Product category:
Database management, list services
News Release from: Visual Sciences | Subject: Technology Platform 5
Edited by the Marketingservicestalk Editorial
Team on 30 May 2007
Technology Platform 5 answers tough data
queries
Real-time web analytics provider Visual Sciences (formerly WebSideStory), has released Technology Platform 5, which provides fast answers to the hardest data questions.
Technology Platform 5, a tera-scale real-time analytics platform, harnesses the explosion of data facing Visual Sciences clients with superior performance, understandability, flexibility, granularity and scalability Platform 5 serves as the foundation for Visual Sciences' industry-leading real-time analytics applications, including Visual Site and Visual Call, and is also used by Visual Sciences' clients to quickly deploy real-time analytics solutions tailored to their unique requirements
This article was originally published on Marketingservicestalk on 22 May 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The real-time data wheel technology at the core of Visual Sciences' Technology Platform 5 can provide measurable benefits for any organisation that relies on data cube-based online analytical processing solutions.
Organisations today are facing an explosion of data.
For many enterprises, much of this data comes from the increasing variety of ways that customers interact and engage with their organisations, such as web sites, interactive voice response (IVR) systems and next-generation points-of-sale.
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This explosion is outrunning the capability of organisations to make sense of the data at the same time that executives are mandating that their organisations become real-time enterprises.
Keeping up with the growing stream of real-time customer data is only one aspect of the problem - the ability to answer questions posed by executive management in real-time from the growing base of historical customer data is equally daunting for most organisations.
Conventional business intelligence solutions that use a cube-based approach to online analytical processing cannot cope with the volume or complexity of the customer data being created and stored.
In contrast, the Visual Sciences' Platform delivers two breakthrough technologies for large dataset analytics: a real-time analytics engine that eliminates the overhead and data loss of data cubes; and an interactive data visualisation interface that enables direct interrogation, exploration and the rapid understanding of both broad trends and granular details in the data.
"The real-time analytics engine in Platform 5 represents an entirely different approach to the analysis of streaming and stored data," said Jim MacIntyre, chief executive officer of Visual Sciences.
"The data wheels technology at the core of Platform 5 is a revolutionary departure from data cube-based online analytical processing systems popular today.
"Platform 5 allows users of Visual Sciences' real-time analytics applications to interact with and explore the data in real time through the speed of its data access technology, to incorporate real-time data on a continuous basis without the periodic batch processing typical of cube-based solutions, to summarise the data while at the same time allowing the drill-down to detail, to explore for correlation in thousands of customers or other data dimensions while calculating new results for segmented business metrics on the fly, and to integrate new data sources quickly as business needs dictate".
The capabilities delivered in Platform 5 reinforce the company's mission: to help organisations optimise their businesses by delivering fast answers to hard questions.
Platform 5 delivers parallel data processing and integration, as well as innovative multi-dimensional analysis capabilities that allow the creation and update of very large numbers of related data dimensions on an ongoing, real-time basis.
Platform 5, the 5.0 version of the Visual Sciences' Technology Platform, adds significant new features and benefits to its industry leading real-time analytics application platform.
All Visual Site, Visual Call, Visual Mail and other Visual Sciences' application clients will gain the features added in Platform 5 when they update their Platform 5 components (such as Visual Server, Visual Workstation, andd so on) and in some cases configure their system to take advantage of such features.
Platform 5 provides a number of important features that are the result of its core technology and forward-thinking architecture, including the following features: Performance - Platform 5 installations will typically experience a two to eight times improvement in query speeds over Platform 4 installations depending upon the hardware platform used in the deployment.
Platform 4 was already the fastest commercially available real-time analytics platform.
In addition, enhanced system diagnostics and performance reporting enable system administrators and data architects to see how data is being processed from start to finish in a single location to help with further performance optimisation of operational systems.
Usability - Platform 5 has added multi-lingual support and can display any foreign language.
A simple-to-use natural language segmentation filter editor has been added allowing segments to be defined in editable natural language statements.
In addition, an easy-to-use interactive analysis tool has been added to the platform to significantly shorten the time required to do certain types of forensic drill-down analysis.
Scalability - Platform 5 leverages 64-bit hardware and also remains available in a 32-bit server version.
The 64-bit Visual Server version allows the use of 32GB of RAM, enabling the system to support even larger numbers of simultaneous users.
Platform 5 can scale to tens of terabytes on commodity computer hardware.
Granularity - Platform 5 allows even the largest data dimensions to be loaded without truncation or loss.
This breakthrough Visual Sciences' technology allows for efficient storage and processing of dimensions with a large number of elements (such as campaigns, pagesand so on).
These dimensions may hold millions or billions of elements without truncation or "roll-off," allowing users to drill down to any level of granularity, for instance to an individual customer.
Flexibility - Platform 5 allows administrators to design visualisations with their own data schemas quickly and easily.
The open schema is displayed in easy-to-understand visualisations so that users can understand the structure of the data they are analysing.
Flexible time dimensions allow multiple time scales within the same Platform 5 dataset allowing analysis time to match custom organisational time related rules.
In addition, users gain the flexibility to run Visual Workstation on almost any modern notebook or laptop computer, enabling wider distribution within organisations and eliminating the need to purchase new equipment.
Visual Sciences Platform 5 is now shipping for new licensees and is available to current licensees as part of their on-demand service subscription or software maintenance agreement.
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