BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

Transcription

1 2013 Frost & Sullivan 1

2 C ustome r V a l ue L e a de r sh i p A w a r d B ig D a t a A n a l y t ics G lob a l, 2013 F r ost & Su l l i v a n G lob a l R ese a r c h P l a t fo r m Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The c research philosophy originates with the CEO 360-Degree Perspective, which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research methodology. This unique approach enables us to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best Practices research, Frost & Sullivan is proud to present the 2013 Global Customer Value Leadership Award in Big Data Analytics to Opera Solutions. Sign i f i c a nce of t he C ustome r V a l ue L e a de r sh i p A w a r d K e y I n d ust r y C h a l l e nges A d d r esse d b y E n h a n c i ng C ustom e r V a l u e The explosive growth of data emanating from different industry segments has recently led companies to develop systems that help improve data-handling abilities. The traditional database systems are gradually becoming inefficient for handling the massive data sets. This thus compels market participants to develop highly flexible and cost-competitive options for data handling. This urgent need in the market has further led to the development of new technologies, consequently enabling companies to offer extremely scalable and performance-optimized software solutions. Additionally, it is becoming a challenging task to ascertain the relevancy of the correct data from amidst the huge range of information available. This is leading to a situation where the right data may not be optimally used to render benefits to end customers in terms of future predictions and correct data analysis. In such a situation, companies that have developed the efficiency to handle large data volumes collected from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources are poised to offer better customer value over competitors. Understanding the need to improve the quality of service offerings, companies have been proactively focusing on building advanced analytical features into their existing solutions. This has enabled them to ensure that huge data sets are seamlessly analyzed in real time, render extreme ease of use, and maintain optimum accuracy in their predictions. The other key concern encountered by companies in the big data analytics market is associated with the enormous cost and lack of flexibility of the solutions. An increasing number of users and the huge amount of data available for analysis are constantly increasing costs for enterprises. Implementation of expensive hardware and utilization of sophisticated programming skills for efficient data analysis amount to huge maintenance costs for companies. This has compelled companies to develop an end-to-end software 2013 Frost & Sullivan 2

3 solution that is competent to reduce hardware resources and provide optimum performance at the same time without extra maintenance costs. B est P r ac t ice A w a r d A n a l ysis fo r O p e r a Sol u t ions The Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership is presented each year to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. This award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and ultimately customer base expansion. Opera Solutions rformance in Big Data Analytics Opera Solutions initiated its big data science and predictive analytics operations in 2004 with only 10 people. A true visionary innovator, the company understood and identified the future trends in the big data analytics market and efficiently addressed the requirements to redefine the market scope. It provided enhanced value to customers by developing best-inclass technologies to stay resilient amidst future changes. With the right combination of human expertise along with technologically advanced tools such as machine-learning science and large-scale data management, the company caters to a diverse set of customers globally. It spans across sectors including financial services & insurance, healthcare, capital markets, government, transportation, consumer goods, retail, and telecom/media. It also offers solutions for supply chain management and marketing functions. The New Jersey headquartered company has, in a span of eight years, built up a strong team of over 600 people to increase its technological abilities and develop cloudbased solutions that are extremely customer-friendly. The company has been successful in rendering the utmost customer value through its software solutions by effectively handling raw data to generate higher productivity for its end users. In its attempts to generate higher satisfaction among customers, the company has adeptly employed its scientific and technological expertise to build solutions such as Signal Hubs and a range of Signal Products. It also provides scientific and professional services to its end users, highlighting its capability to perfectly combine human expertise with science and technology. This gives the company a superior edge over its competitors, consequently enhancing the satisfaction quotient of its customers. K e y P e r f o r m a n c e D r i v e r s f o r O p e r a Sol u t ions Factor 1: Strong Value Proposition Opera Solutions has rightly identified the immense opportunity in the big data analytics market. With its skilled manpower and over 175 scientists skilled in the use of machine learning techniques, the company in a very short span of time has successfully leveraged its expertise to develop high-quality solutions. Its solutions, such as Signal Hubs (which continually extract, update, and store the valuable predictive patterns and variances that 2013 Frost & Sullivan 3

