Data applications let business users explore and investigate all of a company’s data and come to insights that impact day-to-day and long-range decision making, without intermediation by over-burdened analysts or BI teams.
They can be used to analyze business activity across a wide range of functions:
Data applications are a new concept, differing from BI and AI in the use cases they serve.
They differ from static BI reports as they offer ad hoc interaction through an intuitive interface tailored to the specific use case. They also differ from automated ML-driven analytics as they are designed for the “human in the loop” as opposed to automated decision-making. This makes them perfect for analysis that requires a blend of data and intuition.
Data applications facilitate data investigation and data exploration. Data investigation occurs in reaction to a specific event or anomaly. The user combines the event data with other data sources and historical data to identify the root cause and take action. This leads to hundreds to thousands of small insights that make a big difference in aggregate.
Data exploration is proactive, with the user combining their business intuition and intellectual creativity with data to get insights. It occurs as a series of unplanned iterative queries based on a nascent hypothesis or just pure curiosity. Data exploration is where impactful ‘a-ha” moments occur.
Imply is built specifically to enable data applications by consistently serving sub-second responses to ad hoc analytics queries across large data sets, with real-time data, and supporting high query concurrency.
The Imply analytics engine is a multi-cloud, scalable database that: