RefinePro Announces Open Beta of Cloud-based Data Preparation Service

TORONTO - Nov. 14, 2014 - PRLog -- RefinePro, the cloud-based platform that simplifies the data preparation process, is pleased to announce the opening of its Public Beta. RefinePro is software that makes it easy for staff - whether they work in marketing, administration, or accounting - to clean and transform their data directly, without having to wait for  IT to do it for them, a traditional business bottleneck.

Why is this important? Today the most pressing data-related problems that businesses experience involve managing and working with their core data, such as customer, supplier, or inventory listings, market analysis, and survey results. Not only is the information stored in a variety of systems and formats, the people who end up cleaning and refining the data are not the people who know the data.

For instance, when the marketing department wants to clean and consolidate their customer contact information, they rely on IT for the process -- but the IT staff doesn’t necessarily know what the various fields and tags signify nor have a deep interest in understanding what the priorities are. The process often means the data is passed through several sets of hands (IT followed by analysts) before returning to the original department, which often leads a lack of trust in the results - plus it just takes too long.

Using RefinePro streamlines the process and increases the sense of ownership of the data.

RefinePro enables business people to clean and manipulate their own data (e.g. remove duplicates and typos), analyze it, and then convert it for use in other systems, all in an Excel-like interface -- only faster and with more power and options.

Based on an open source project (OpenRefine), RefinePro takes free, unsupported software and offers a predictable, tested, and supported version in a secure managed environment. The platform takes care of the responsibility for installing, troubleshooting, and fixing issues. With very little training, the software helps the user integrate data from a variety of internal sources, enrich it with supporting materials from repositories like DBpedia or Freebase, and analyze the resulting data set to generate reports and recommendations.

Whether your team mates require a point and click interface for beginner users or can take advantage of the powerful expression language builder for advanced scripting, RefinePro is an essential tool for all businesses that deal in data.

Try it for one month free now, at www.RefinePro.com