Analytics-based services discern ‘patterns’ in masses of data

Big data and analytics — they almost always seem to go together in the marketing pitch by IT service and consultancy services industries — are the new buzzwords.

Chastened by the severe pressure on profit margins in the last few years, a leading Indian outsourcer for American banks recently decided to “move up the value chain”. Instead of merely moving the banks’ processes related to their mortgage operations to India, the company started by adding an ‘analytical’ layer to its earlier plain vanilla offering by offering to “predict” which of the banks’ potential customers were more likely to actually settle for a loan. The company went a step further by offering risk assessment of the potential clients of the bank. Analytics-based services such as these essentially thrive on their ability to quickly discern “patterns” in masses of data.

‘SHAPING’ CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

The spam filters in the emails we use, or the way Linkedin decides who we may be interested in, are actually based on algorithms that use analytics that ‘learn’ from our usage of these services. Large corporations, including banks, insurance companies, telecom service providers and hospitals, that have access to data of their users “virtually own their clients,” says Natwar Mall, Senior Vice-President, Fractal Science, Fractal Analytics Ltd., a San Francisco-based company that specialises in big data and analytics.

But companies, even when they have the data, are not using it because they do not analyse what they have, says Mr. Mall. Drawing on Fractal’s “pricing studies” of global FMCG companies, Mr. Mall points out that the most “price-sensitive” markets in the world are not India or China as is commonly understood, but Brazil. “A 1 per cent increase in the price of a product (a common FMCG product such as a shampoo in a sachet, for instance) can result in demand reacting by 4 to 5 per cent in Brazil, compared to just 1 to 2 per cent in countries such as India. “Imagine the pricing power that a Proctor and Gamble or a Unilever would have when they have access to the nuances of markets,” remarks Mr. Mall. He attributes the “excitement” among companies, especially large MNCs, to the possibilities offered by the use of analytics running on silos of ‘big’ data that they have access to. The crux of their interest is how they can “meaningfully shape” consumer decisions by understanding consumer behaviour using the data they have.

But who are the drivers of the state of the art in the field of analytics? “Undoubtedly it is Google, but there are also players such as Amazon and Netflix, who are setting new benchmarks for excellence in this field,” says Mr. Mall. Google’s pre-eminence as a search engine, and the search engine’s web of linkages with the company’s other services, makes Google the past master in the field of analytics. “Google is not a technology company, not an advertising company by virtue of the fact that this generates a significant proportion of its income, but an analytics company,” says Mr. Mall.

NETFLIX’S SUCCESS

Why would Netflix, an Internet-based streaming media service, figure among the top analytics companies? Netflix bought the rights to the popular 1970s-era British political drama, House of Cards, and started production for the U.S. market (aired in the U.S. in February 2013). As virtually every household in the U.S. is a Netflix subscriber, the company has access to what viewers’ preferences are, what they watch and for how long. “When Netflix aired House of Cards, they used all the data they had and completely customised the programme,” says Mr. Mall. “Netflix dialled up sex and violence and dialled down a few things, according to what it thought was suitable for the U.S. audience.”

House of Cards thus became one of the most-watched TV shows ever, won several Emmy Awards and Netflix even allowed viewers to download all episodes together if they so wanted. “What Netflix did is what I would call state of the art because they recorded every bit of user data they could get their hands on and used it to sell something,” observes Mr. Mall.

THE PRIVACY ISSUE

But do no these things raise worrying issues of users’ privacy? “Absolutely, without a doubt,” says Mr. Mall. Google’s alteration of its privacy policy earlier this year, which results in a unified policy across all its products, implies that user data that is available with YouTube can be shared with Gmail, which in turn can be shared with its search service. “Google has been pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable but we have to see where it settles down,” says Mr. Mall.

Mr. Mall feels Indian IT service companies have clambered onto the analytics bandwagon without paying enough attention to the issue of hiring enough qualified talent. Indian IT companies and consultancies, he says, are telling their clients that as they are already handling their data, they are well placed to handle their analytics business too.

Indian IT companies still see the issue as one of merely scaling up their workforce — a question of just putting more people on the job. Companies such as Wipro have made acquisitions of analytics companies, but most are still struggling, says Mr. Mall. The trick, he says, is to have a workforce with multiple skillsets.

Fractal, he says, has many employees who have majored in physics, “because they understand data better, but we also have people from very diverse fields”. “IT companies are underestimating the complexity of what it takes to build a practice in analytics,” he argues.

Rajiv Kaul, Kartik Jain, Nimal Manuel, Natwar Mall, Vikas Ahuja and Vinay Bhatia discussed big data strategies for marketing 

Day one of the 13th CII Marketing Summit 2013 in Mumbai saw the spotlight being turned on ‘Big Data’.

A panel on ‘Big data strategies for marketing’ featured speakers from different industry segments discussing the buzz word and attempting to demystifying the hype around it.

Moderated by Rajiv Kaul, executive vice chairman and CEO, CMS Info Systems, the panellists included Kartik Jain (EVP and head marketing and depository services, HDFC Bank), Nimal Manuel (partner, McKinsey & Company, Kuala Lumpur), Natwar Mall (SVP and head of Fractal sciences, Fractal Analytics), Sam Balsara (chairman and MD, Madison World), Vikas Ahuja (CMO, Myntra.com) and Vinay Bhatia (customer care associate and SVP – marketing and loyalty, Shoppers Stop).

Kaul began the session by stating that there is humongous amount of data being generated every day through various channels such as social media, digitisation of content, use of internet, electronic devices and transactions conducted. Big data offers phenomenal opportunity to marketers and the challenge is how to use data collected from different sources, he explained.

“In the last few years, data and numbers are becoming more and more cool and sexy. Hot shops are being set up around the world, full of bright young energetic people mostly mathematicians and statisticians, who have helped marketers realise and get insight from the data that they are capturing. Big data is about our ability to collect this huge amount of data and analyse it and derive the right value out of it as a business.”

He cited the US example of Obama’s election campaign in 2012, which used social media analytics to determine whom to target, when to canvas for money and contribution and how to drive the marketing media plan.

Tailoring marketing plans, targeting

Vikas Ahuja, CMO, Myntra.com, said, “Big data has always been around but now it has metamorphosed. Eighteen years ago, when I was at Nestlé, we would wait until the end of the month to to receive sales information, but now the story has changed. We have multiple types of information – SKUs sold, price points, visibility at outlets and so on – coming in on a daily basis and sometimes in real time,” said Ahuja.

He spoke of a ‘three V’ framework that he has encountered in the last few years – reflecting that there has been an increase in the volume, velocity and variety of data available to the marketer. Ahuja also classified data broadly into internal (traffic trends, number of people visiting the web sites, sales data and so on) and external (social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter).

According to the Myntra CMO, a marketer should ask the question ‘what is the repeat purchase pattern?’, and then take all the data and analyse it to look for patterns and trends. He cited the example of Myntra being able to predict the buying patterns of males in the age group of 18 to 22 years and how it then approached customers on the basis of this insight.

“Data is sitting in multiple parts of the organisation but the question is who should be responsible for it. The partnership between marketing and technology is critical in an organisation to unlock all the data,” he surmised.

‘Identify what matters and monetise it’

Nimal Manuel, partner, McKinsey & Company, Kuala Lumpur, stated that the scale of big data had grown phenomenally over the years. He said that one must know how to identify what data matters and process it and eventually monetise it.

He made a few observations gathered from over the years. One of them being to avoid stand alone cases; instead, one must use all the data, he said. He also observed that big data was not about technology alone, but how about one uses it.

Natwar Mall, SVP and head of fractal sciences, Fractal Analytics, said, “Businesses have more information on consumers than ever before. This should be music to marketing professionals but it also means that there is a new variable that has been injected into play and companies who play this well will have better chance of success.”

According to him, big data helped in customer segmentation and therefore understanding customer genomics, so as to target them accordingly. From the perspective of market research, Mall said that marketers should move from asking to observing consumer behaviour.

He recommended rapid experimentation as the way to understanding consumer behaviour, similar to the ones conducted by companies like Amazon. He mentioned that earlier digital would account only for 5 per cent of marketing spends but currently could average around 25 to 30 per cent of the spends. He asked marketers to put together online and offline activities together and try and understand how it is driving actions of consumers.

Growing revenues with data

Vinay Bhatia, customer care associate and SVP – marketing and loyalty, Shoppers Stop, expressed disagreement with the formal definition of big data, and offered that ‘data is more about using common sense’.

“The way we approach analytics is that we don’t jump into data as there is lots of data and one may probably sink. What we do is that we generate a hypothesis which then leads to an insight – and we then monetise that insight,” explained Bhatia.

He pointed out that Shoppers Stop is expected to earn incremental revenue of Rs 100 crores this financial year by using data analytics. Among other initiatives, the retail brand conducted community mapping to target Bengalis across the country before Durga Puja, and similarly Muslims before the festival of Eid. With the help of pin code mapping, it was able to cut costs, excess inventory, and even staffing at existing outlets after newer stores were opened in the vicinity. Bhatia explained that niche mapping such as birthday mapping and sun sign mapping were used. Using the insights generated, newer products were then launched accordingly, he surmised.

The ‘invisible’ media consumer

Sam Balsara, chairman and MD, Madison World, said, “I would (like to) see the power of big data in helping me know what people will be watching tomorrow on the basis of all the humongous data collected today as to who has watched what. If I were to extend this argument further, retailers such as Myntra and Shoppers Stop are selling to people who they know in some form or the other. But when I talk of selling, I am selling to a mass of people who unfortunately have remained nameless. It would be wonderful if Cadbury knew the names and profiles of everybody who bought the chocolate.”

He pointed out that it would take a very long time for modern retail that currently covers only for 10 per cent of people to reach to 40 per cent.

“The power of big data should be harnessed as to how can I market on a one-to-one basis to 250 million people. To my mind, that is a big opportunity for data. Secondly, if we could harness the power of big data in creativity then we will be able to improve substantially the RoI on advertising and marketing and our creative will deliver greater results and be more effective. If we work on this, then big data will be the big word in advertising and marketing,” he stated.

Kartik Jain, EVP and head marketing and depository services, HDFC Bank, said that big data was nothing but more data and that marketers should not be terrified of it.

Bringing forth another important aspect of using data, he explained how HDFC Bank used big data at all stages of the customer lifecycle, to pre-determine the needs of the customers and to serve them accordingly.

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics services to Fortune 500 companies, is invited by The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) to speak at ‘The Data Scientist’ debate to be held in Bengaluru on November 29, 2013. Natwar Mall, Senior Vice President of Fractal Sciences Lab at Fractal Analytics, will share insights on how to build a world class analytics team, with a focus on the data scientist.

To remain competitive, the world’s largest enterprises are striving for smarter and more effective data-driven decisions. This demands for the latest organizational superhero called the Data Scientist which the Harvard Business Review deemed the “sexiest job of the 21st century”. This session will discuss the role and definition of a data scientist, as well as the experience and skills needed to decode unstructured data, and transform data into relevant business insights. Learn more about the session.

Fractal Analytics is a core member of NASSCOM’s Analytics Interest Group (AIG) that commenced this year. The objective of the AIG is to increase the visibility and relevance of analytics in the Indian context, consult and equip analytics providers with capabilities, and address the talent gaps.

About Fractal Analytics:

Fortune 500 companies recognize analytics is a competitive advantage to understand customers and make better decisions. We deliver insight, innovation and impact to them through predictive analytics and visual story-telling.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In June, global private equity firm TA Associates acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million, and in May, information technology and research advisor Gartner named Fractal as a top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

Learn more at www.fractal.ai.

