What Sets Tellius Apart From BI

We work with organizations around the world every day who are looking for a tool that helps business users get the answers they need. These organizations for all of eternity have wanted to know – what happened, why did it happen, how to react? This model has been applied to making decisions around who to target, products to develop, areas to explore, business models to deploy, setting prices, negotiations and beyond.

Analytical tools were slowly developed to address different pieces of this decision making process. As technology advanced, each progressive part of this process was addressed.

While all fantastic in their own right, using a data prep, dashboarding, search and modeling tool that were haphazardly cobbled together is time consuming, unintuitive and inefficient. 

BI dashboards, reports and visualization tools are good for showing operational metrics and the things that users know what to look for. However, visual discovery can’t find signals in the noise – especially at the scale of today and tomorrow’s data sizes. These tools are only effective when users know what to look for.

When it comes to why data is changing, or what is driving a particular behavior, manual analysis and data science tools are required to model and find key drivers. These require specialized, technical skill sets that are in high demand and short supply with a high barrier to entry.

Where do business users live within this ecosystem? Today they are at the start and end of this cobbled together process, givers and receivers of questions and answers. Business users are beholden to the whim and time constraints of their peers with technical skill, and the makeshift systems in place to support them. Friction from communicating between different groups, moving data and skill barriers elongate this process.

Meanwhile, in their personal lives business users experience a level of inclusivity and automation that they could never find at work. First class citizens at home, they are second class citizens when it comes to applying data to their work decisions. Hamstrung by an overwhelming amount of dashboards, standalone search tools, AutoML tools and a team that takes 4-7 days on average to develop new reports, they are begging for a better way.

Written by: admin,

at Tellius

What About Search?

Much noise has been made as of late about search tools – how they will revolutionize how business users interact with data. An easy, natural language interface is a requirement if you want to reach more users and accelerate their pace of decision making – but it still only addresses the “what” part of the problem.

With natural language search, users now have a new interface for their dashboarding tools. This results in a slightly modernized ecosystem that looks like this:

Enter Decision Intelligence

Here at Tellius, we saw a gap in these tools because they don’t go far enough. Analytics have been developed to make decisions and act on information. Obviously, companies are not collecting data for the fun of it – data is acting as an input to a decision making process.

Typical Time to Insight = Hours to Days

Traditional dashboarding tools and their recent shift to search are fantastic for establishing the “what” via either dashboards or a more intuitive natural language interface.

Where they fall short is the “why” and “how” pieces of the decision making process. While many claim the ability to deliver “automated insights”, the actual information that they deliver is universally basic and immature.

What Sets Tellius Apart From BI Vendors

Tellius brings a new way of thinking to the decision making process. This revolutionary discipline is decision intelligence, and it is what sets Tellius apart. In a decision intelligence application, business users are first class citizens, powered by innovative machine learning methods that allow them to answer what, why and how completely on their own – supporting an end-to-end decision making process. Artificial intelligence is at the core Tellius, woven throughout the architecture to make suggestions, powering real answers and enabling predictions that can make a real impact.

Decision intelligence provides the right piece of information at the right time, and will separate the winners from the losers over the next 20 years. Now, business users need not wait for anyone, and they can traverse the entire decision process 90% faster than ever before.

Relevant & Impactful Insights vs Random Anomalies

The output of a traditional dashboarding and search application is a visualization. Business users and analysts are paid to sift through these visualizations and find the key pieces of information that will help to answer a question. Quite frequently, the business user and the analyst will need to communicate several times, iterating on different questions that will support a decision.

With Tellius, our Genius Insights engine provides AI-driven Insights in seconds. These are beautiful summaries of all of the key drivers responsible for a change or behavior. Using a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques, these automated insights expose the right piece of information at the right time in order to free up business users to make immediate decisions. Not only are insights constructed to be interpreted by business users at a glance – they are transparent, easily explainable and auditable.

Competing vendors offer up “insights” that are simple outliers or trend lines.

Competitive “Automated Insights”

Tellius Genius Insights go farther than ever before by identifying and ranking key contributors for a change across dimensions and metrics, finding deep and interesting segments or comparing cohorts to find what drives differences between them. These interactive, flexible Insights are built to answer the difficult “why” questions that with other vendors take hours of sifting through search queries or limited “automated insights”.