4 exist in big data for large enterprises), Signal Products (cloud-based solutions, delivered as a service, that focus on applying advanced analytics to solve specific industry problems), and Analytic Partnerships (services combining science, technology, and domain expertise that help select clients accelerate progress on their big data strategies and initiatives). The ability to handle wide sets of data from disparate sources and definitively drive profitability and growth for its commercial customers enables Opera Solutions to provide enhanced value to customers. Signal Products and Signal Hubs take much less time, approximately a few weeks to a few months, to implement in the customer s business processes. The SaaS delivery model in which Opera Solutions takes on the tasks of continually ingesting relevant data, running its models, generating recommendations and insights, and inserting these d systems ensures that customers do not have to invest significantly in infrastructure or IT support in. Preconfigured Signal Hubs are available for wealth management, consumer risk & fraud, transportation, and telecom/cable;; the company also offers custom Signal Hubs. Opera Solutions delivers Signal Hubs as a service and can implement them in three to four months with no major IT investment on the These products automatically and continually integrate large and varied data from inside and outside an organization and extract its valuable predictive information, or The Signal Hub stores and organizes these variables in a way that makes it easy for scientists to access and use them in models focused on solving specific business problems (e.g., recommender engines, churn and attrition monitoring, and fraud alerts). Models can be built and put into operation much more quickly than those built by current approaches, and they perform better because they are based on more powerful variables that capture more of the predictive information contained in massive big data. Companies obtain an innovative and effective capability to derive profits and productivity gains from the data that flows in and around their organization rapidly, and with low infrastructure investment., delivered as cloud-based subscription services, combine extreme user friendliness with seamless integration into business processes. Signal Products include, but are not limited to, Hospital Revenue Leakage, SignalSensor Threat Assessment Platform, Signalytics Spend Intelligence Suite, and Mobiuss Valuation and Risk Management. All epitomize value proposition: that is, delivering value from big data without requiring long ramp-up times, high investment, and complex implementation. For instance, Hospital Revenue Leakage works in conjunction with the s to discover missing charges in patient accounts. Machine learning science, in this case, identify omissions and mistakes in patient accounts and facilitates automatic updating of the system, even during changes of rules and regulations. Each day, billing auditors receive prioritized lists of charges to investigate, thus greatly increasing their focus and efficiency. Recovery of a missing charge, in this case, helps generate more revenue for the customer, thus rendering customer satisfaction Frost & Sullivan 4

5 SignalSensor is an always-on social media monitoring and assessment system that continually looks through 200MM entries per day in over 150 languages to extract threats, sentiment, and meaning. It automatically alerts security and intelligence professionals, brand managers, and law enforcement officials about potential issues or security threats. SignalSensor provides never-before-available access to critical information hidden in the w -access data without requiring high investment in science and systems. Signalytics applies machine intelligence to the problem of identifying savings opportunities spend data, allowing procurement specialists to spend less time searching for savings and more time taking action to capture those savings. The effective use of machine intelligence to assist human activities helps boost productivity, profitability and growth for the customer. The extremely flexible and robust Mobiuss platform is used to identify the value and associated risks of respective bonds and highly complex portfolios for mortgage-backed securities and whole loans. The cloud-based platform automates many of the manual data integration tasks and offers very robust Monte Carlo simulations building up from millions of property-loan-borrower combinations, thus allowing traders to make more bids and investors to gain much clearer visibility into the risks and valuation of their portfolios. Other Signal Products Asset Commander for managing very complex portfolios;; Hospital Staffing Optimizer for predicting patient volume and scheduling nurses accordingly;; Auto Auction Pricing;; and the Collection Recommender Engine share this combination of high science, low IT investment, and easy integration into existing workflows and systems. Factor 2: Differentiated Attributes Opera Solutions has consistently striven to stay at the forefront of the global big data analytics market. Its differentiated attributes include industry-proven and highly qualified manpower resources (scientists, business domain experts, software developers), diverse machine-learning expertise, a massive repository of predictive Signals, and technological competency. world feedback truly helps the company mitigate the prevailing complexities in the big data market. The explosive burst of data from every corner is gradually compelling market participants to improve their embedded capabilities and address broad-based and elite customer needs with ease. The team of more of than 175 world-renowned scientists within the company provides unparalleled levels of innovation and creates real-world solutions that aptly exemplify best-in-class customer-centric approach. Machine- the company have one of the largest contingents in private industry today, but its scientists represent 20 respective disciplines, ranging from computational neuroscience to behavioral 2013 Frost & Sullivan 5