Recent recognition:

Primary Media Contact: Ranjana Mukherjee, [email protected], 91-77-38369622

Secondary Media Contact: Abhishek Vora, [email protected], 91-90-04669760

The big data path leads to improved decision making, more effective marketing strategies and the ability to better understand, predict and influence consumer behavior.

Many insurers have embraced analytics and have made great strides at leveraging data and analytics to solve pricing issues. However the industry has largely ignored other opportunities to increase customer engagement and loyalty and have missed lessons from other sectors that have successfully used analytics to drive the revenue side of the equation.

The insurance industry stands at an analytics crossroads. One path leads to the status quo, the other to improved decision making, more effective marketing strategies and the ability to better understand, predict and influence consumer behavior.

The reality of today’s insurance marketplace resembles a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog world where companies are competing for a finite pool of possible customers. It’s a zero-sum game where growth strategies are largely built upon a company’s ability to win business from competitors and defend against similar incursions into its own market share. The main weapon in this battle has traditionally been pricing – and this is precisely where those insurance companies that leverage Big Data and analytics focus their efforts, often to the exclusion of claims, products, agents and sales operations, among other areas.

However, while insurance companies historically spend a lot of time and effort on pricing, that doesn’t mean the industry as a whole is where it wants to be. For example, if a 35-year-old married mother of two from a mid-sized American city asks for an auto policy quote from five different companies, her premium could vary from $600 to $2,000 for a six month period. All the underlying characteristics are the same – she’s the same person, same age, living in the same city, with the same number of kids and the same driving record – but her price options can be all over the place.

[ISO survey: Three-quarters of insurers use predictive analytics in pricing]

One reason for this is that most companies look exclusively at their own data and experience for pricing. These are important indicators, but if you make a mistake, it’s repeated over and over again. There is no outward focus, no benchmarking to other indicators in the industry.

Another reason for these price disparities is that business operations vary widely from company to company. Some companies sell through agents, for example, while others sell exclusively or primarily through the Internet. Still, these explanations fail to account for the chaotic price differentials from one carrier to the next. The use of analytics can help insurance executives learn from other industries. Mortgage lenders, for example, tend to set rates between plus or minus 75 basis points, and borrowers don’t see rates swinging wildly between companies. Other industries have got it right so there’s hope for us to do it with insurance rates, as well.

Ultimately, however, the insurance industry has to realize that pricing, in the modern world, is no silver bullet. For example, commoditization is a very real and on-going phenomenon in the industry and is an area ripe with opportunities for leveraging big data and analytics. Insurance is a high-involvement financial purchase and it used to be a nightmare to buy. People had to consult an agent and rely on specialists, but all that is changing. Americans are becoming better, more intelligent insurance consumers and this has led to the demystification of insurance products across the board. Consumers today understand what products they need, can purchase those products on their own and are no longer bound to professional advice-givers. Also, the process of buying insurance is much easier now than even five or 10 years ago, as phone and web-based sales skyrocketed.

At the same time, insurers are smart and they realize their products are being commoditized. This realization led, about ten years ago, to a sustained industry-wide advertising boom. Back then, the entire industry was spending roughly $2 billion on ads. In 2012, according to SNL Financial, the top two companies account for nearly that in combined ad spending. Not only is the industry as a whole spending more on advertising, but it is in many instances changing the way it advertises – primarily with ads that look and feel more like something a CPG or retail company would produce. Which is why that little British lizard is now nearly ubiquitous. And who can think of insurance these days without thinking of Flo’s retro up-do?

[Lessons for insurers from Blockbuster’s demise: Can auto insurance sell through kiosks?]

Quirky spokespeople aside, all this carries big implications for the use of analytics. Given that the products are more commoditized, how can companies better understand customers and resonate with them better? By deploying analytics solutions such as optimizing marketing spend to increase ROI, incentivizing agents / brokers to acquire profitable long-term customers rather than high volumes of unprofitable, high-churn customers or changing the pricing from a pure cost-plus to a more value-based pricing that captures customer value and their price sensitivity, executives can connect with the consumers better and improve their profitability in a much more powerful and meaningful way.

Another big industry trend that presents us with sophisticated and exhilarating analytics applications is the increasing use of pay-as- you-drive telematics devices. Instead of using age and gender as proxies for assessing risk, companies are using telematics to assess risk on an individual basis. These devices relay information about who is driving, how fast, at what time, from where to where, etc. In other words, companies are able to set prices based on actual drivers, rather than broad driver categories.

[Canada emerges as fertile ground for telematics]

This is a remarkable, perhaps revolutionary, technological advancement. If these devices become universally accepted, however, the amount of personalized information that insurance companies will acquire, analyze and put to practical use is enormous. This will necessitate greater and more creative use of analytics solutions in order for companies to store this tidal wave of data, retrieve it and make sense of it.

The message for the insurance industry is clear: pricing is not the silver bullet. Big data and its benefits can help insurers become more informed, more nimble and better able to interact meaningfully with consumers.

About the author: Deepak Ramanathan is VP, Global Consulting, Financial Services and Insurance for Fractal Analytics.

SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)
Fractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), a global provider of advanced analytics services, and Sequoya (www.sequoya.com), a leading developer of customer management solutions, today announced a new alliance that helps retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to deploy predictive analytics for real-time pricing and promotions decisions.

Optimizing pricing and marketing models to drive maximum consumer value is mission-critical for CPG manufacturers and retailers, yet many analytics platforms do not adequately support business users. The Fractal/Sequoya alliance will put data science insights into the hands of front-line decision makers, allowing them to make smarter, faster, and more accurate decisions in real time without having to create or understand the statistical complexity behind the scenes.

“Making fast, consistent and accurate data-informed decisions is an imperative step in a company’s journey to engage customers and inspire loyalty,” said Pranay Agrawal, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Global Consulting and Client Management at Fractal Analytics. “The key to effective customer engagement is to anticipate actions and provide answers to questions not yet posed. Now we can deploy sophisticated analytics into Sequoya’s industry-accepted pricing tools to institutionalize real-time decisions for business users.”

Optimizing pricing and marketing models to drive maximum consumer value is mission-critical for CPG manufacturers and retailers, yet many analytics platforms do not adequately support business users. The Fractal/Sequoya alliance will put data science insights into the hands of front-line decision makers, allowing them to make smarter, faster, and more accurate decisions in real time without having to create or understand the statistical complexity behind the scenes.

“Making fast, consistent and accurate data-informed decisions is an imperative step in a company’s journey to engage customers and inspire loyalty,” said Pranay Agrawal, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Global Consulting and Client Management at Fractal Analytics. “The key to effective customer engagement is to anticipate actions and provide answers to questions not yet posed. Now we can deploy sophisticated analytics into Sequoya’s industry-accepted pricing tools to institutionalize real-time decisions for business users.”

“The agreement between Sequoya and Fractal Analytics is based on a shared recognition that the easiest way to comprehend complex data and develop effective problem-solving tactics is through visual information,” said Dale Neely, Vice President, Customer Operations at Sequoya. “We partnered with Fractal to incorporate their expertise in Big Data cleansing, consumer behavior and visual story-telling into our solutions to further propel our clients’ decision processes.”

Sequoya has been the leading provider in Trade & Everyday Price Optimization, Category Management Leadership and Consumer Demand Management since 1996. Using a cloud-based delivery model, Sequoya has delivered hundreds of successful implementations, many in less than 30 days, to businesses with revenues ranging from $100 million to more than $10 billion.

Fractal Analytics offers companies the ability to institutionalize advanced analytics. The company’s Concordia™ Data Harmonization Service automates, cleanses and organizes both structured and unstructured data for smooth integration into Sequoya’s advanced analytics applications. Fractal’s Customer Genomics™ solution for personalized marketing leverages Big Data to predict deeper customer insights from every transaction and customer interaction, helping marketers to engage with consumers based on a 360 degree view of each person across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions.

About Fractal Analytics

Fortune 500 companies recognize analytics is a competitive advantage to understand customers and make better decisions. We deliver insight, innovation and impact to them through predictive analytics and visual story-telling.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In June, global private equity firm TA Associates acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million, and in May, information technology and research advisor Gartner named Fractal as a top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

Learn more at www.fractal.ai.

About Sequoya

Since 1996, Sequoya has delivered best of breed advanced analytical solutions to improve customer management and consumer analysis. Predictive Modeling & Optimization (PMO) technology provides Consumer Goods organizations with real-time price and promotion response models and the platform to forecast future consumer behavior.

Account specific models analyze and predict the impact of everyday price change, promotion execution and competitive activity, providing the missing link to truly optimize business planning. Once embedded in the planning process, strategic and tactical decisions can be fully optimized to drive volume, financial liability and return on sales and marketing activities.

Solutions include analytics for every day price elasticity, cross-elasticity, promotion simulation, promotion evaluation, brand and SKU interaction, total volume planning and Optimization Science. Sequoya’s Pro Key, Price Key and Alert Key applications share a flexible web-based architecture and highly graphical interfaces that deliver both the advanced modeling capabilities required by decision makers and the simple field-based reporting required by the entire sales organization.

Built on open relational databases, Sequoya’s multidimensional time series schema efficiently processes large quantities of the historical data that drives real-time decision-making. All solutions are delivered through Software as a Service (SaaS) model whereby applications are hosted by Sequoya and provided on a 24/7 basis over the internet.

Learn more at www.sequoya.com.

Contact:
Fractal Analytics Inc.
Joanna Pasquale, 513-233-8960
Vice President, Alliances & Partnerships
[email protected]
www.fractal.ai
or
Sequoya
Dale Neely, 203-505-5031
Vice President, Customer Operations
[email protected]
www.sequoya.com

SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics, recently took home the coveted Innovation Award from the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) annual Analytics Challenge during the DMA2013 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago.

“It is an honor to receive such high accolades for our skills in analytics and business intelligence”

Two teams from Fractal Analytics were in the top five rankings, beating an impressive array of 240 teams from around the globe. Fractal’s FourthDimension team earned the Innovation Award for its solution to this year’s challenge and the Fractalites team with a strong showing ranked fifth. The competition, which was sponsored by the Cleveland Clinic, involved identifying the patients most likely to respond to a re-activation campaign aimed at bringing back former patients. Members of FourthDimension were Rahul Roy Chowdhury, Neha Sherawat, Archana Kumari, and Himanshu Sharma.

Winners were judged based on predictive model performance and innovative approach. FourthDimension presented their solution on Oct. 14th at the DMA Conference, the annual event at which the world’s leading data-driven marketing companies share insights and best practices.

“It is an honor to receive such high accolades for our skills in analytics and business intelligence,” said Pranay Agrawal, co-founder and executive vice president, global consulting and client management, Fractal Analytics. “The application of our approach supports not only the life sciences industry, but also sectors like retail, financial services and insurance, as many different companies are looking to attract and retain customers with better insights into consumer behavior. This award proves that we are capable and highly qualified to provide predictive analytic services to a myriad of different industries.”

About Fractal Analytics

Fortune 500 companies recognize analytics is a competitive advantage to understand customers and make better decisions. We deliver insight, innovation and impact to them through predictive analytics and visual story-telling.

Learn more at www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine-learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including social media, to help marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In June, global private equity firm TA Associates acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million, and in May, information technology and research advisor Gartner named Fractal as one of the a top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

About DMA2013 Conference & Exhibition

The DMA2013 Annual Conference & Exhibition: The Global Event for Data-Driven Marketers is the world’s largest gathering of data-driven marketing professionals. DMA2013, held Oct. 12-17 in Chicago, features keynote presentations, educational sessions, roundtables, case studies, white papers and research reports. DMA2013’s exhibit hall features hundreds of exhibiting companies.

Visit the DMA2013 blog at http://dmaannual.wordpress.com/.