Tellius Genius Insights

What → Why → How: The Fastest Way to an Answer

Tellius puts business users first whereas they are treated as second class citizens by other tools today. Never before has a completely integrated experience that supports the decision making process allowed users to traverse their entire analytics journey, from “what” to “why” to “how”.

Search is the starting point of our user journey, and provides an intuitive natural language interface throughout Tellius. Asking a question in the familiar syntax of your own language – not only keyword based – results in an immediate visualization of the relevant answer, across all of your data.

Building a home for business users to both interact and search their data at scale while also applying true artificial intelligence to find, rank and communicate “why” answers at scale means that we are powered by two unique technologies. We built a Fast Query Engine (FQE) to power lightning fast search, and an In-Memory Compute Engine (ICE) that enables our Genius Insights and predictive capabilities.

From visualizing and discovering “what” happened with a robust visual engine, to one-click Insights that answer the “why” and AutoML capabilities that enable anyone to predict “how” to impact the future, Tellius is the one stop shop for business users to get the information they need.

Infinitely Scalable, On Demand Insights for all of your Data

Tellius is built on Apache Spark, leveraging this open source computing framework that is built for petabytes of data and thousands of users as the core to our technology. The result is an elastically scalable, in-memory distributed architecture that can handle tomorrow’s data sizes and volumes.

The Tellius architecture is completely containerized, built on microservices and features completely automated autoscaling. This has enabled us to make public a fully functional hosted SaaS solution called Tellius On Demand, with no data limits and a consumption-based pricing model as low as $2 per credit. Our flexible, modern architecture also enables us to make available a free trial with no feature restrictions.

This is a unique, industry-leading architecture that is only possible because of the investments we have made to our technological backbone. While other vendors offer a variety of deployments, they lack true dynamic scalability and infrastructure flexibility, resulting in painful management, deployment headaches and limited ability to scale for increases in demand or data growth. Without dynamic scaling, organizations find themselves paying for infrastructure that they only use during peak demand.

Seamlessly Integrated Data Transformation at Scale

The current data preparation process for both business and technical users is disjointed at best. Today most visualization and data science tools lack a strong foundation that allows for fast feature creation or context changes to make results relevant for consumers.

Our Genius Insights engine is made even stronger by our enterprise class data transformation capabilities. Tellius supports both self-service data loading, transformation and integration for the average user, alongside a SQL and Python IDE that allows for large scale data preparation for all deployment sizes.

Proactive Intelligence

The combination of a learning, machine learning based engine and a data architecture that supports live data at the most granular level means that Tellius supports Proactive Intelligence. We monitor key metrics that users are most interested in based on user behavior, pushing notifications to them when there is a significant impact.

These are not your typical alerts – they are powered by a machine learning model that is personalized to the user level, making for smart & relevant alerts at the right time.

The best part is that we automatically provide a root cause analysis utilizing our Genius Insights engine. This is the “intelligence” part of Proactive Intelligence, giving the user the answers that they need without forcing them to hunt for data or interpret what this outlier could mean.

Enabling ML & AI for the Business Analysts

The last, most critical part of the decision making process involves the application of collected information to moving forward. Making predictions and modeling impact is critical to understanding “how” changes will impact our outcomes.

Predictive analytics has long been the ecosystem of highly technical, trained individuals who were focused on building the oven instead of the taste of the food. Tellius makes the power of predictive machine learning available to anyone by allowing them to simply choose a metric or classification to predict — Tellius Predict does the rest of the heavy lifting for them.

The technical expertise that once served as a gate to utilizing the power of machine learning in predictive models is no more. While fully automated, Tellius Predict also employs full transparency with Explainable AI. This technology exposes the factors that influenced each model’s decision, allowing for human supervision when needed.

The integration of Tellius Predict with the rest of the Tellius ecosystem means that now anyone can move from “what” to “why” to “how” in an integrated, simple, user friendly fashion.

Conclusion

Tellius is turning the analytics world upside down by going further than any single tool ever before. We support the entire analytics journey for the business user, leveraging applied AI to surface the right piece of information at the right time. Using our decision intelligence tool to ask “what, why and how” can help reduce the time to insight by over 90%.

We go where other analytics companies are unable to, making it easy for business users to move faster and become truly data driven on their entire decision making journey. When crafting your next generation analytics strategy, give users the tool that allows them to find the information they need faster than ever before.

To see Tellius in action for yourself, check out www.tellius.com/free-trial and get started today.