DataRPM, a self-proclaimed pioneer in cognitive business intelligence, has closed a $5.1 million Series A funding round led by InterWest Partners with the participation of CIT GAP Funds. The funding will be used to accelerate DataRPM’s global go-to-market strategy.

DataRPM sets out to change the way we work with data, making analytics more accessible and easier to use by solving the two main barriers to the adoption of data analysis – time-consuming data modeling and usability. The DataRPM business intelligence (BI) platform automates the data modeling process and employs a natural language question-and-answer interface to simplify data analysis and visualization.

“Our mission is to simplify business intelligence. We provide insights, actions, and results from of the massive amount of data with a machine first, removing the cumbersome manual lift. Pairing our computational search platform with machine learning and natural language interface, greatly simplifies the process of gaining insights from data,” said Sundeep Sanghavi, co-founder and CEO of DataRPM.

DataRPM’s BI platform in available both on-premise and the cloud.  It pulls data from disparate sources and stores it in distributed computational search index, rather than traditional data warehouse and provides a natural language and search-based query interface to analyze the data, rather than SQL or other code-based interfaces.  This results in users being able to easily analyze and visualize their data in near real-time with no limit to the size of data.

Business Intelligence and analytics is imperative in the enterprise, as it helps make sense of all the information collected for a business to apply as actionized decisions.  Unfortunately, only a small portion of the enterprise is leveraging the available data produced by BI and analytics.  According to a 2010 Accenture Institute for High Performance report, only 20 percent of employees are considered business analytics professionals, and the remaining percent, are considered analytics amateurs and they are made up of executives and managers.

BI is data democracy

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Dr. Rado Kotorov, vice president of product marketing for Information Builders, believes that Business Intelligence is a job for everyone.

“We always interpreted BI and analytics as a job everyone had to do, which isn’t wrong. But the difference is analysts go through the analytics and data from an analysis perspective and often take their time, while professionals make their decisions based on tacit professional knowledge,” he said.

Tableau Software shares the same ideals as Dr. Kotorov in that BI is a job for everyone, not only a task for a specific set of people.  Tableau’s desktop-based data visualization tool provides company-wide access to knowledge that impacts an organization on every level.  Tableau Desktop is now being adopted by many large companies and media organizations to create sophisticated visual representations, business dashboards, and fast analytics of big data.  Its drag n’ drop interface allows people to easily create interactive reports, dashboards and visualizations.

Though some may perceive Tableau’s effort as dumbing down data, the company sees it more as making tools more accessible so data can make more sense..

“When people think of dumbing down, they think of less capabilities,” explains Elissa Fink, CMO at Tableau.  “we think it’s about making the tools accessible.”

Tableau has also leaned heavily on strategic partnerships to push data democracy, teaming with Splunk to allow users to access Splunk Enterprise through an ODBC driver.  This lets users access new sources of information without having to learn a new application, expediting its adoption and fostering an increase in productivity.

“Our alliance with Tableau extends the value that Splunk software unlocks in machine data,” explained Guido Schroeder, Senior Vice President of Products at Splunk, in a statement, “to Tableau’s enthusiastic and growing customer base, many of whom are also Splunk customers.”

• More key partnerships

To help the enterprise with BI and analytics, some companies are already offering apps and tools to make it easy for clients to leverage BI solutions. In this growing space, industry alliances are necessary to push forward the analytics and visualization tools that are user-friendly and accessible across an entire organization.

A recent example is Triad Technology Partners, which teamed up with Northcraft Analytics, a platform-independent BI application and services company focused on providing customers with powerful analytics to drive discussions around the value of IT within their organization.  Northcraft Analytics’ suite of applications was built on a standard Microsoft BI infrastructure, a familiar route to today’s end user.

“Triad is thrilled to expand our partner ecosystem with solutions from Northcraft Analytics,” said Bridget Dunnington, CEO of Triad Technology Partners.  “Our ServiceNow customers can now provide visibility into their ITSM projects, demonstrating the value they bring to the organization at large.  The suite of BI applications from Northcraft not only makes this possible, it delivers comprehensive dashboards and metrics for the executive suite both quickly and easily.  This is going to be a game changer for our customers and we look forward to a long partnership with Northcraft.”

image: Saad Faruque via photopin cc