About Direct Marketing Association (DMA)

The Direct Marketing Association (www.thedma.org) is the world’s largest trade association dedicated to advancing and protecting responsible data-driven marketing. Founded in 1917, DMA represents thousands of companies and nonprofit organizations that use and support data-driven marketing practices and techniques.

In 2012, marketers—commercial and nonprofit—spent $168.5 billion on direct marketing, which accounts for 52.7 percent of all ad expenditures in the United States. Measured against total U.S. sales, these advertising expenditures generated approximately $2.05 trillion in incremental sales. In 2012, direct marketing accounted for 8.7 percent of total U.S. gross domestic product and produces 1.3 million direct marketing employees in the U.S. Their collective sales efforts directly support 7.9 million other jobs, accounting for a total of 9.2 million U.S. jobs.

Contacts

Harden Communications Partners, LLC
Liam Collopy, (510) 635-4150
[email protected]

According to Meenakshi Iyengar, senior vice president & head, Human Resource, Fractal Analytics, “Effective on-boarding requires a robust induction programme that starts with the first several weeks and builds over the first year. Companies could set up online portals that enables freshers to interact with their managers, gives them easy access to corporate information that makes them well versed before the induction begins.

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To make a positive impact with analytics requires much more than expertise in statistics and experience managing data and IT systems. It also calls for embedding the results of analytics systems into business processes managed and used by people—including many who have no experience with statistics or data management.

That reality means that analytics professionals need to calibrate their approach to suit an organization’s existing culture to win widespread adoption, says Srikanth Velamakanni, the CEO of Fractal Analytics.

Velamakanni cites the example a consumer packaged goods company that set ambitious goals for a new demand forecasting system: It had to return results fast and win global adoption by relevant managers. He says the resulting system his team developed accomplished the goal by trading down on the sophistication of their forecasting algorithm so it could be more easily integrated into the company’s business processes. “That was a better way for the company to use analytics and to actually use it for the forecasting purpose,” he says.

Velamakanni has been with Fractal since its founding in Mumbai in 2000, and in a wide-ranging interview on October 16, he offered insights on trends in analytics use cases and implementations, and observations about the lessons analytics developers can learn from Google and others. He also discussed his company’s research into new directions for analytics. What follows is a partial edited transcript of the interview.

Data Informed: You talk about the need to institutionalize analytics. What you have seen in the evolution of your work over time?
Srikanth Velamakanni: We look at the world on a two-dimensional grid. On one axis there is a sophistication of analytics. And on the other axis, the institutionalization of analytics. On the sophistication side you could just be doing spreadsheets, you could just be doing slice and dice, you could be doing advanced analytics and predictive analytics, or you could be doing machine learning. That is a continuum.

On the Y axis you have a continuum that starts with being a very sporadic user of analytics, to a department or an organizational use, to a very institutionalized use. So if you look at that grid and you see all the companies, map all the companies out over the last 14 years that we have been around, we have seen companies systematically move to the northeast to the top-right-hand corner of that grid. Companies such as Google and Amazon and possibly Netflix are in the top-right-hand corner of the grid. And we believe that all other companies are getting there gradually. But if you see the underlying trends I would say there are four key trends that are very critical. One is a man-machine combination [where] human beings are supplementing machines and machines are supplementing human beings in reaching the optimal decision.

And we see that happening more and more. So every decision that can be done through the use of analytics is being done, is gradually moving to the analytics way.

The second big trend that I have seen is around hyper personalization as well as mass customization.

One great example of that is Netflix. They basically used the last many years of data that they have of every customer’s pausing or rewinding or fast-forwarding the video that they are watching. They record all these things as events. And using all this event data they have been able to mass customize a show like “House of Cards,” which arguably is a perfect television show, where they have dialed in all the elements that they believe that customers really want to watch.  And dial down the elements that the US audience doesn’t really like. That’s a great example of mass customization.

On the hyper-personalization side as well we’re seeing a lot that is going on. What we do with customer genomics is an example of that. We look at customer transaction data from millions of transactions and what customers say on social media or other places and we learn what the customers’ preferences are. What do they like, what do they not like, or what is their life stage, or understand whether they are likely to move their house in the next three weeks.

We can understand these things in a very probabilistic manner. And once we have all these different labels of customers which reflect their attitudes and preferences and they are all derived from transaction data, not by survey or other kinds of data. We don’t believe in data sources like Acxiom, or stuff like that tends to get these kinds of data from research.

We don’t believe in asking customers. We believe in observing customers and understanding from their transactions, their actual behavior.

So using that, we probabilistically determine their preferences, and now once we have these preferences about customers and we have all these labels attached against them, we can use that to hyper-personalized marketing that is a lot more effective and delivers a better ROI than otherwise.

The third big trend is, we believe, around experimentation. What we are seeing is a relatively lower importance of pure market research. Especially asking customers what they want and why they like something is not so useful.

It’s still important to observe them but not really to ask them. What we are seeing here is that people are increasingly doing experiments on understanding customer behaviors. So if you look at your Amazon shopping cart and you see that the price of products changes every day or five times a day or 10 times a day that is because what they are doing is that they are trying to understand your responsiveness to price changes  and seeing what happens.

The most interesting trend for me is about understanding what is relevant now and telling you [an answer] before you ask the question. Traditionally analytics has always been about answering a business question. And building a model, predicting a customer response and so on.

But if you think about the amount of data we have collected, most often we are struggling to understand what is the right question, rather than finding answers to a question [when] we don’t even know what is relevant right now.

That I believe is the big question and it is one of the most difficult questions to solve in the areas of analytics because it is undirected exploration. And the only company that I know that has done this very successfully is Google so far with their Google Now product, which basically analyzes your emails, all kinds of other things, and tells you what is relevant to you right now.

And I have personally benefitted from that in the recent past. Where Google alerted me to the fact that my nephew was flying out of the city on that day and I had completely forgotten about that, but it picked up an email that was almost two months old and told me, “Hey, he’s going to fly out tonight and help me go and pick him up,” because Google alerted me in the morning saying, hey, look, this seems like an important event today for you.

That is something that is very, very difficult to do with analytics but we believe that is the next big wave in the analytics world.

Would you be doing research and development on that yourself?
Srikanth Velamakanni: We have set up what we call Fractal Sciences. That team is roughly 18 months old. We do some original research and IP creation in that team. And one of the things that the Fractal Sciences team has set up is what we call a data lab [with] a bunch of people right now. They are given massive amounts of data and some of this is in partnership with our clients who have agreed to co-create IP with us.

So we look at the data and we say, “There are no questions here, just go and explore and tell us what is important right now.” So they are beginning to explore that and the hope is that they will come up with answers to questions that clients were not even aware they should be asking.

What kinds of challenges do you see in customers moving from scattered deployment to institutionalizing analytics?
Srikanth Velamakanni: One example in that is a consumer packaged goods company that is global in 190 different countries. And what they were trying to do was to do demand forecasting across a whole host of countries and categories on a quarterly basis for the next 20 quarters. The idea was to redo these forecasts or revise these forecasts every quarter for the next 20 quarters on a rolling basis.

Now one of the methods here could be just to say take the most sophisticated approach for building these models. And that was our first preference, to actually use the most sophisticated technique. But what we realized when we thought about it a little bit further, specifically along with the client, is that the critical goal here is to institutionalize the use of forecasts in the organization.

The forecast can be produced, that is one thing. What is a business process around the way that business units agree to the forecast and then planning the shipments and stuff like that accordingly and then using that forecast.

So that was very important and also the timing of the forecast was very important. We have to get the forecast out in a quick time because then there is a whole process of the company and various stakeholders buying into that and then using the forecast. The automation of the forecast was very critical. And therefore using the most sophisticated technique was not going to [lead] us to a great amount of automation.

And it would take too much time. So what we actually did was we used a much less sophisticated but still a good technique, a set of techniques called the ARMAX [autoregressive moving average] model, which is basically a slightly enhanced version of ARIMA [autoregressive integrated moving average] models.

Our data scientists would not have been very excited with using that approach in the first place. But we did. And we automated the entire process for 10,000 country-category combinations. And once we got that entire forecasting process in place, over the next one and a half years, we worked to improve the sophistication of the forecasts in terms of techniques that we used and still retain the automation benefits.

So that was a good tradeoff situation where a company actually moved up in terms of institutionalization rather than moving right to more sophistication because that was a better way for the company to use analytics and to actually use it for the forecasting purpose.

It sounds like you want to tailor the approach, or is that a model story for an organization using analytics. Get them embedded and then make them better over time?
Srikanth Velamakanni: This is not a one-solution-fits-all approach because there are organizations that we have seen that the sophistication of analytics is actually really critical.

It really depends on the situation at hand and some companies have a preference naturally to be sophisticated first and institutionalize later. And some companies prefer to institutionalize first and improve sophistication later. That really is a function of the organizational culture as well.

Having said that, I also want to point out that sometimes simplicity is better than complexity in terms of technique because of institutionalization. The other thing that we’ve realized over time especially as we institutionalize analytics is that the complexity of analytics is important. It is important to have complex analytics that solves a problem very, very well. But in terms of how it is consumed in an organization we have to make it very, very simple.

That is the only way to really [win over] consumers in an organization. What we realized is that all the fancy analytics that we can do should all get hidden inside a very easy-to-consume tool like a visual dashboard, a visual storytelling infrastructure.

[With a visual dashboard,] the actual users and decision makers will never see the price elasticity models or the coefficients or something like that. All they will know is that if they tweak the price this way, this is how the market share will be affected. So they have simulators. They have a visual way in which they can look at what will happen if they make decisions based on that.

The best example of that is again, Google. Given how complex and sophisticated the Google search machinery is, it still gives us very intuitive and very easy-to-use results.

That is something that every company has to do. Make it very easy to consume within the organization so that adoption overall increases dramatically.

Can you provide an example of what you called customer genomics?
Srikanth Velamakanni: Customer genomics was born a couple of years ago when we started working with a U.S. retailer that had 60 million customers, 60 million households, and had roughly half a million different products. One of their businesses was a tools business, which is a 100-year-old, very reputable business of theirs. For a long time, they had been segmenting their customers saying these are my expert customers, these are my novice customers, and these are my intermediate customers. And the way they did [this] was that if people bought expensive tools more frequently, they would call them “experts.” And if you buy infrequently and you bought inexpensive tools you would be called “novices.” Which they knew was not the right way of doing it, but that is the best they could do, because you can’t really ask a customer whether they are an expert or a novice. They didn’t have that infrastructure.

And the idea [of customer genomics] that we worked with them on was to say that the basic premise was, you are what you buy.

We went to the merchandisers who were in the tools business and asked them to mark a few of the products. They had thousands of tools-related SKUs. We said mark 50 of them and tell us whether these are expert products, novice products, or intermediate products. Just give us a few examples. And then we said, OK, if you are a customer and you bought one of these products, and that happened to be an expert product, then it’s more likely you are going to be an expert. And if you bought a novice product, more likely that you will be a novice.

We bootstrapped an algorithm that would automatically determine and label all the products as expert, novice, and intermediate, as well as all the customers as expert, novice, and intermediate.

That’s how the problem was structured. Now what we saw after that was some very interesting insight. We found out that the novices really don’t buy cheap tools. They actually buy expensive tools. But they buy cheap accessories. So that was one interesting finding. Another interesting finding was that the experts are not necessarily buying the most expensive tools, but one thing is clear about their buying behavior: They like to buy only the tools and nothing else from the store. They visit the store, they just buy that tool and they go back. They really don’t spend any more time buying products in the store.

And this was the beginning of a full-fledged program across all 17 their business lines, where we basically started using transaction data to understand customer behavior better and then uniquely target them for marketing programs.

