Your business stores a lot of valuable data in many source systems. Turn that data into valuable information, give your team easy access—and watch how they can make the right decisions to operate your business more efficiently and capitalize on revenue opportunities.
Many businesses try to take on this challenge internally. Without the required resources and expertise, they may first try to deploy an analytics solution that aligns to the skills they have on staff.
But this can lead to solutions with inefficient workarounds to get at the data. The processes end up pieced together using “bubble gum and tape” to create a Frankenstein-like solution. In addition to operating inefficiently, the solution is difficult to support, further draining the bandwidth of internal IT resources.
Realizing external help is needed, other firms outsource the solution development piece but try to transition to internal support. This approach is better, but there’s still an inadequate level of resources and skills to support the solution and address ongoing needs, and unexpected costs for development pop up as new functionality requirements emerge. To overcome this, the business may scope a larger effort than initially needed, but this delays ROI and introduces risk.
A More Efficient Way to Drive Decision-Making
At ATX, we saw many clients struggle to implement efficient data analytics systems to streamline their decision-making processes. So four years ago, we embarked on an aggressive path to expand our services beyond technology advisory and implementations. We saw a void in the market for data analytics and decided to leverage our ability to service clients who need systems integration, data warehousing, and business intelligence.
As we grew this practice, we added more expertise—including CTO Mike Kennie, our chief analytics solution architect. Mike built our data analytics team and was recently promoted to an ATX Partner. With the help of Mike’s team, we enhanced our Caliper BI solution as well as our custom business intelligence, automation, and integration services.
We have been successful thus far in our data analytics journey, but we’re not stopping there!
We now offer a fully-managed Analytics-as-a-Service platform and are hosting and developing solutions for multiple industries. Our analytics experts collaborate with clients in construction, non-profits, professional services, hospitality, and CDFIs (Community Development Financial Institutions).
Ideal for Small to Mid-Market Firms
Our Analytics-as-a-Service platform makes sense for small to mid-market firms that want to deploy BI but are not able to find and hire the necessary full-time skill sets. Similar to using managed services for your IT infrastructure, the solution delivers the data and reporting capabilities you need to make business decisions. So instead of hiring multiple resources for what essentially is fractional work, you get the skills you need—data architecture, report and dashboard development, database administration, user-interface design, and business analysis.
The platform includes on-going support, access to a data warehouse in the cloud that can integrate with all your data source systems, and licensing for business intelligence tools. As your hosting company, our environment also provides the required infrastructure resources and any necessary middleware and databases.
Another key attribute is our flexible hybrid model. For example, if you already have business analysts on staff, you can outsource the other components to us. And you can add development services for any custom analytics you might require.
An Efficient Way to Drive Business Decision-Making
Data analytics is all about tapping into all the valuable data you are already collecting—and then delivering it to your end-users in real time in a way that’s easy for them to consume so they can make fast business decisions. By turning to the analytics-as-a-service model, you gain this capability without draining your IT resources while also making analytics processes work efficiently for your end-users.
Author: Mark DiGiovanni
To learn more about the ATX Analytics-as-a-Service offering, feel free to reach out to me at mark.digiovanni@atxadvisory.com