Powered Analytics - 18