CIOs from industries as disparate as Nissan and Sonic are using the software tools at their disposal to help their organizations react to a U.S. government default, in the unlikely event it actually occurs.Chief information officers around the world are playing an important role in helping their organizations plan for the fallout from a U.S. government default. The combination of a government shutdown and a default on U.S. debt could have a crippling effect on business, but exactly how that would manifest is entirely unknown.

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Good morning. A good number of CIOs are helping their organizations game out the possible repercussions of a default on U.S. debt. Srikanth Velamakanni, chief executive of Fractal Analytics Inc., tells CIO Journal that while businesses can’t act on contingencies for so-called Black Swan events until they actually have occurred, computer-aided simulations or theoretical models can help organizations prepare for and mitigate the effects of a default, which could impact everything from the cost of short-term loans to pricing power after the storm has broken. Executives might not be able to do anything concrete to prepare, but “you don’t want to start thinking when the event occurs,” he said – because by then it’s too late.

How do you achieve a proper balance between business case-driven results and pure data experimentation which yields actionable information?

“The $64,000 Question” began as a radio show in 1940, and went through a series of transformations and ultimately, adoption to television until it finally left the air in 1952. Contestants were asked questions of progressive difficulty as the stakes of the game increased. I still hear people who weren’t even alive at the time of the show refer to the “$64,000 question” when they talk about the art of asking the right question and getting the answer that they’re looking for. I dare say getting both questions and answers right hasn’t gotten any easier with big data.

That is the question

The point was driven home this week in a conversation I had with Srikanth Velamakanni, CEO and founder of Fractal Analytics, a big data analytics provider. “What we see with companies and how they are using their big data is actually a bigger issue than the answers that they are deriving from their big data,” said Velamakanni. “We believe that the big issue is whether they are asking the right questions in the first place.”

It’s a challenge for organizations which now find they are swimming in data, yet struggling to identify the really relevant questions they should be asking.

Some organizations try to harness their big data by structuring analytics questions around specific business cases that they want to solve or better understand. The thinking behind this is that if you have specific objectives and a tightly constricted focus, you won’t get “off course” in your big data probes and questions asking, and you will likely arrive at results faster.

Yet, most of us only have to go through a current report catalogue in the average company to see that there already is information on company business line and product profitability, quarterly and annual financial results that can be compared with financial performance one year ago, statements of inventory surpluses and shortages, and even reports that show how many new accounts the company has gained (and how many it has lost). These reports are the outcomes of historical business cases that companies have already identified in areas like finance, operations and sales – so if a big data analytics project gets focused too tightly around one of these existing business cases (or something similar) the chances are high that the answer to a big data query (or at last part of it) already exists in legacy reports somewhere.

Art of the question

Velamakanni talks about this when he discusses the art of asking the right questions and getting the most out of big data.

“We have scientists in our data lab who tell us something we were not expecting to get,” he said. “It comes down to the ability to explore data. If you don’t do this data exploration well enough, you might find that you’re too narrowly focused on solving a particular business problem with your queries. On the other hand, when you look at the data itself without initially limiting it with a focus that could be too narrow, you might come away with something different.”

The exploratory approach works well in academia, where the emphasis is on research and there is also an understanding that not every data exploration will be successful, However, in enterprises where bottom line results are measured and bottom line answers to questions are expected, it isn’t always easy to adopt a more open and exploratory approach to big data queries – especially if they don’t end up yielding results.

Of course, if you don’t dare to experiment with big data, you’re not likely to get the ground-breaking answers you want to get, either.

This is the crossroads that many organizations find themselves at now in their big data analytics. How they achieve a proper balance between business case-driven results and pure data experimentation that yields innovative, unanticipated and actionable information – might well be the next “$64,000 Question.”

About Mary Shacklett

Mary E. Shacklett is president of Transworld Data, a technology research and market development firm. Prior to founding the company, Mary was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Technology at TCCU, Inc., a financial services firm; Vice President of Product Research and Software Development for Summit Information Systems, a computer software company; and Vice President of Strategic Planning and Technology at FSI International, a multinational manufacturing company in the semiconductor industry. Mary is a keynote speaker and has more than 1,000 articles, research studies, and technology publications in print.

Srikanth Velamakanni, the founder and CEO of Fractal Analytics, has a pet peeve. “Over the last 15 years I’ve been in this business, the one thing that frustrates me the most is companies make so many mistakes using faulty analytics,” he says. “People use analytics for political reasons, or they make some very stupid mistakes in terms of how they’re thinking about the problem, and make huge errors in their decisions.”

Just as Hippocrates encouraged medical doctors to do no wrong, Fractal aims to help companies avoid errors in analytics. That business is booming in that regard is not surprising, Velamakanni says.

“My role has been to work with companies to make sure they’re setting it [analytics] up correctly,” Velamakanni says in a phone interview last week. “But over the years, as data volumes have increased and it’s become harder and harder to put all of these things together, I think that people are definitely losing control over the quality of their decisions with the analytics. There are the exceptions. But for most companies, it’s fair to say they are currently really struggling to pull the piece of data together in an industrious manner and make decisions.”

When he founded Fractal Analytics 14 years ago, the term “big data” was just a gleam in a marketer’s eye. “We started doing analytics way before it was really popular or it was called big data or whatever,” Velamakanni says. Over the years, he has created a successful business by building and deploying predictive analytic tools for some of the biggest companies in the world, including Fortune 100 firms in the consumer packaged goods (CPG), financial services, and retail industries.

Today, Fractal Analytics employs more than 600 workers around the world from its base in Jersey City, New Jersey, giving it more than 3,000 person-years of analytics experience. The company’s 300 or so customers come to Fractal not only for the technology and industry-specific expertise it can provide in the areas of customer analytics, pricing, marketing analytics, risk analysis, and supply chain analytics, but also for the way it can bring experts from diverse backgrounds like statistics, machine learning, auditing, sociology, and psychology to bear on a business analytic problem.

The company’s data harmonization product, called Concordia, can help the analytics process by cleaning up the data. After all, without good data, even the most powerful and precise analytic tool is essentially worthless.

Concordia brings together capabilities you might find in ETL and master data management (MDM) products. “It’s a bit like ETL in the sense that it’s solving exactly the same problem,” Velamakanni says. “But we are looking at data that’s very, very unclean, much more unclean that a traditional ETL tool would handle. We get lots of flat files with little or no information about it.” The software also has the capability to work with data in more than 100 languages, which is something a traditional ETL would struggle with.

Concordia is used by companies that find large gaps in their data is hurting their capability to perform analytics. “A company might want to understand and analyze their data on a weekly basis, but some [subsidiaries in other] countries are only reporting on a monthly basis. How do you convert monthly information to a weekly basis? Traditional ETL technology tech doesn’t do any of that stuff. But we use a lot of algorithms to intelligently interpolate, extrapolate, or divide the data in such a way that it can answer the question that is required to be answered. There are a lot of interesting algorithms in the product that do this job quite well.”

The company’s other main product, Customer Genomics, is used to deliver a multi-dimensional view about an organization’s customers and their views, interests, and activities. Just like Concordia, the Customer Genomics product can run on Hadoop, if the volume of data demands tremendous scalability. (TIBCO’s Spotfire product is also brought in as a visualization layer for the products.) And just as Concordia can be used to cover over bad patches of data, Customer Genomics can keep analytic projects from veering off into fantasy land.

According to Velamakanni, the traditional customer segmentation methods used for decades have almost no bearing on reality. “Essentially the idea that we can standardize all the people in the world into 10 or 20 neat boxes and they’ll behave that way for all purposes is very faulty,” he says. Fractal tackles the problem of accurate customer portrayals by getting lots of data, and then running its “secret sauce” algorithms against it.

“The idea is, how do we uniquely label customers so that we understand them on a multi-dimensional basis, and not on just one axes in a segmentation schema,” Velamakanni says. “That’s what Customer Genomics does. It looks at all the transactions from a customer–what they see on social media, they’re browsing behavior, the devices they use–and starts to put various kinds of labels against them.  Maybe you’re an expert in photography, or you like organic foods, or you have kids, or you’re thin. I can find out all these things based on your transactions, and using this information, we can then hyper-customize the customer experience.”

But don’t mistake this for another episode of “Algorithms Gone Wild.” Without human supervision, the machines can’t be trusted to generate accurate answers against new data. Just as you wouldn’t make a $1-million bet on the hunch of a human analyst with little experience in her field, machines need training, too. And despite what some in the industry have said, the “bigness” of big data is no substitute for knowing what to look for, and what to ignore. “If you’re looking at new data sources and choosing them for the first time, you don’t know what to expect, so you don’t have a sense of what’s valid and what’s not,” Velamakanni says.

Fractal Analytics’ technology essentially is the synthesis of years of human experience solving business analytic problems in CPG, financial service, and retail. It’s solving the old “garbage in, garbage out” quandary, at big data scale. At the same time, it’s paving a way for machines to take over the jobs they are good at, while simultaneously keeping humans and their often flawed thinking away from the analytics as much as needed.

The goal of Fractal Analytics is to make analytics error free and less dependent on people and more dependent on processes and technology. “That’s the big drive we’re seeing,” Velamakanni says. “We never like to [have humans] do things that machine are capable of doing better. That’s what we’re seeing all over the in analytic world. When you’re playing with a lot of data, I don’t think any company in the world has a foolproof way of fixing errors that creep into analytics. This is a way in which we’ve addressed the problem. By creating a visual workflow and by automating it, we’re reducing the variability and the human error that creeps into any analytics exercise.”

The market is witnessing the emergence of social analytics
DUBLIN, IRELAND: The analysts forecast the global data analytics outsourcing market to grow at a CAGR of 31.68 per cent over the period 2012-2016. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the rapid expansion of data.

The global data analytics outsourcing market has also been witnessing the emergence of social analytics. However, the lack of awareness about data analytics could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

The key vendors dominating this space include Fractal analytics Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., WIPRO Ltd., and ZS Associates Inc.

The other vendors mentioned in the report are American Express, Capgemini S.A., Citigroup Inc., Cognizant, Credit Rating Information Service of India Ltd., Eclerx Services Ltd., Evalueserve Ltd., EXL Services Holding Inc., Fractal Analytics Ltd., Genpact Ltd., Mu Sigma Inc., Opera Solutions, Infosys Ltd., TCS Ltd., UBS AG, and WNS Holdings Ltd.

Everybody is talking about Big Data these days, and for good reason. The most successful companies are gaining a competitive edge by employing analytics to improve decision making, develop effective marketing strategies, and understand, predict and influence consumer behavior. Since 2000, Fractal Analytics has been helping Fortune 500 companies solve intractable problems at every organizational level.

Fractal tailors analytics solutions for consumer-facing companies that have high volume transactions to solve problems centered in two areas: 1) need to deeply understand consumers to drive engagement and loyalty, and 2) help businesses to operate more efficiently by institutionalizing data-informed decisions. The flagship Customer Genomics solution helps personalize marketing from a 360 degree view of each customer’s behavior and attitudes. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every customer transaction and interaction, including social media.

Fractal specializes in consumer goods, financial services, insurance, retail, and technology industries. The company draws upon its experience working with data and consumer behavior in over 100 countries to offer 40 productized services that give enterprises the ability to identify, track and act upon previously undiscovered patterns in chaotic ocean of information.

By integrating scientific decision making into the very fabric of the corporate culture, Fractal’s clients are improving business process efficacy and their customer experience, resulting in higher market share and profitability. From artificial intelligence (AI) to business intelligence (BI) to customer intelligence (CI), Fractal Analytics offers the opportunity to leverage a range of business analytics to ride big data to sustainable success.

People set Fractal Analytics apart

Fractal Analytics is very selective in hiring and grooming exceptional analytics professionals with deep expertise in problem-solving across industries. It offers a wide range of services with a flexible engagement approach.

What’s next for Fractal?

