Copyright © 2013 http://jtonedm.com James Taylor
I got an update from Aha! recently on their Aha! Analytics Platform. Aha! believes that organizations must embed and automate analytic disciplines at the operational level so that people running the business day to day can apply analytics. To deliver on this they have been expanding their analytic platform capabilities, supporting big data and more.
The potential for an analytic platform is to extract meaningful and actionable analytics from big (and small) data, to connect this to timely decision-making, improve analytic collaboration and create what they call “ambient” analytics. They see a number of challenges to this potential including the constant expansion of data variety, volume and velocity; that most data is “dark” and not leveraged; that the established BI/analytics market is a set of disjointed and costly tools; and that it is hard for organizations to apply high value predictive and prescriptive analytics. In addition there is little or no closed loop capability; no self-service analytics for decision-makers, their staffs and operations; and a shortage of analytic expertise.
The value from analytics increases as the degree of intelligence added to data increases. As companies move from simple summaries and reporting to descriptive and predictive analytics, prescriptive actions and operationalizing analytics they get more value from their data. Aha! believes that moving up this value curve requires a unified and comprehensive platform, and a platform that supports big data.
The new Aha! Analytics Platform:
- Manages diverse structured and unstructured data sources
- Unifies analytic producers and consumers for strategic, tactical and operational decisions
- Operationalizes analytics throughout the enterprise
- Delivers real-time, relevant insights to the right person or system
- Automates rapid model creation and management
They focus on dramatically reduced implementation times, a flexible path to analytics from multiple start points, several engines for operational deployment and eliminating the need for scarce skills through automation. They offer multi-tenant, packaged and branded solutions.
Architecturally the platform has a number of layers:
- Dynamic Model Data
The base layer is a facility that accepts all types of data to create different levels of analytic intelligence - Adaptive Event Processing
Events are cascaded through their event process engine to manage real-time and long-running analytic applications (including 3rd party tools) - The final layer consists of four core capabilities:
- Aha Predictive Streams!
Reads in real-time data and scores in real-time, automates model re-training and re-specification. - Aha Decisions!
Provides self-service analytics supporting trending, forecasting, modeling and automation of key performance indicators. - Aha Foundry!
An analytic workbench for both producers and consumers of analytic models. - Aha Modeling Systems!
Provides ensemble data mining, discrete event simulation and Monte Carlo models.
- Aha Predictive Streams!
The whole stack is delivered as multi-brandable, multi-tenant solutions that support web services and domain specific languages. The new platform is still wrapped around core capabilities to display and manage KPIs that are constantly updated. Predictions and forecasts are integrated with these KPIs and the underlying model allows for hierarchical management of these KPIs at different levels. Their flashboard technology has been updated and new widgets allow multiple KPIs to be in a single widget while trends and forecasts on several KPIs can be viewed and manipulated as a set to allow links and influences between KPIs to be explored.
Vertical solutions developed using Aha! range across enterprise operations, customer interaction and customer experience, digital marketing, sales optimization and performance management.
More information on Aha! is available at www.ahasoftware.com with a short video that lays out the platform components and Aha! is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies report.
I am doing a webinar with Aha april 11, 2013 - Operational Customer Interaction Analytics with Aha!,Abundance Studios
