Data Applied Crunches Business Data On-Premise and In The Cloud

Nov. 30, 2009 - PRLog -- Data Applied, a provider of Business Intelligence and Data Mining solutions, announces the launch of a revolutionary Web-based Data Mining solution. The solution offers a wide array of data analysis and visualization techniques, designed to extract valuable knowledge from raw data. Example of applications include analyzing survey results, visualizing product inventories, optimizing marketing campaigns, or finding hidden patterns in product orders.

"For years, large companies such as banks, insurers, or retailers have reaped the benefits of Data Mining to optimize their business. However, because of tremendous complexity and high costs, automated data analysis has remained out of reach for small and medium businesses. We're changing the rules of the games by making advanced algorithms accessible to regular business users, not just teams of statisticians working for large companies." said Data Applied's founder Dominic Pouzin, an ex-Microsoft veteran.

Data Applied's client uses Silverlight technology, and runs directly from within a Web browser. Users can connect over the Web, upload data, and perform analysis tasks. Interactive data visualizations can be accessed over the Internet, or deployed to private intranets. Behind the scenes, an XML Web API enables on-demand remote data analysis, or low footprint integration with other products. Collaboration features, such as sharing data sets, tagging analysis results, exporting content as images, and searching within results, are also included.

"One problem with data mining tools from traditional vendors is that they often require PhD-level statisticians and programmers. Another problem is that they rely on outdated technology: no Web-based access, limited collaboration features, static visualizations. In the Age of Google, users expect interactive analysis, pervasive search, user collaboration, and Web-based access. So we invested heavily in these features."

Analysis techniques include pivot charts, tree maps, time series forecasting, correlation analysis, outlier detection, association rule mining, clustering, decision trees, and similarity maps. The company is planning to keep adding features such as market-basket analysis or time sequence mining. Behind its Web API, Data Applied relies on SQL technology, either Open Source (MySQL) or commercial (Microsoft SQL Server).

"We see companies trying to analyze data sets such as survey results or sales data using conventional spreadsheet software. Some analysts end up plotting hundreds of pie charts to find which groups are more likely to answer yes to a specific question, buy a specific product, or find outliers. The algorithms we implement do that automatically, but some companies don't know it is possible. Once they see it though, they want it."

Data Applied's Web solution can be installed on a single computer, but was also designed to scale. By installing additional servers, analysis workload is automatically distributed to a computing mesh. Analysis is performed by streaming data, so the whole data set need not fit in memory. Implemented algorithms were also selected for their ability to handle real-world mixes of missing, numeric, and categorical data.

"Some vendors focus on processing terabytes of data to the detriment of user experience. We implement state-of-the-art scalable algorithms and leverage distributed computing. But we also recognize that many business data sets contain at most several hundred thousand records. So we remain very focused on an intuitive user experience, and close to real-time analysis. While purists might disagree, we also think it makes sense to mix data mining and data visualization features."

About Data Applied
Data Applied revolutionizes data-driven decision making by integrating rich analytics, data mining, and information visualization capabilities - all using a zero footprint Web interface, collaboration features, and a secure XML Web API. By extracting valuable knowledge from data in domains as varied as Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Social Sciences or Non-Profit, Data Applied helps organizations make better data-driven decisions and improve efficiency. Find out more by visiting http://www.data-applied.com.