Fractal is striving to be the world’s premiere analytics company. The company is on its way as proven by the recent recognition by leading industry analyst Gartner’s report on ‘Cool Vendors in Analytics’. The path to global excellence is built by individuals that collaborate in teams with an emphasis on operational efficiency and leading technologies.

Fractal Analytics is leveraging a private equity investment from TA Associates to bring new machine-learning solutions to market and double the employee strength to 1,200 in the next year. In the U.S., the company is responding to client demand by expanding New York and California offices and strengthening client services presence in India, Europe and Latin America. The future is paved with breakthrough data-informed decisions for everyone and every purpose. The future is analytics. That future is now.

The big data and analytics industry is grappling with a low supply of qualified talent

In this volatile economic condition, where most companies are curbing hiring costs, big data and analytics is one emerging area that is talent-starved. Unlike other professions with abundant talent, the demand for right talent is intensifying in this industry. Data analysts are candidates with a unique combination of computational and analytical skills that are difficult to find.

The human resource personnel of these companies and departments grapple with the challenge of finding an amalgamation of a mathematician, statistician, an economist, social scientist and even a psychologist in one ‘right’ candidate. The HR in collaboration with other divisions should be able to bifurcate the multiple job roles in analytics, based on different competency levels, instead of trying to retrofit one candidate in multiple roles. For example, a candidate with an engineering or a technology background could fit the role of a big data engineer; likewise, a candidate with an MS in computer sciences, postgraduate degree in statistics, or econometrics, combined with an MBA degree, best suits an analytics consulting role. A well-defined job role in analytics will enable companies to identify specialists for each role and fast-track the recruitment process. HR could also target raw talent from top business schools or engineering colleges with a passion for problem-solving, who can be groomed to develop sophisticated analytics solutions.

Besides recruitment, another arduous task for the HR department is to develop and engage employees in this competitive landscape where companies are vying for the best talent. This can be attained by making the job more appealing with new challenges, offering structured training programmes and providing employees with an inclusive work environment.

With the average age of an analyst being 35 years or less, these young professionals with the adrenaline rush of constantly challenging their potential, will remain with a company that throws difficult and compelling opportunities their way and allows them to operate independently. Analytics is all pervasive; apart from enabling us to solve business problems, it is also prevalent in other areas such as predicting cricket, weather, or politics, crime prevention, disease management, and even in our personal lives with applications such as Google Now. The opportunities in the field of analytics are unimaginable. It is the responsibility of companies to identify the candidate’s area(s) of interest and core competence and allow ample exposure across various industries.

– The author is senior vice president and head, human resource, Fractal Analytics

BANGALORE/MUMBAI:
Institutes that provide training in the hottest new technology areas—cloud computing, mobile and data analytics— are growing in prominence to cater to demand from software companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

This phenomenon is being driven by the shift that is taking place in the information technology industry where traditional services are being supplemented rapidly by those which take advantage of ubiquitous, fast internet access and the rising popularity of mobile devices.

“We have recorded phenomenal growth in demand,” said Gaurav Vohra, founder of Jigsaw Academy, an online training institute that specialises in analytics. The three-year-old venture began in Bangalore by training about eight students a month.

Today, it enrolls 125 students a month. Jigsaw’s alumni now work at top IT firms like Infosys and Genpact as well as core analytics providers such as Fractal Analytics.

The demand is huge. While India alone will require at least one lakh cloud computing professionals by 2015, globally there will be a shortage of some 2 lakh data analysts by 2019, according to a study by EMC and Zinnov.

All of this taking place when large Indian IT companies have slowed down their pace of hiring from engineering colleges.

They are doing so amid rising levels of automation for routine, repetitive tasks. In 2013-14, software industry grouping Nasscom estimates that 1.5 lakh graduates will be hired by the industry, compared to 1.8 lakh in the previous year.

Koenig Solutions, based in Delhi, is among those which has been a beneficiary of the technology shift. It has partnered with cloud computing softwaremaker VMware to train students in a technology which helps enterprises access their IT services through the internet.

Rohit Aggarwal, chief executive of the company, said his students have received offers from TCS, Infosys and IBM.

“Short-term training in hot skills is at an all-time high,” said Surabhi Mathur Gandhi, senior vice president at Teamlease, a staffing firm. “A lot of training institutions have started tying up with IT companies for post-placement opportunities.”

She said the reduction in campus hires has pushed students to join training institutes with placement cells. Other institutes that are making a mark in the new areas include RCV Innovations, Smarton, Equitor and Bites Academy.

India’s third-largest IT services firm, Wipro Technologies, which already has a team of 1,000 to work on these new technologies, is expected to hire more. “These skills are not available at the level of new engineering graduates,” said Deepak Jain, senior vice president and global head for workforce planning and development at Wipro. “We work with training institutes and our alliance partners for training on emerging technologies.”

In addition to traditional IT services companies, specialist providers of services such as cloud computing and data analytics are hiring in large numbers.

SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Alliance to Enable Sustainable Competitive Advantage in a Big Data World

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics services, and TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TIBX), a leading provider of enterprise-class analytics software, today announced a strategic alliance marrying Fractal Analytics’ predictive analytics capabilities with TIBCO’s visualization software, TIBCO Spotfire®. The relationship makes data-informed driven decisions more actionable and accessible to business users through visual storytelling to speed real-time decisions.

“Advanced analytics help businesses to stand out amid a sea of promotions by taking targeted customer engagement to the next level. Data visualization is not just for marketing; it’s a key element that can transform every aspect of business, from the mailroom to the boardroom. TIBCO Spotfire allows all types of users to visually discover insights hidden in big data to make more effective decisions,” said Pranay Agrawal, co-founder and executive vice president, global consulting and account management, Fractal Analytics.

“Spotfire delivers transformational business value through visual, predictive, and operational analytics, and our alliance with Fractal ensures that our joint customers can not only discover – but more importantly anticipate – opportunities or threats in big data to achieve sustained competitive advantage,” said Peter Lee, executive vice president, TIBCO Spotfire.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to deeply understand consumers, earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytical solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning. Learn more at www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In June, global private equity firm TA Associates acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million, and in May, information technology and research advisor Gartner named Fractal as a top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

Reams of data are generated everyday; these practitioners mine the information for cues on what sells and why

Analysing billions of data points and making sense of them is what data analysts excel at. Whether it is Web-browsing data trails, social media communication or even video or audio data files, managing these petabytes (10 to the power of 15 bytes) is what these data scientists enjoy doing most.

This data deluge (popularly referred to as “big data”) is the new catchword as far as superior decision making is concerned, and experts with the computer skills to store this data, retrieve it by writing the right software algorithms and with the business analytics to use it, are in huge demand. We ask these professionals what it feels like to be in what the Harvard Business Review describes as the “sexiest job of the 21st century” and what it takes to keep up with the technology.

Srikanth Karnakota, 37
Director, server and cloud business, Microsoft India, Hyderabad

Srikanth Karnakota explains the intricacies of cloud computing with ease, making him sound quite like the evangelist for big data. “Organizations today have a big ‘data’ problem, they are able to make sense of just 20% of their data, the balance 80% is just there, and that is why big data today is one of the top priorities for the CEO (chief executive officer),” says Karnakota, who spends his days marketing Microsoft’s Server and Cloud Azure, both tools for big data management.

How he got here:An electronics and communications engineer from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (1997), and a master’s in business administration (MBA) from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi (1999), Karnakota joined Maruti Udyog Ltd, where he worked on exports and imports at the Nhava Sheva port in Mumbai.

“But the itch to join the digital side of the business was always there,” says Karnakota, who applied in 2000 to Pramati Technologies, a start-up that made application servers. In 2004, Karnakota, who was handling business development for Pramati, joined Microsoft. He built and incubated start-ups for Microsoft and in 2008 moved to the cloud and server side of the business.

Daily duty:Karnakota’s job is to sell and service the Microsoft range of tools and solutions for big data. These include the Hadoop-based Windows servers (the Hadoop software framework supports data-intensive applications) as well as Windows Azure. On a typical day in Hyderabad, he may sit down to work with his four product managers, to work out a sales incentive structure for Microsoft salesmen. Microsoft in India sells through a complex web of approximately 800-strong sales force.

Before we met, Karnakota had to speak at a big data event, organized by Microsoft, where experts had been invited to speak about the challenges and solutions of big data. Here, Karnakota says, he liaised with some clients and potential customers.

At office, there are a few internal meetings, which Karnakota conducts from his cabin via Lync/Skype. But virtual meetings notwithstanding, Karnakota travels a lot, both for internal meetings and meetings with customers. He spends three days a week on the road, mostly in Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, with a quarterly visit to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, US.

Most interesting project: He worked with a car company that uses big data on consumer preferences derived from the Internet and social media. This was integrated with their dealer software. “This is where the magic happens. The dealer from Coimbatore now knows he has to store fewer jazzy colours because Coimbatore consumers prefer sober colours. The dealer from Nagpur knows his biggest customers are likely to be from the farming community, so he should design his promotion schemes to appeal to them,” says Karnakota.

Biggest challenge: “Anticipating the trends that are going to shape the industry and being ready for that,” he says. Karnakota keeps up with the latest technology trends almost obsessively. “You will be dead if you are not curious,” he says.

Skill set needed for this field:”At Microsoft, we are a fairly opinionated team, so we look for people who are confident and believe in themselves. Also, people who are driven; else it is easy to get sapped out by the complexities of this business,” says Karnakota. Decent programming skills, passion, curiosity, as well as the ability to collaborate and communicate are some of the qualities data analysts need to succeed.

Money matters: The salary at this level can be upwards of Rs.1 crore per annum.

Vinita Sivaramakrishnan, 25
Assistant manager, analytics, Hansa Cequity, Mumbai

Vinita Sivaramakrishnan has always been a fan of numbers. “I like data; I like making sense of what is happening with the aid of numbers,” she says.

How she got here: After a bachelor’s degree in statistics from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and master’s in political science and operations research from the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK, Sivaramakrishnan joined Genpact’s analytics division in Bangalore in 2010. In 2012, Sivaramakrishnan left Genpact to join Chennai-based consulting firm, Takshashila Consulting.

“That job (Takshashila) wasn’t very data driven; I did it for a very short span of time before realizing consulting wasn’t for me,” says Sivaramakrishnan, who joined the Mumbai-based Hansa Cequity earlier this year. “Since the company is only six years old, it has a start-up feel to it. It also gives me the opportunity to work in retail marketing and to work face to face with clients in the Indian market,” she says.

Daily duty: Sivaramakrishnan begins her day with a data study. “There are always business queries that require a deep dive into data,” she says. The morning is spent trying to examine what caused a spike in last months’ sales for a client. She also needs to track response to the clients’ advertising campaigns and/or mailers. This involves working on SQL servers as well as Excel. Sivaramakrishnan has learnt coding on the job and sometimes writes her own code.

“C and Java used to drive me crazy when I was in school. But now when I know what output I need, like the figures on the sales of a particular month, it’s easy for me to write a query and pull that information out of the data warehouse,” she explains.

Most interesting project: Designing a strategy, while at Genpact, to optimize debt collection from credit card customers. “It got our client amazing returns and is being used even today,” says Sivaramakrishnan.

Biggest challenge: “Learning to take that extra step to translate your statistical analysis into layman’s terms to be able to communicate with marketing guys.” Skill set needed for this field: “Quantitative skills; you can’t flip when you see a spreadsheet with 1 million rows of numbers,” she says. Money matters:The starting salary ranges from Rs.4.5 lakh-9 lakh per annum. With three to five years’ experience, it can go up to Rs.7 lakh-15 lakh per annum.