6 economics. Their breadth of knowledge and ability to creatively apply techniques learned in one discipline to another further help Opera Solutions develop better techniques to address difficult analytic challenges. Companies are therefore able to access analytics that significantly outperform competitors and can find better solutions to problems. Additionally, the company maintains a library for Signals and algorithms that are already perceived and detected so that they may be reused and applied to future analysis of big data.. With an aim to offer best-in-class solutions and services to customers at large, the company leverages its technological expertise to develop highly flexible and scalable technology that can effectively handle the diverse complexities of big data. For example, Opera Solutions is agnostic as to the form of the data (e.g., structured, semi-structured or unstructured), the data warehouse system used, and the processing approach. It works on top of all major databases (Oracle, SAP, Teradata, and others) and integrates with SAP HANA, HPCC, and -Memory Machine, as well as Hadoop. The technology can be delivered in the cloud or on-premise and is built to seamlessly insert its analytic output (recommendations, scores, prioritized lists, and alerts) into existing workflows and systems via APIs. Finally, a core differentiator lies in the way that its approach prepackages advanced machine-learning science and provides a new capability for companies and government to rapidly turn raw big data flows into value. For example, Signal Hubs automate much of the time-consuming data preprocessing and variable discovery process that can comprise up to 80% of a data scientist s model-building efforts thus freeing the scientist to focus on variable selection and model building. In addition, the Signal Hub allows the scientist to skip the difficult (and often months-long) step of transforming lab models into production-ready models. Similarly, its range of Signal Products leverage innovative scientific approaches, packaged user-friendly technology and delivered via an IT-light cloud-based method. Factor 3: Focus on Broad Array of Customers Opera Solutions caters to a broad audience across the globe. Its solutions are designed for a wide array of requirements, such as finding credit card and healthcare fraud, matching individual consumers with the, finding new savings opportunities for procurement operations, and forecasting the sales of a specific apparel brand in a retail store. Its diversity of offerings and ability to focus on wide strata of market segments, such as financial services & insurance, healthcare, capital markets, government, transportation, consumer goods, retail, and telecom/media, position Opera Solutions at the forefront of competition. All its solutions achieve the utmost customer satisfaction with the ability to customize to meet specific requirements. For instance, the company addresses the needs of a globally renowned credit grantor. After United States based company was successful in reducing its fraud losses by $60 million each year. The ability of 2013 Frost & Sullivan 6

7 to create smart predictive-modeling tools, detect anomalies in the data, and also integrate new data from external sources assisted in the entire fraud-reduction process. Additionally, Opera Solution Automobile Auction Pricing Optimization solution has helped improve the average sale price by around $150 per car for a major automobile reseller in the market. Another recent client that has been able to gather significantly superior benefits through the software systems is a major global airline. Opera Solutions was the preferred choice for this carrier because it was able to extract predictive patterns from terabytes of data and deliver positive and efficient business results by deploying a front-end interface with advanced algorithms and data science working behind the scenes to generate customer-specific recommendations. C onc l usion With its technologically advanced solutions catering to diverse domains, Opera Solutions has efficiently helped companies handle the explosive growth of big data and enabled them to improve their business processes. With its nascent yet technologically strong presence, the company has clearly achieved a dominant place in the big data analytics market across the globe. The increasing flow of data from different domains has compelled the company to improve its existing solution offerings and adeptly provide accurate insights to improve customers business performance. In line with this, the company has provided prompt and accurate predictive intelligence across a wide application area by effectively handling huge data sets. Its customer-focused strategy for aligning its solutions with market requirements truly makes Opera Solutions the worthy recipient of 2013 Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Leadership Award in the Global Big Data Analytics Market Frost & Sullivan 7

8 C r i t i c a l I m po r t a n ce of T E A M R ese a r c h research process. It offers a 360-degree view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all seven of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Our experience has shown over the years that companies too often make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Frost & Sullivan contends that successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. In that vein, the letters T, E, A and M reflect our core technical, economic, applied (financial and best practices) and market analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the TEAM Research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry players and for creating high-potential growth strategies for our clients. Chart 1: Benchmarking Performance with TEAM Research A bou t F r ost & Su l l i v a n Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best-practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit Frost & Sullivan 8