20130121

Advizor Visual Discovery, Part 2

This is the Part 2 of the guest blog post: the Review of Visual Discovery products from Advizor Solutions, Inc., written by my guest blogger Mr. Srini Bezwada (his profile is here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15840828 ), who is the Director of Smart Analytics, a Sydney based professional BI consulting firm that specializes in Data Visualization solutions. Opinions below belong to Mr. Srini Bezwada.

ADVIZOR Technology


ADVIZOR's Visual Discovery™ software is built upon strong data visualization tools technology spun out of a distinguished research heritage at Bell Labs that spans nearly two decades and produced over 20 patents. Formed in 2003, ADVIZOR has succeeded in combining its world-leading data visualization and in-memory-data-management expertise with extensive usability knowledge and cutting-edge predictive analytics to produce an easy to use, point and click product suite for business analysis.

ADVIZOR readily adapts to business needs without programming and without implementing a new BI platform, leverages existing databases and warehouses, and does not force customers to build a difficult, time consuming, and resource intensive custom application. Time to deployment is fast, and value is high.

With ADVIZOR data is loaded into a "Data Pool" in main memory on a desktop or laptop computer, or server. This enables sub-second response time on any query against any attribute in any table, and instantaneously update all visualizations. Multiple tables of data are easily imported from a variety of sources.

With ADVIZOR, there is no need to pre-configure data. ADVIZOR accesses data "as is" from various data sources, and links and joins the necessary tables within the software application itself. In addition, ADVIZOR includes an Expression Builder that can perform a variety of numeric, string, and logical calculations as well as parse dates and roll-up tables - all in-memory. In essence, ADVIZOR acts like a data warehouse, without the complexity, time, or expense required to implement a data warehouse! If a data warehouse already exists, ADVIZOR will provide the front-end interface to leverage the investment and turn data into insight.
Data in the memory pool can be refreshed from the core databases / data sources "on demand", or at specific time intervals, or by an event trigger. In most production deployments data is refreshed daily from the source systems.

Data Visualization


ADVIZOR's Visual Discovery™ is a full visual query and analysis system that combines the excitement of presentation graphics - used to see patterns and trends and identify anomalies in order to understand "what" is happening - with the ability to probe, drill-down, filter, and manipulate the displayed data in order to answer the "why" questions. Conventional BI approaches (pre-dating the era of interactive Data Visualization) to making sense of data have involved manipulating text displays such as cross tabs, running complex statistical packages, and assembling the results into reports.

ADVIZOR's Visual Discovery™ making the text and graphics interactive. Not only can the user gain insight from the visual representation of the data, but now additional insight can be obtained by interacting with the data in any of ADVIZOR's fifteen (15) interactive charts, using color, selection, filtering, focus, viewpoint (panning, zooming), labeling, highlighting, drill-down, re-ordering, and aggregation.

AdvizorCharts
Visual Discovery empowers the user to leverage his or her own knowledge and intuition to search for patterns, identify outliers, pose questions and find answers, all at the click of a mouse.

Flight Recorder - Track, Save, Replay your Analysis Steps


The Flight Recorder tracks each step in a selection and analysis process. It provides a record of those steps, and be used to repeat previous actions. This is critical for providing context to what and end-user has done and where they are in their data. Flight records also allow setting bookmarks, and can be saved and shared with other ADVIZOR users.
The Flight Recorder is unique to ADVIZOR. It provides:
• A record of what a user has done. Actions taken and selections from charts are listed. Small images of charts that have been used for selection show the selections that were made.
• A place to collect observations by adding notes and capturing images of other charts that illustrate observations.
• A tool that can repeat previous actions, in the same session on the same data or in a later session with updated data.
• The ability to save and name bookmarks, and share them with other users.

Predictive Analytics Capability


The ADVIZOR Analyst/X is a predictive analytic solution based on a robust multivariate regression algorithm developed by KXEN - a leading-edge advanced data mining tool that models data easily and rapidly while maintaining relevant and readily interpretable results.
Visualization empowers the analyst to discover patterns and anomalies in data by noticing unexpected relationships or by actively searching. Predictive analytics (sometimes called "data mining") provides a powerful adjunct to this: algorithms are used to find relationships in data, and these relationships can be used with new data to "score" or "predict" results.

AdvizorPredictiveModel

Predictive analytics software from ADVIZOR don't require enterprises to purchase platforms. And, since all the data is in-memory, the Business Analyst can quickly and easily condition data and flag fields across multiple tables without having to go back to IT or a DBA to prep database tables. The interface is entirely point-and-click, there are no scripts to write. The biggest benefit from the multi-dimensional visual solution is how quickly it delivers analysis, solving critical business questions, facilitating intelligence-driven decision making, providing instant answers to "what if?" questions.

Advantages over Competitors:


• The only product in the market offering a combination of Predictive Analytics + Data Visualisation + In memory data management within one Application.
• The cost of entry is lower than the market leading data visualization vendors for desktop and server deployments.
• Advanced Visualizations like Parabox, Network Constellation in addition to normal bar charts, scatter plots, line charts, Pie charts…
• Integration with leading CRM vendors like Salesforce.com, Blackbaud, Ellucian, Information Builder
• Ability to provide sub-second response time on query against any attribute in any table, and instantaneously update all visualizations.
• Flight recorder that lets you track, replay, and save your analysis steps for reuse by yourself or others.

Update on 5/1/13 (by Andrei): Avizor 6.0 is available now with substantial enhancements: http://www.advizorsolutions.com/Bnews/tabid/56/EntryId/215/ADVIZOR-60-Now-Available-Data-Discovery-and-Analysis-Software-Keeps-Getting-Better-and-Better.aspx

3 comments:

  1. Hi Andrei,
    I'm a frequent follower of your blog and I find this very interesting comparison.
    What I'm missing (in both parts of this comparison) is a reference to scalability with big data - how many rows can they handle and at what cost (hardware, VM...), what is their web performance when dealing with big data and so on...

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  2. Andrei Pandre3/3/13 11:37

    Hi Elad:

    1st of all I need to say that both Mr. Bezwada and me think that "Big Data" is too much of hype and certain vendors just trying to sell more of their stuff, using this hype. I posted some articles about scalability of Tableau, Spotfire and Qlikview and thoughts about "Big Data" noise on this blog before.

    I asked Mr. Bezwada to answer on your question and he provided some background (64 bit for large memory spaces, efficient C++ for processing, no inherent limits (dynamic structures)) and submitted to me some specifics about one of his usual Advizor projects:

    Typical Example: 1 Project: 14 pages, 88 charts, 41 calculations. Project's dataset using 63 Oracle tables: 17 millions of rows, 499 fields; file size for storage: 445 meg, RAM: 4.7 gig.
    Performance: Loads in 30 seconds, response time < 1 sec.

    You can email to Mr. Bezwada directly, if you need more details (e.g. what hardware he used in this project), but it looks convincing to me...

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  3. Great, thank you for the prompt reply.
    I don't think big data is a hype, but I do agree that the market leaders in DV are trying to leverage this for their sales, though not really being able to support real big data.
    im handeling bigger data than the project mentioned above... will share some details with you when possible.

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