Srikanth Velamakanni, 39
Group chief executive officer (CEO), Fractal Analytics Inc., based in Mumbai and San Francisco, US

“We are like Sherlock Holmes; we do what the human mind has always wanted to do—find answers to questions,” says Srikanth Velamakanni, who quit a career in finance 13 years ago to become a co-founder at Fractal Analytics Inc., a data analytics firm.

How he got here:After a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), Velamakanni joined ANZ Bank in 1998, moving a year later to ICICI.

At ICICI, Velamakanni worked on designing India’s first collateralized debt offering (CDO). “We had to do a lot of very interesting math behind that in understanding the risk profile of the different cash flows and pooling them in a way investors found attractive,” says Velamakanni. The math was interesting but didn’t seem to add much value to the world. So, in 2000, Velamakanni along with an IIM-A batchmate, Pranay Agrawal, set up Fractal Analytics “to deeply connect with consumers, earn customer loyalty, make better decisions to reduce waste, and ultimately improve lives”.

Daily duty: Velamakanni’s day in Mumbai begins at 8.30am, with Fractal’s executive committee global telephone call—a seven-city call, where heads of the different offices, the chief financial officer, and the heads of human resources and marketing get together for an hour and a half to discuss the highlights (and lowlights) of the past week, and plan for the week ahead. The week we met, Fractal was hiring and Velamakanni reviewed with the head of human resources the hiring plans, as well as the training programme for the new hires. The entrepreneur, who believes in “management by walking” (he walks up to the staff instead of summoning them), then met the head of Fractal Sciences for a discussion on the customer genomics algorithm. “It’s an algorithm we are designing that tries to figure out what kind of person you are and what are the kinds of things you would like to buy based on the data obtained from your earlier purchases,” says Velamakanni.

Post-lunch the team was busy with a client visit; most of Fractal’s customers are based in the US and interact on the phone, but every now and then a client visits the Mumbai office.

With 600 employees spread over seven locations, and a bulk of the customers based in the US, Velamakanni says he is always on a plane. Most interesting project: “So many. We started our business with designing a model for ICICI that would reduce their loan default rate. In 2001, we did a project for Hindustan Unilever and later one for Citibank, where we built a model that sold personal loans on a credit card for them, which they loved,” says Velamakanni.

Biggest challenge: “In 2009-10, we lost 10% of our revenue in a single day when General Motors went bankrupt. Earlier in 2007-08, we lost 25% of our team in one day. They wanted to start another organization but once funding looked dim, they joined another organization. That was the toughest time for me personally,” he says.

Skill set needed for this field: “Problem-solving abilities. Humility because, at the end of the day, ours is a service business. Basic learnability. People with economics and statistics background, because we are building econometric models. Training in computer science helps in building machine-learning models. People with sociology, psychology or anthropology background that can help us try to understand the human mind,” he says.

Money matters: The starting salary can be around Rs.7.5 lakh per annum. Data professionals in the US earn upwards of $1 million (around Rs.6.2 crore). In India, at the CEO level, it is upwards of Rs.1 crore.

Every month, we explore a profession through the lives of three executives at different stages in their careers.

SAN MATEO, Calif. (BUSINESS WIRE)

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics, today announced that the 2013 Inc. 5000 list recognized the company for their sustained growth, ranking the Fractal among the fastest growing private companies nationwide for the second straight year.

Fractal’s surge in the rankings (to #1228 nationally) stems from a 335 percent increase in revenue over the last three years.

“We are honored to be recognized for our rising success over the past few years,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal Analytics co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “We expect continued growth as we bring our clients new machine-learning solutions that solve their toughest problems.”

In addition to Inc.com, Fractal Analytics has been acknowledged for their growth and cutting-edge analytics from: 1) leading industry analyst Gartner, in their report on ‘Cool Vendors in Analytics’, 2) USPAACC’s Fastest 50 Asian-American owned private businesses, and 3) leading growth private equity firm TA Associates’ $25M equity investment.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to deeply understand consumers, earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytical solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning. Learn more at www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In June, global private equity firm TA Associates acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million, and in May, information technology and research advisor Gartner named Fractal as a top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

Contact:

for Fractal Analytics
Liam Collopy, 510-635-4150
[email protected]

The concept of price elasticity of demand has not received enough attention in the world of property/casualty insurance.

Regulatory hurdles, a tradition of cost-plus pricing and maybe even an outright aversion to the word “discrimination” combine to hold insurers back from reaping the full benefits of applying some of the basic economic principles that are commonly used in other industries—industries that charge consumers different prices for the same product or service.

Microeconomic theory teaches us that thoughtful selection of prices, or price discrimination, is a key to maximizing revenue and profit. Our research, in fact, reveals that if P/C insurers adopt advanced pricing strategies that consider customer elasticity differences, they can boost their revenues by roughly 3 percent and returns-on-equity by 1 percent, on average.

Price elasticity of demand (PED) essentially refers to the responsiveness—elasticity—of a customer in terms of the quantity of a product he or she will buy when the price of that product changes.

The airline industry provides a recognizable example of how a pricing strategy can be developed based on an understanding of price elasticity. Airlines get higher prices from business travelers with inelastic demand than from vacationers who shop for deals and show flexibility on departure times.

Likewise, all types of retailers offer discounts to senior citizens for their products, because seniors with more flexible schedules are price-elastic.

Some P/C insurers exploit the relative inelasticity of policyholder demand (on a limited basis). Insurers, for example, may account for elasticity differences when applying single-digit discounts to multi-year auto policyholders, even when their loss experience suggests steeper discounts are possible. Business insurers also may offer modest package discounts when the data suggests their loss experience could support a more substantial package-policy bonus.

In other words, they’re increasing their own revenues and profits rather than sharing savings with customers.

Such practices, however, are intuition-led and not typically based on rigorous analytics.

We believe that Big Data and predictive analytics offer new avenues for research and application of PED concepts in insurance. In addition, we will propose one way in which P/C insurers can make PED concepts work within the existing regulatory framework.

Price Discrimination Anathema to Insurance

“Discrimination” is a loaded word, but what we’re discussing here is segmenting consumers based on their behaviors, not by characteristics that insurance regulations identify as unfair, such as race or religion.

Still, P/C carriers are rooted in a cost-plus pricing world—borne from the data we capture, the relative size of variable costs over fixed costs, and most notably from actuarial and regulatory principles that emphasize rates that are “reasonable and not excessive, inadequate or unfairly discriminatory.”

Outside of the United States, price differentiation practices are more advanced than the package and multi-year discounts discussed above. In fact, in the U.K., car insurers are permitted to change rates at will—on a daily basis if they so desire. Only race and gender are considered off limits, although insurers can and do market by gender. One British insurer is even called “drive like a girl.”

Despite regulatory hurdles, we are pleased to report that PED does have a role in the U.S. personal and commercial insurance marketplace. Measures of PED cannot be applied to the individual as they might in the U.K. market, for instance, where the time of day a purchase is made might result in different rates for otherwise identical risks.

In the United States, we must apply these principles at the cohort level in a manner consistent with accepted rating variables.

The Power of Big Data

To begin to understand their customers’ price elasticity, insurers will need to capture new data. While it is true that most insurers today don’t have the same robust customer-behavior data that an online retailer might have, that picture is changing as more consumers buy—or at least shop for—their auto policies online before making a purchase.

The data now being captured at the insurer’s website can provide useful insight into consumers’ behavior.

Once it is captured, price elasticity will manifest in at least two traditional ways:

  • Switching behavior exhibited when inefficiencies in pricing enable customers to find lower premiums or more favorable combinations of prices and coverages.
  • Reduction in consumption in response to a change in price. A policyholder who raises his deductible or lowers his limit in response to a price increase is revealing something about his price elasticity. We refer to this behavior as “rate avoidance.”

Readers will recognize the latter as a common aspect of the property-catastrophe reinsurance market, where insurers regularly change their property-catastrophe program in response to rate changes.

Insurers will—and many already have—grasped these concepts. But through the power of predictive analytics and our ability to marry these behaviors with other forms of data, we can systematically look for patterns and correlations that can provide insights not visible through intuition or informed judgment alone.

Another benefit available to insurers that study PED on their own books of business relates to improved business and financial forecasting. Underwriters may reason that a 10 percent rate increase, for instance, will drive away some business. But predictive analytics may help to refine the likely percentage, or even to examine the impacts of other changes that may mitigate policy attrition.

Regulation Limits But Doesn’t Preclude PED Application

It is possible to use PED concepts while working within the limits established by insurance regulation. We turn to the example of personal auto insurance pricing to illustrate how price elasticity principles can be applied.

Most auto insurance rates are derived by applying rate relativity factors to a base rate. Those relativity factors will vary based on gender, age, credit score and so on. Importantly, the statistical analysis used to estimate the relativity factors produces a range of outcomes that within a certain confidence interval should be equally acceptable to the regulator. We believe that auto insurers will benefit by applying PED in their relativity selections. Our work shows that PED relativity selections from relativity ranges estimated with 95 percent confidence can improve revenue and profit outcomes by single-digit percentages.

Assume that through careful study of an insurer’s data, we can determine that females of a certain age exhibit less price elasticity than male drivers of the same age or females in adjacent age categories. Without being overly prescriptive, we could tweak the established rating relativity variables—within their accepted confidence intervals— to arrive at a different rate for those drivers.

In other words, carriers can apply PED at the cohort level—working within the existing framework to incorporate PED into already accepted pricing categories.

For a business, attributes including credit score, the industry it competes in and the number of years it has been in business are among those that might provide insight into PED. In turn, these could be used in rating algorithms to improve an insurer’s revenues.

While we have provided two examples of behavior that could be used to measure price elasticity—switching behavior and rate avoidance—there are actually many more.

We believe the incorporation of PED principles into insurance ratemaking is an idea whose time has come.

Global Data Analytics Outsourcing market to grow at a CAGR of 31.68 percent over the period 2012-2016. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the rapid expansion of data. The Global Data Analytics Outsourcing market has also been witnessing the emergence of social analytics. However, the lack of awareness about data analytics could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

To check out the complete table of contents, visit: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/analysis-details/global-data-analytics-outsourcing-market-2012-2016

Global Data Analytics Outsourcing Market 2012-2016, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market in the Americas and the EMEA and APAC regions; it also covers the Global Data Analytics Outsourcing market landscape and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

The key vendors dominating this space include Fractal analytics Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., WIPRO Ltd., and ZS Associates Inc.

The other vendors mentioned in the report are American Express, Capgemini S.A., Citigroup Inc., Cognizant, Credit Rating Information Service of India Ltd., Eclerx Services Ltd., Evalueserve Ltd., EXL Services Holding Inc., Fractal Analytics Ltd., Genpact Ltd., Mu Sigma Inc., Opera Solutions, Infosys Ltd., TCS Ltd., UBS AG, and WNS Holdings Ltd.

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What will the market size be in 2016 and what will be the growth rate?
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Who are the key vendors in this market space?
What are the market opportunities and threats faced by key vendors?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of these key vendors?

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Though still in its nascent stage, the trend of analytics providing a strategic business advantage is on the upsurge.

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BANGALORE/HYDERABAD: In tough times such as these, when software companies are extremely choosy about hiring, there is one area where the demand for professionals far exceeds supply — data analytics.

The consequence is that large information technology companies are aggressively poaching from small, specialist data analytics companies and driving up salaries for those with skills in this niche. Analysing vast amounts of data to help corporations make more informed business decisions is an emerging opportunity that software services companies are eager to tap into.

While smaller firms such as MuSigma, Fractal Analytics, Manthan Systems, Opera Solutions, AbsoluteData have been early birds in the space, larger companies like Tata consultancy Services, Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro, who were late to the game, are now scrambling for talent.

