Vantage Analytics wants to help business managers compete on analytics without actually being professional data geeks.
It seems like a big task, but cofounders Aran Hamilton and Brandon Kane said the Toronto-based startup can process, prioritize and make actionable and insightful decisions about data, at the pace that customers want.
According to Hamilton, “You will be more successful by being an expert in your business, not in data science.”
“We think that there’s a number of companies that have found it easy to collect that data, but they don’t have the tools right now to sift through it and actually leverage it to their advantage,” Hamilton told BetaKit. “So we offer a collection of powerful predictive analytics and data mining modules to allow them to visualize the data, collaborate and use it with their team and see patterns to really act upon it.”
Interested potential users will have to wait a few months though: Vantage Analytics is currently in beta testing, and will launch to the public between late Fall and early 2014. Nevertheless, Hamilton is confident that people will like what they see upon launch.
The startup will work by a SaaS model, only charging users on a module-basis, or only by what they actually use on the platform.
The platform is cloud-based and intelligent enough to quickly flag interesting data points and help users take action very easily. It can help business managers navigate data generated by ecommerce operations, increase revenues or decrease churn and calculate the cost of acquisitions and lifetime values of customers. It can also allow sales teams to improve their segmentation, targeting and prospecting.
Finally, if major marketing automation companies want to run A/B tests of marketing campaigns, the platform can do all of the work. Because, as Hamilton said, “It actually makes sense to really test these things in a smart way rather than just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what’s there.”
The startup is riding along a new paradigm of understanding mass amounts of data only produced within the last five to ten years. The world’s data is projected to grow 50 times over the next decade, and dozens of startups in North America already have developed products to help people visualize it in order to understand it.
But Hamilton believes that people need to understand their data before they use tools to visualize it. “Data visualization is very valuable, but we don’t see the point in just visualizing the data if you don’t understand it,” he said. “On the front end, we make it really easy to get the data into the system and on the backend it’s really easy to act on the data or the insights you’ve made.”
Like other companies in the same space, Vantage Analytics seems to be targeting Excel as a classic example of inferior software. Excel can’t allow data collaboration or predictive analytics. Other than the traditional Microsoft program, Hamilton said if companies want the kind of sophistication that his platform offers, they would end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a high-powered solution that often necessitates the presence of an expensive data scientist.
Instead, there’s Vantage Analytics, and we’ll be sure to update readers when it fully launches.
