In the aspiration for a data-driven environment, enterprises grapple to leverage data assets and increase the ability to better connect cause and effect. Organizations find themselves deluged with data - which is inflating beyond terabytes into petabytes and sometimes exabytes. These vigorous explosions of data are compelling organizations to throw away terabytes of data without the benefit of capturing the insights it may contain. This lost data could be the key to improving business processes that include customer churn analysis, win/loss analysis, warranty fraud, claims fraud, market segmentation, predictive failure analysis, customer/market sentiment, resource planning, patient sentiment, risk assessment / avoidance and general trend/cluster analysis. Due to this data deluge, many organizations look at big data in silos. For many, big data is just another code word for a set of new tools that try to solve data challenges in an economic way. Other organizations are on the sidelines, wary of the adoption of analytics as analytics tools can raise conundrums of messages with no discernable insights, converting the user experience into a cacophony of cluttered numbers.

Saama Technologies (Saama), strategically headquartered in Silicon Valley, California meticulously addresses the data and analytics challenges of its Fortune 1000 customers with the approach the company calls “Fluid Analytics”. “Over the 17 years of Saama’s existence we’ve seen many twists and turns in the data and analytics space and have come to realize that in terms of business needs for analytics, there is nothing more important than speed and flexibility – because our customers’ businesses and markets never stand still”, observes Suresh Katta, Founder and CEO at Saama Technologies. Considering Big Data to be explorative, creative, and BI to be structured, math, and science oriented, Suresh believes that the combination of Saama’s Fluid Analytics with Big Data analytics and Traditional BI can transform analytics and unleash intelligence through the art of data science.

Countering Data and Analytics Qualms with “Fluid Analytics Approach”
Saama, having its India division in Pune Maharashtra, helps its customers leverage their existing technology investments from traditional BI to Advanced Analytics. With its vendor agnostic approach, the company leverages existing infrastructure and other available information sources to focus on the white spaces between existing capabilities and the critical business questions that need to be addressed thus achieving faster time-to-market and easy monetization of data. On the business end, the company offers an “analytics-on-the-edge” strategy to keep both data and analytics integrated over time, to leverage fast and lasting market leading insights as they surface. Customers embracing Saama’s analytics solutions and services have lauded its “Fluid Analytics approach” as “critical openness to ongoing change”. “Our customers feel that the business insights and outcomes Saama enables is a capability that sets them apart in their respective markets”, adds Suresh.

Discovering Valuable Insights within Data and Analytics Noise
The race is on everywhere to extract data be it from the social media platform or the Internet of Things (IoT). Data is so abundant and large that organizations struggle to keep up with its growth. They encounter a disconnect between the process of collating data and building decisions upon them. “It’s a big challenge, because this space evolves every day, and organizations need tools that are flexible and adapt to daily changes. It’s become a big part of our work”, says Suresh. He goes on to explain that with Saama’s Fluid Analytics technology, data undergoes consistent and routine monitoring enabling delivery of automated insights that is both flexible and fast.

This flexibility helps avoid what some companies are experiencing such as exorbitant expenditure by implementing tools and techniques to manage data that quickly become outdated before they are able to get an effective answer to data cleansing and master data management. Consequently, they fail to gain insights that drive value-creating decisions. With a Fluid Analytics approach, Saama assures decision quality by carrying out initial assessment and designing prototypes within a matter of weeks. “This will show the mathematical model, a high-level economic and functional understanding and the overall feasibility on the business level”, says Suresh. The prototypes built on the foundation of Fluid Analytics technology, and help business managers, not necessarily from an IT field, to pull together actual and meaningful data that provides time-to-market advantage.

Reconciliation with Data Quality and Consistency
Data quality is one of the biggest challenges in data migration, and to ensure good data quality coverage, organizations seek for best practices to ensure quality, consistency and completeness of data. Owing to the non-recurring nature of most data migration, handling data quality issues in a live post migration environment has the potential to go haywire. “This is because the structure and the nature of data can change or morph significantly during the migration process. Also, this process may result in inadvertent loss of information in the target system, which is not easily caught by traditional testing methods”, points out Suresh. However, with reconciliation technology and methodology, Saama identifies the gap between data quality and migration and enables data stewardship teams to ensure the data quality continually evolves and improves. “We configure, refine and improve business rules and constraints with little or no code changes and work inexorably to ensure data quality in order to sustain and support overall business needs,” says Suresh

Revolutionizing Everyday Processes with Analytics
Augmenting business operations with analytics is usually straight forward, but creating a difference with it in the topline, bottom line and also in the regulatory space is definitely not a cakewalk for most of the analytics service providers. Saama specializes at driving analytics into key business processes based on its deep vertical expertise, and by industry practice. Select analytics solutions include customer churn analysis, win/loss analysis, warranty fraud, claims fraud, market segmentation, predictive failure analysis, customer/market sentiment, resource planning, patient sentiment, risk assessment / avoidance and general trend/cluster analysis.

Moving Ahead
Over time, Saama has helped top-named brands with their data and analytics challenges and has established itself as a market leader in the data and analytics space. The company wants to continue to expand and accelerate growth based on its core experience and success with customers. Harboring happy clients from Fortune 500 life science, health care, insurance, financial services, high technology/manufacturing, internet and consumer product industries, the company continues to incorporate new technologies and best practices into its solutions. The company is also geared to expand further into other industry verticals and regions. Moving forward with a positive outlook, Saama is once again getting ready to prove its mettle by providing solutions to address some of the world’s biggest BigData problems with speed and flexibility through Fluid Analytics for better insights and higher-value business outcomes.

Awards and Accomplishments
• Maharashtra IT Award for Innovation and R&D in Information Technology in 2010 for its work in the area of predictive analytics
• Listed as a Sample Vendor in Two Gartner 2014 Hype Cycle Reports
• Named a Representative Vendor in Gartner "Market Guide for Insurance Fraud Analytics” Report

Data Services & Technology provided by Saama
• Saama Data Business Consulting
• Saama Data Science Services
• Saama Data Management Services
• Saama Prebuilt Components & Content
• Saama Fluid Analytics Engine

Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI CoE)

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