Rahul Kumar, an engineering graduate who refused to join typical IT companies for an annual salary of Rs 4-5 lakhs, is now being offered jobs that pays as much as Rs 7-10 lakh after he did a specialised data analytics course that trained him in the tools of the trade. Not much different is the case of Ashish Jain who works in the analytics practice at Infosys and is getting job offers with a promise of up to 50% raise.

“As traditional IT services firms try to ramp up their big data and analytic services, places like Manthan systems become a good source of trained talent,” said Atul Jalan, chief executive officer of Manthan Systems, which helps retail chains understand their customers better to be able reach out to them with right products at the right time.

“The only way to combat this trend of poaching is to provide the analysts with good opportunities and challenges.” The Bangalore-based analytics firm, which has seen a recent spike in employee attrition and looking for ways to improve employee engagement, is maintaining a “bench” of employees to shield itself from the impact of attrition .

“Instead of enforcing a bond on them, we reached out to our employees to understand their needs,” said Jalan. Industry analysts estimate that big data and data analytics firms are witnessing employee churn levels of between 15% and 20%, compared to broader IT industry attrition rates of 9% to 14%. “When the need comes, companies are ready to take the talent at any cost.

They make a lucrative offer in terms of salary, global exposure and role, which is difficult to say no to,” said Gaurav Vohra, founder and head of Jigsaw Academy , a Bangalore-based institute that offers specialised training in data analytics. The rush for talent is fuelled by the rapid rise in demand for analytics services.

Industry body Nasscom estimates analytics to be a $7.5 billion opportunity—including domestic demand and exports— by 2020 for Indian companies. The smaller, niche firms that are bearing the brunt of this tug-of-war for talent are investing in different strategies to be able to retain talent.

A report by Crisil said small Indian data analytics firms are investing heavily in infrastructure and other office facilities to create an employee-friendly environment. Some companies try to offer stock options as a means of ensuring employee loyalty.

“We obviously need to pay our people fairly and over the last four years, our increments have been a few percentage points higher than the IT industry,” said Srikanth Velamakanni , cofounder and CEO of Fractal Analytics that offer predictive analytics solutions to financial services, insurance and consumer goods clients.

SAN MATEO, Calif., July 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies, today announced that Shubham Mehrish, based in New York, has been named to head global client development for financial services and insurance.

“While financial services and insurance companies have derived tremendous benefits from the use of advanced analytics, they know they need to drive it to the next level,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fractal Analytics. “Shubham brings deep expertise in partnering and leading these industries to leverage big data technologies and machine learning techniques to drive competitive advantage.”

Mehrish is the latest in a series of strategic hires announced by Fractal as it scales globally. Mehrish, who brings over 15 years of industry experience to Fractal, most recently headed sales and strategy for Infosys’ insurance vertical in the Americas. Before that, Mehrish served for five years at Bank of America’s Global Corporate and Investment Bank, working on structured products and corporate credit. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University.

“Big Data and disruptive analytics have changed the competitive dynamic for financial services and insurance providers, opening up new avenues to build deeper customer relationships and drive operational efficiency,” Mehrish said. “Fractal’s deep analytics expertise and productized offerings such as Customer Genomics address this need. I am excited to lead Fractal in strengthening its Fortune 100 client relationships in these industries.”

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning. Fractal Analytics serves clients from offices in San Francisco Bay area, Greater New York area, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai. For more information, please visit www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including from social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In May, information technology and research advisory company Gartner named Fractal as one of the top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

Contact:
Careen Foster
Fractal Analytics
+1.510.229.2166

Email

Ranjana Mukherjee
FleishmanHillard
+91 77-3836-9622
Email

Software industry body Nasscom on Thursday announced the formation of a panel on making use of the growing business opportunities in the analytics and big data space. It estimates that big data analytics would offer an opportunity of $7-7.5 billion (Rs 42,100-45,150 crore) by 2020.

The primary role of the interest group would be to help increase the visibility and relevance of the analytics in the Indian context. Also, consult and equip analytics providers with capabilities and address the talent gap, besides finding answers to specific issues coming in the way of its adoption, according to Som Mittal, president of Nasscom.

Big data analytics is an expertise that offers actionable insights and is a confluence of a host of specialisations, including mathematics, science and social sciences. It seeks to provide ways to increase the business and profitability of companies based on big data generated from various sources regarding the customer behaviour.

Mittal said the Indian information technology and software sector had to gear up for making use of this new global business opportunity. He also said the scope for specialisation within the analytics would result in a new wave of companies emerging on the Indian horizon.

The special interest group would determine the growth strategy for India as an emerging analytics, and getting the human talent oriented to create a pool of analytics would be one of the immediate challenges, according to him.

The group members include Sundar Ramaswamy of Absolut Data, Arnab Chakraborty, Accenture, Sameer Dhanrajani of Cognizant, Pankaj Rai of Dell, Sudhir Banerjee of Honeywell Business, Srikanth Velamakanni of Fractal Analytics and Pankaj Kulshreshta of Genpact.

Research firm CRISIL, which has brought out a report on risk and procurement analytics for Nasscom, has predicted the prospects for these services, particularly risk analytics, which is expected to become a $50-billion industry globally by 2020. According to the report, the Indian analytics services players will have a $2.5-billion opportunity, up from $700 million in 2013.

Roopa Kudva, managing director and chief executive officer of CRISIL, earlier addressing the Big Data and Analytics Summit organised by Nasscom here, said analytics would have big opportunity in preventing frauds, one of the problems facing the financial sector.

Fractal Analytics, which received a Rs 150-crore private equity investment from TA Associates, will double its employee strength to 1,200 in the next year as it expands its presence in India, Europe and Latin America.

The company’s Mumbai office has 450 employees, while in Delhi there are about 50 and in the US and a few other countries there are about 100. “We are going to double the workforce in Mumbai and Delhi. The number of staff outside India too would double,” Srikanth Velamakanni, Group Chief Executive Officer of Fractal Analytics, told Business Line.

The company registered a turnover of Rs 120 crore in 2012-13 and is looking at Rs 210 crore this year. “We are looking at going for an IPO in three years, when we expect to reach a turnover of Rs 600 crore. PE players, however, are not in a hurry for an exit soon,” Velamakanni said.

Hiring for big analytics companies could be more different from hiring for a normal IT company. “You need a mathematician, a statistician, social scientist and even one from the psychology field,” he said.

“Talent in this segment is quite scarce. We had hired 200 people last year. For that, we had to vet 10,000 resumes. And we are going to vet 25,000 resumes as we finalise the plans for hiring 600 this year,” he said.

CUSTOMER GENOMICS

Srikanth said computers are better placed to understand the behaviour of customers. “By just seeing you, I will make some internal assessments on what kind of phone you use and what is the operating system you are using,” he said.

By knowing customer preferences, computers can predict your buying behaviour. “We have built an engine called Customer Genomics to help corporates understand the behaviour of their customers without having to talk to them. It understands behaviour of consumers and products (how they are being received.)

Big data is not just for software companies, but increasingly permeates almost every industry

On 24 June, private equity (PE) firm TA Associates Inc. said it invested $25 million in lieu of a minority stake in Mumbai-based Fractal Analytics Inc., which provides advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies. On 7 May, Wipro Ltd signed an agreement to invest $30 million for a minority position in Opera Solutions Llc, a big data science company headquartered in Jersey City, NJ.

Both these companies are one among the hundreds that have begun to understand, some as users and others as investors, the value of big data—a term used to describe the value in analyzing the mountains of data produced by companies and individuals with the help of algorithms rather than some human input the way business intelligence (BI) solutions do.

Intel Corp., for instance, estimates that the world generates 1 petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of data every 11 seconds or the equivalent of 13 years of HD (high-definition) video. Research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) estimated that in 2011, all of the data created in the world amounted to 1.6 trillion gigabytes. By 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to networks and the Internet.

The proliferation of devices such as PCs and smartphones worldwide increased Internet access within emerging markets and the boost in data from machines such as surveillance cameras or smart meters has contributed to the doubling of the digital universe within the past two years alone—to a mammoth 2.8 ZB (zettabytes), according to a December report titled “IDC Digital Universe”, which was sponsored by EMC Corp.

IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 ZB by 2020, an amount that exceeds previous forecasts by 14%. There are 700,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on all the beaches on earth, which means 40 ZB is equal to 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. In 2020, 40 ZB will be 5,247 GB per person worldwide, the report said, adding that by 2020, emerging markets will supplant the developed world as the main producer of the world’s data.

It’s no wonder that in 2006, market researcher Clive Humby declared data “the new oil”, which underscores big data’s potential.

In a May 2011 paper, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) forecast the use of big data would become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms, even as it acknowledged that policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability will need to be addressed in a big data world.

MGI studied big data in five domains-—healthcare and retail in the US, the public sector in Europe, and manufacturing and personal-location data globally. The report said a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60%. It added that if US healthcare was to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year with two-thirds of that in the form of reducing US healthcare expenditure by about 8%.

In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues. And users of services enabled by personal-location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus.

Wipro, for instance, invested in Opera Solutions for its specialization in machine learning, which Opera applies to the world’s big data flows to extract predictive patterns, or signals based on which it offers a range of solutions, delivered as a service to improve front-line productivity and bottom line growth.

Infosys Ltd, according to PWC’s Global 100 Software Leaders Report released in May, used analytics to make sure it was deploying sales efforts most profitably. It analyzed lifetime revenues of clients and discovered that sales had drifted from a focus on the largest enterprises to some mid-sized businesses. The analysis also highlighted how many resources these smaller accounts typically consumed. One Infosys product for retailers, for example, takes data on purchasing patterns and uses an algorithm to make recommendations to consumers, just like Amazon and Netflix. Infosys is paid by value that its creates for the online store and it’s completely in the cloud, the report said.

On 9 May, IBM Corp. said the Central Bank of India is leveraging its analytics solution to transform its financial management processes which includes activities ranging from budgeting to forecasting to liquidity management, due to which the company is able to gain better insight into branch and regional office performance, allowing for further flexibility and quicker shifts in strategy to drive improved results while also maintaining regulatory compliance.

With the use of analytics, Central Bank of India has moved away from spreadsheet based planning to a smarter process that analyzes daily financial data based on actual performance and potential for growth.

Another key part of the bank’s transformation was the implementation of state-of-the-art static asset liability management solution which enables the company to reduce liquidity risk and also minimize impact of interest rate and foreign exchange rate movements. As such, the bank has achieved total automation of this tedious and time consuming process by consolidating approximately 7.5 million deals and trade positions across the company.

Why is big data so important?

By its very nature, network traffic is big data. The over 6 billion mobile subscriptions around the world, for instance, generate billions of text messages.

According to a Cisco report in June 2012, big data solutions could help reduce traffic jams or even eliminate them with predictive, realtime analysis on traffic flows, feeding immediate changes to traffic signals, digital signs, and routing, before backups begin. Paper receipts from retailers and banks that clutter one’s wallet could be replaced by electronic records. Businesses could enrich these records through contextual and comparative information. Individuals could manage, share, monetize, and utilize the data through, for example, budget management and health advice applications, noted the report.

Medical advances enabled by big data could include treatments personalized to a patient’s unique health issues. Epidemics of contagious diseases or food contamination could be predicted, tracked, and curtailed. Already, Google Flu Trends has aggregated data on searches for health information to predict outbreaks across the globe, the report noted.

On a planetary scale (or beyond), it said, big data can monitor and analyze vast amounts of information on anything from climate change, astrophysics, and energy consumption to geopolitics and socioeconomics.

India, too, is seeing a lot of interest in big data.

Consider this. On 11 June, Nasscom said it received 4,000 applications for angel funding and acceleration under its “10,000 start-ups” programme. The last day for applying was 30 May. Out of the total applications received, close to 23% were from Bangalore, followed by 20% from Delhi NCR (National Capital Region). Over 70% applications came from applicants under the age of 30 and about 15% applicants were women.

