The challenges of the last year have forced business teams to new levels of creativity, driving innovation and change as they assume the lead role in new data analysis initiatives. Business people are no longer content waiting for IT experts to gather, prepare and deliver data subsets to them—they don’t have time to wait.
Business teams need data now to make the strategic decisions that will ensure business survival. And they need an accessible, all-in-one platform to be able to explore, drill in, and discover without having to go back to IT every time they have a new question.
Enter Incorta 5, which is generally available as of this month.
For the past several years, Incorta has won fans in IT by offering a new way to deliver enterprise analytics. If you can analyze data directly—without reshaping it and summarizing it–you gain a host of benefits including: agility, security, and flexibility. However, data from enterprise ERP or CRM systems is very complex with potentially hundreds of tables and relationships to track.
Incorta can analyze original, detailed source data directly, with simply incredible speed due to its groundbreaking innovation, Direct Data Mapping. This makes it very attractive to IT people. And now, as we release Incorta 5, the ease-of-use, agility, and accessibility via an all-in-one Web interface is winning over business people as well. Some of our biggest customers are moving their business users off of other analytics tools onto Incorta, because it is so easy to deploy.
And that is what Incorta 5 is really about: Making data analysis easier for business users at companies of all sizes.
Of course, we’ve got enhancements for IT practitioners: a new, faster in-memory SQL engine that makes quick work of very complex tasks, such as multi-stage derivations and deeply nested joins; a new REST API for developers; support for Spark 3; dynamic memory allocation; and new supported notebook languages including R and Scala for data enrichment and integrated machine learning. That’s pretty cool. But the biggest winners this time around are business users, who can now take the lead in exploring data for the insights they want. Here are some of the highlights:
Access to 200+ new data sources
Typically line-of-business people are limited to a narrow range of departmental financial data or operational data, which allows them to see if sales or spending are going up or down, for example. They can do simple business intelligence and reporting, but not real analytics. The core of analytics is being able to take two or more different data sets and look for correlations. That gives you new insight into your business. For example, how did the decrease in marketing spend impact sales? How did weather conditions affect profitability by product, and by region? That’s why we’re providing access to a much broader set of data sources, through our OEM partnership with CData. The farther you can reach into your organization, the better your analysis is going to be.
Revamped data exploration tools
We did a top-to-bottom rewrite of our data exploration tool using brand new technology. It’s always a hard decision to rebuild something from the ground up, but we had come to a cul de sac with the old interface. We knew it would not support the capabilities we plan to add in the future, and we needed to break from the past to make something truly simple to use.
If you look at some of the popular tools on the market today that claim to be easy to use, they might be easy for an analyst, or an Excel jockey, but not for the average business person. Our UX team spurred us to look deeply into the typical workflow of a business person seeking answers, and they streamlined the workflow to make it easier, and at the same time, more powerful.
We also made it extensible, so that it can support faster development and customized visualizations. Every industry has specialized ways of viewing data. Maybe they are a part of some proprietary system, or are built, maintained and published as standalone applications. Now any way of looking at data can live in Incorta alongside the rest of your data and analytics.
Our new data exploration tool is so easy that you can confidently deploy it without training. And it is fast. Instead of bringing a slide deck to your next meeting and then leaving with too many questions to follow up on, bring Incorta to the meeting, make changes to the analysis on the spot and give answers right away. Incorta fundamentally changes your relationship with data.
Cloud-ready
The final thing we’ve done is to make Incorta cloud-ready. Soon, users of all stripes, at companies of any size, will be able to sign up and get Incorta on demand.
We are always mindful of providing more value to advanced practitioners, data scientists and IT professionals as we continue to build and improve upon our product. We will never skimp on security, reliability or performance. Incorta will remain a power tool that can grow from departmental solution to enterprise-wide standard.
Business users are taking a bigger role in data analysis projects. And Incorta 5 may be exactly what business needs today, a powerful yet pragmatic solution for delivering enterprise data in an easy-to-use all-in-one package.
If you would like to learn how to enable agile, accurate, and fast decision-making for your team, check out the eBook: Next Level Data Analytics.