ClearStory Data Makes Advancements to Spark-Based BI Platform

NEW YORK, N.Y., Sept. 27 — ClearStory Data, the company bringing business-oriented analytics and Data Intelligence to everyone through fast-cycle, disparate data analysis, today announced new advancements to its smart, Spark-based business intelligence platform that provide business users with automated discovery of insights and all related data when exploring within ClearStory’s Interactive Storyboards. The improvements leverage ClearStory’s unique capabilities in data-intelligent data profiling, called Data Inference, and the company’s patented Intelligent Data Harmonization capability.

With the new capabilities, business users can explore insights in a narrated, interactive storyline. While a user is exploring a storyline in a StoryBoard, ClearStory will automatically surface and augment the exploration with all related insights and relevant new data, all in context. The result is fast, contextual answers to any business question and automatic augmentation of all related insights and relevant data that provide richer, smarter answers to feed better informed and more timely business decisions.

The impetus behind ClearStory’s machine driven, data-intelligent approach to modern analytics is to eliminate the need for people-driven laborious data prep, IT-driven data modeling and the rigid constraints of traditional business dashboards. When using these outdated methods, users simply hit a wall every time they view a dashboard and have new questions arise that weren’t pre-defined in the dashboard. The analytics industry’s traditional dependency on pre-modeled and pre-wired metrics severely limits interactivity and drill-down discovery capabilities using traditional dashboards because of their single, pre-defined models’ rigid hierarchy.

ClearStory’s machine-driven approach to business self-service data discovery provides more flexibility and discoverability across large complex datasets through a dynamically generated data model, which is surfaced in the resulting Data Stories and StoryBoards. With ClearStory, business users benefit from a continuous cycle of insights, and the ability to ask and answer new questions quickly and in-context with rich relevant data and related insights to guide them.

According to Gartner, the BI and analytics market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, self-service analytics. As a result, the modern business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) platform has emerged to meet new organizational requirements for accessibility, business agility and deeper analytical insight.

Highlights of ClearStory’s new advances include:

• Machine-driven, Data-Intelligent, Granular Discovery of Answers that Leverage All Related Insights and All Relevant Data
  Rather than manual, predetermined exploration paths within a limited and rigid dashboard view, ClearStory automatically discovers and recommends connected information and insights for the question being explored by a business user. This new capability is made possible by ClearStory’s machine-driven, data-intelligent understanding of data in every source used in an insight or storyline. As connected information and related insights are presented to users, both context and interactivity are maintained. This lets users easily associate new insights in context to the entire storyline.
• Continuous Cycle of Insights from New Questions to Delivery of Answers
  The immediate coupling of newly discovered, correlated data and visualizations with existing StoryBoard insights reveals new and “what’s interesting” storylines from a dynamically-generated model and inferred data semantics. Users can spend more time asking more questions and uncovering deeper insights about the business on-the-fly as they see new and connected views, instead of requiring human intervention or more data-modeling cycles to create custom drill paths for each dashboard.
• Omni-directional Navigation, Cross-view Brushing and Context-based Linking
  Users can easily navigate between discovered and recommended views that are related within a StoryBoard, or a business-explored hierarchy, to uncover more granular details of the data. As users navigate between views, ClearStory automatically performs cross-view, context-based linking to ensure accurate data visibility across visualizations, even if they were sourced from different data sources or in decoupled Data Stories.

“Business users don’t necessarily know what questions to ask until they see an intriguing insight,” says Ali Tore, Chief Product Officer at ClearStory Data. “ClearStory’s new advancements in smart, data-intelligent business discovery, supports business users’ natural problem-solving intuition by automatically discovering related data and insights on StoryBoards in context, so they can ask new questions and uncover deeper insights on the fly as they navigate through dynamically associated StoryBoard views.”

For more information on ClearStory’s capabilities, or to request a demo, visit: http://www.clearstorydata.com/demo.

About ClearStory Data

ClearStory Data is bringing Data Intelligence to everyone to accelerate the way business leaders get answers from more data, on a faster cycle, across any number of disparate data sources. ClearStory Data’s solution simplifies data access to internal and external sources, automates data harmonization via Intelligent Data Harmonization across disparate data, enables fast, collaborative exploration, and reduces business wait time for insights via Interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards. ClearStory Data lets business users be more self-reliant in reaching richer, faster insights. Its end-to-end solution includes an integrated Spark-based data processing platform and an incredibly simple user application model for business consumption of insights. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DAG Ventures, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).

Source: ClearStory Data