Paxata:Bridging the Link Between Data and Business Value

Modern business requires data to be quickly integrated and analyzed to create actionable business insights. As a result, data needs to be ingested into something coherent and relevant for it to be useful. Paxata with its enterprise-class, self-service data preparation solutions are helping global organizations to make better and more real-time decisions.

Paxata launched their first interactive, self-service data preparation solution for business analysts in November 2013. Paxata has since then partnered with leading industry giants such as Microsoft, Accenture, and Amazon. Today it has over 60 enterprise customers, ranging from the largest financial, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies to top technology, healthcare, and consumer retail vendors.

Paxata's mission is to give everyone the power to intelligently profile and transform data into consumable information at the speed of thought.

Today, for any data developer, there are over 1000 analysts, business users, and subject matter experts. At Paxata, their mission is to empower everyone including the non-technical users, to prepare their data and make it ready for analytics and decision-making.

Prior to Paxata, there had been advances in platforms that can manage the storage, and accelerate the processing of data. However, the challenge for every analytics project is the significant effort to gather, cleanse, shape, and join datasets, whereby only the business analyst, not IT, has the proper understanding of the data's context. This presented a missing link and was the idea behind founding Paxata in 2013 and designing it as a data preparation layer that is centered on the needs of a business user.

Today, the company has simplified that business user experience even further by using machine learning and NLP algorithms. These techniques work behind the scenes and provide prescriptive and predictive insights to the user, making their data prep experience visual, intuitive, and fast.

A Dynamic Leader

Prakash Nanduri is the Co-Founder and CEO of the company. His entire professional career has been in information management. He was one of the pioneers of the master data management space where he co-founded Velosel – now part of TIBCO's MDM platform. He has spent a significant number of years at TIBCO and SAP and has been very influential in building their business intelligence (BI) and analytics products and go-to-market strategy.

As part of his journey in the information management space, Prakash identified the white space – the missing link between analytics tools and the data management infrastructure layer – and founded Paxata along with industry leaders – Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Dave Brewster, and Chris Maddox in 2013.

Exceptional Services and Solutions

Paxata is putting big data in the hands of analysts and business users. This has eliminated IT bottlenecks for many of their clients. For example, one of their customers is a 150-year old, multi-national bank, operating in over 70 different markets. Using Paxata, they have been able to accelerate their financial crimes compliance reporting by 95% and improve its quality and accuracy by 52%, simply by putting data prep in the hands of business analysts, and eliminating IT bottlenecks.  Business analysts are able to interactively work with datasets containing 100s of millions of rows — far beyond the capabilities of batch systems or sampling.

Another example is a recent tech / telecom conglomerate post-merger data consolidation project. With Paxata's self-service data prep, the client accelerated their migration to a new system in just three months, saving approximately US$13 million in staffing and consulting costs.

Some Quotes from Happy Clients

Ron Kasabian, Vice President and General Manager, Analytics and AI solutions at Intel Data Center Group said: "Intel and Paxata share the view that accurate and timely information is the foundation to insight gleaned from massive amounts of data, which has the ability to dramatically transform business."

Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer, Standard Chartered said: "Paxata is helping us transform raw data into an insightful information fabric and this can help increase our speed of decision-making. This investment is an important step in building our capabilities as a data-driven company where employees in all functions are able to harness data at their fingertips."

Achievements

Paxata has been named a leader in the Forrester Wave for Data Preparation Tools, Q1 2017, where it was top-ranked in the Current Offering Category with the highest possible scores in 14 of 15 categories.

In addition, Paxata was selected as:

•  CRN – Top 10 Data Analytics Vendors to Watch in 2018

•  InformationWeek – 25 Data and Analytics Vendors at the Forefront of 2018

•  Bizjournals.com – 2017 Best Places to Work

•  Gartner's Cool Vendors for Data Integration and Data Quality, 2014 Report

Challenges to Overcome

Changing human behavior is a tall order. Paxata has made data prep easy for the non-technical users and the company has many clients that have seen the benefits of this shift. However, they still see people gravitate towards using Excel.

"To break any habit, you need a vision and you need to make small changes, and that has been the practice that we have put forward for our clients. We always start with one use case, something that has a quantifiable outcome, is contained and has a meaningful impact. You take that and prove success, you now have the eyes and ears of everyone. This is how changing the status quo has worked for us", says Prakash.

Future Roadmap

Paxata will play a determining role in the future of big data analytics. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are undergoing a digital transformation – and at the heart of this transformation sits the data and the power to generate meaningful insights and valuable assets.

The dynamics of the big data market has changed in the recent years. Over the past 20 years, enterprises have continually invested in data warehouses, data lakes, data marts. Now, most enterprises are shifting to the cloud – all with the hope of gaining integrated analytics and speed of discovery. But to avoid vendor lock-in, they are investing in a multi-cloud strategy, with Azure, AWS, and on-premise cloud infrastructures as the centers of gravity.

This multi-cloud strategy dictates their investments in data analytics. Ideal solutions are those that can operate across all platforms. Paxata sits right at the center stage of this new shift, helping enterprises onboard and analyze data across a hybrid cloud world.