With the arrival of the Internet of Things, data has becomes more available than ever and is leveraged by end users to gain better insights. Having a platform that analyzes and makes sense of this data, therefore, becomes critical.
With the arrival of the Internet of Things, data has becomes more available than ever and is leveraged by end users to gain better insights. Retailers, for example, study customer habits and behavior for merchandising, while hotels rely on operations data to gain further efficiency and energy savings. Having a platform that analyzes and makes sense of this data, therefore, becomes critical.
That was the point raised by Vincent Woon, Cofounder of
Holistics Software, which provides business intelligence solutions.
“Holistics is a cloud business intelligence software that helps companies automate the preparation of raw database data into reports and insights,” Woon said. “Startups and growing businesses track key performance indicators closely, and data teams spend a lot of time to condense operational data, such as payments, CRM records, and orders, into insights. Holistics provides both the analysis and automation capabilities for teams to move away from the mundane and focus on understanding drivers of business growth.”
According to Woon, what makes their solution unique and special is that all the data analytics is done on a single platform, as opposed to deploying one tool each for data preparation, reporting automation, visualization and advanced analytics. “Such a setup increases cost and reduced flexibility, especially as decision-makers desire quicker turnaround from analysts. With one product that requires no additional training, teams can get started in under ten minutes and build impactful visualizations for executive consumption,” he said.
Holistics’ backend is hosted on the cloud, and the product is built on a Ruby-on-Rails stack with a VueJS front-end, Woon said. “As Holistics sits between a user writing queries and the database that is being queried, a lot of input/output operations, querying and displaying of data, and rendering of visualization are the key functionalities. Doing these in a quick, responsive, and within a browser window drives us to be efficient and lean,” he said.
Enabling AI and deep learning
Meanwhile, with artificial intelligence and deep learning becoming more common, Woon said that Holistics can be an enabler in this regard, too. “Holistics will be an enabler for organizations that wish to adopt AI into their products, as model building requires data to be organized, categorized and automated. Holistics’ data preparation suite perfectly complements data science teams by reducing the effort in creating data sets, and improving the time taken to make changes as data scientists can make changes to SQL on the fly,” he said. “On the other hand, the analysts that Holistics empowers to answer business questions with data may find some of their duties replaced by voice assistants. For example, today, a CEO who wants to know the KPIs of a business uses a dashboard or goes through an analyst for an ad-hoc request. AI technologies may develop to a point where the question could be automatically answered by a bot that can intelligently passes through the company’s data. While we are not far away from the latter manifesting, we believe that the forces related the former will dominate, and that there is a tremendous opportunity as companies adopt newer technologies. Data is the fuel in these new technologies, and Holistics will be an important player in ensuring that the right data is made available to people, systems, and models.”
Ultimately, Holistics aims to make their solutions accessible to everyone regardless of their technical skills. “Business intelligence was previously a vertical function with a handful of experts, but is now becoming a ‘horizontal’ enabler, whereby associates across different functions use and interact with data. This provides a tremendous opportunity for Holistics which aims to provide tools for people with varying degrees of technical ability. Holistics caters to the technically savvy analyst as well as the business user who wants to self-serve questions with a simple drag-and-drop interface,” he said.