From a technology point of view, 66% of the applications came for Web/Internet start-ups, followed by mobile start-ups occupying a share of 24%. Applications from cloud and big data were at 16% and 11%, respectively.

Big data is not just for software companies, of course, but increasingly permeates almost every industry. Data analytics potentially makes every company a software company when it embeds the necessary technology into its products to make them part of the Internet of things, according to the PWC report cited above.

Nike puts sensors in its shoes to collect data to help you improve your performance. General Electric (GE) and Airbus equip their jet engines with sensors and software that allows them to gather and transmit data to increase safety and efficiency. Depending on how they choose to charge for these services, they could find themselves in the subscription software business.

“We won’t be surprised to see a Nike or GE or some other non-traditional “software” company join the Global 100 list in the future,” the PWC report said.

Market potential

Not to be left behind, software and hardware vendors are putting in their mite behind big data to garner more revenue.

As of early 2012, the big data market stood at just over $5 billion based on related software, hardware, and services revenue, according to market research firm Wikibon. The total big data market reached $11.4 billion in 2012, ahead of Wikibon’s 2011 forecast. The big data market is projected to reach $18.1 billion in 2013, an annual growth of 61%. This puts it on pace to exceed $47 billion by 2017, the report said.

According to a 19 February Wikibon report, market leader IBM offers by far the largest product and services portfolio by both breadth and depth. Hewlett-Packard Co. or HP achieved second-place status in the overall big data market by revenue in 2012. Amazon continued and Google kicked off increasingly aggressive moves into the big data market, the report said.

In 2012, the top 10 vendors by revenue in the big data segment comprised IBM, HP, Teradata Corp., Dell Inc., Oracle Corp., SAP AG, EMC Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Accenture Plc.

On 22 May, IBM unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing and sales. With the latest IBM Watson debut, IBM is enabling clients to better respond to market shifts in realtime, automate marketing, and transform the way they service their clients.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor “Ask Watson” feature greets, and offers help to, customers via any channel, be it through a website chat window or a mobile push alert, saving consumers the hassle of performing searches, combing through websites and forums, or waiting endlessly for a response about the information they need.

Since its television debut, IBM Watson (the supercomputer that even beat Jeopardy quiz gamers) “is smarter, faster and smaller—having gained a 240% improvement in system performance and a reduction in physical requirements by 75%”, says IBM.

This February, Intel said it’s is delivering an innovative open platform built on Apache Hadoop* that can keep pace with the rapid evolution of big data analytics. Analyzing one terabyte of data, which would previously take more than four hours to fully process, can now be done in seven minutes with its hardware, Intel claimed.

For example, in a hospital setting, the intelligence derived from this data could help improve patient care by helping caregivers make quicker and more accurate diagnoses, determine effectiveness of drugs, drug interactions, dosage recommendations and potential side effects through the analysis of millions of electronic medical records, public health data and claims records. Strict guidelines also exist globally for protecting health and payment information, making it imperative to maintain security and privacy while performing analytics.

Future of big data

An important, but largely untapped, type of data is the real-time actionable data generated by sources such as devices, sensors and video, which often provide the most value while interacting in real time—Cisco calls this data in motion. The network can provide useful contextual information to data in motion such as a person or device’s location, identity and presence (whether they are “available” or not). This data can be used by applications to make decisions or take actions that are immediately relevant, or even to predict future events. Machine-to-machine communication in factory automation is an example where data in motion could be extremely valuable in optimizing a production process.

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012 to 2017, there will be more than 1.7 billion machine-to-machine connections by 2017.

However, there are a few issues that need to be ironed out before big data becomes mainstream.

On 11 June, Gartner Inc. said less than 10% of today’s enterprises have a true information strategy. And while technology is important to big data solutions, people are needed with the special skill sets and creativity—for instance, “data scientists” who transform raw data into information leading to discovery and insight, communicate what they’ve learned in creative and visual ways, and suggest business impact.

On 5 June, Gartner said big data will grow past its hype towards 2016 to become “just data” once the technologies mature, and organizations learn how to deal with it. “The bottom line is that not all information requires a big data approach,” said Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president at Gartner. “The new “big data way’ is not going to replace all other forms of information management. There is more room—and need—for experimentation in the area of “information of innovation”, for instance, with social media data, or by making processes more information-centric.”

TA Associates is investing R150 Cr for a minority stake in Mumbai based data analytics provider – Fractal Analytics. The funds will be used for expansion into other geographies, grow its sales team and build more products with intellectual property rights.

As a part of deal, Naveen Wadhera – Director and Country Head of TA Associates along with Kenneth T Schiciano, TA Associates’ MD from Boston will join the Fractal Analytics Board.

Avendus Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to Fractal Analytics. Nishith Desai Associates and Goodwin Procter LLP provided legal counsel to TA Associates, while DSK Legal provided legal counsel to Fractal Analytics.

Founded in 2000 by Srikanth Velamakanni and Pranay Agrawal, Fractal Analytics helps financial institutions, consumer companies and retailers to understand consumer behaviour and consults companies on their various products and pricing strategies.

The company now employs 600 executives in seven offices across the world.

Founded in 1968, TA Associates has invested in more than 425 companies around the world and has raised $18 bn in capital. This February, TA Associates along with Westbridge Capital invested $44 Mn in Pathology Chain – Dr Lal Pathlabs for minority stake.

In this segment, Qubole Data Service, a SaaS analytics platform raised Series A investment of $7 Mn from Charles River Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. Fidelity Growth Partners India committed $20Mn investment in AbsolutData, provider of data analytics services to global organizations.

Companies building data consulting services continue to attract growth equity as analytics become an increasingly important component of business.

Fractal Analytics Inc ., which has sold a minority stake in its business to TA Associates for $25 million, is the latest recipient.

A year ago Utopia Inc ., a provider of data management, cleansing and integration services, raised $50 million in Series A funding led by FTV Capital . That firm has backed another data and analytics consultancy, Mu Sigma Inc.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Fractal provides clients with consulting services that help them build in-house analytics technologies and integrate data into their decision processes.

Almost two years ago, another company, Opera Solutions LLC raised $84 million in its first funding from Silver Lake Sumeru, Accel-KKR and other investors. Last month it raised $30 million more from Wipro Ltd .

Naveen Wadhera and Kenneth Schiciano of TA Associates have joined the company’s board.

TA Associates, a leading global growth private equity firm, and Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies, today announced that TA Associates has acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of USD 25 million.

“We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity as companies have understood the power of data driven decision making but are struggling to operationalize and institutionalize analytics inside their organizations,” said Naveen Wadhera, Director and Country Head, TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd., who will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors. “Fractal is one of the most respected players globally in this space and has been experiencing accelerated growth, making it the ideal company with which to partner. We look forward to working with the company’s management team to further build value in Fractal.”

Also read: Tata Pure Equity Fund: Invest with a horizon of 3 years

“We chose to partner with TA Associates because of their excellent track record in helping profitable companies become outstanding businesses,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder & CEO of Fractal Analytics. “We are passionate about helping companies leverage advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimize pricing & marketing and compete more effectively in the marketplace. Our partnership with TA will help us fuel this passion further.”

“Fractal has a top notch team of data scientists and world-class analytics solutions that continue to create tremendous business impact for leading Fortune 500 companies,” said Kenneth T. Schiciano, a Managing Director at TA Associates who will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors. “We are delighted to back the company in its mission to institutionalize data driven decision making in corporations, and anticipate a very mutually beneficial relationship.”

“Over the last two years, Fractal has seen revenues almost triple in size, making us one of the fastest growing companies in the industry,” said Pranay Agrawal, Co-Founder and EVP, Fractal Analytics. “We are excited about how this partnership will help us expand our footprint and meet the growing client demand for analytics solutions. We are confident this collaboration with TA will prove beneficial to our clients and employees.”

Nishith Desai Associates and Goodwin Procter LLP provided legal counsel to TA Associates. DSK Legal provided legal counsel to Fractal Analytics. Avendus Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to Fractal Analytics. TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd. provided advisory services on the investment.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning. Fractal Analytics serves clients from offices in San Francisco Bay area, Greater New York area, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai. For more information, please visit www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics™ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including from social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In May, information technology and research advisory company Gartner named Fractal as one of the top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

About TA Associates

Founded in 1968, TA Associates is one of the largest and most experienced global middle-market growth private equity firms. The firm has invested in more than 425 companies around the world and has raised $18 billion in capital. With offices in Boston, Menlo Park, London, Mumbai and Hong Kong, TA Associates leads buyouts and minority recapitalizations of profitable growth companies in the technology, financial services, business services, healthcare and consumer industries. More information about TA Associates can be found at www.ta.com .

TA Associates, a global growth private equity firm, has acquired a minority stake in Fractal Analytics, a provider of advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies, for an investment of Rs 150 crore ($25 million).

Headquartered in the US, Fractal Analytics has offices in London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai and has around 600 team members.

“We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity as companies have understood the power of data driven decision making but are struggling to operationalize and institutionalize analytics inside their organizations,” said Naveen Wadhera, Director and Country Head, TA Associates Advisory Pvt Ltd, who will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors.

Kenneth T Schiciano, a Managing Director at TA Associates will also join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors.

Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder & CEO of Fractal Analytics said, “We are passionate about helping companies leverage advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimize pricing & marketing and compete more effectively in the marketplace.”

TA Associates which manages $18 billion globally, has investments in India include Dr Lal Pathlabs, Micromax and online payment processing services providerBilldesk.

The company almost tripled its revenues over the last two years; it expects revenues to reach $35 million this fiscal year.

Fractal Analytics, an analytics service provider, has raised $25 million (Rs 150 crore) in funding from private equity investor TA Associates, as per a company statement. The funding will primarily be used to fuel global expansion of the firm’s big data services and product development, and to increase the size of its sales team.

As part of the deal, Naveen Wadhera, director and country head, TA Associates and Kenneth T Schiciano, managing director at TA Associates, will join the board of Fractal Analytics. Avendus Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor to the company for the deal.

“We are passionate about helping companies leverage advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimise pricing and marketing, and compete more effectively in the marketplace. Our partnership with TA will help us fuel this passion further,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and CEO, Fractal Analytics.

Fractal Analytics was founded in 2000 by a five-member team—Velamakanni, Pranay Agrawal, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan and Ramakrishna Reddy. Headquartered in the US, the company has offices in London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai, and has around 600 employees.

It partners with consumer companies, retailers and financial institutions to understand, predict and influence consumer behaviour and improve marketing, pricing, supply chain, risk and claims management. Fractal Analytics’ flagship ‘Customer Genomics’ solution helps marketers learn complex customer behaviour at an individual level.

Its solution learns from every transaction and customer interaction (including from social media), helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers. In addition, the company builds analytics solutions and forecasts business performance.

According to Agrawal, the company has almost tripled its revenues over the last two years and expects to reach $35 million in revenues in this fiscal year. Almost all of the company’s revenues come from Fortune 500 companies.

“We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity. Fractal is one of the leading players in this space globally and has been experiencing accelerated growth, making it the ideal company to partner with. We look forward to working with the company’s management team to further build value in Fractal,” said Wadhera.

TA Associates has invested in more than 425 companies around the world and has raised $18 billion in capital. Its average ticket size in India ranges between $45 million and $125 million. The Boston-headquartered private equity firm has been operating in a mid-market deal-making space in India. It leads buyouts and minority recapitalisations of profitable growth companies in the technology, financial services, business services, healthcare and consumer industries.

The PE firm invested $45 million in Micromax in 2009 and also bought stake in the diagnostics chain Dr Lal PathLabs in a secondary deal. The stake was bought from Sequoia Capital. It also invested $40 million for an undisclosed stake in privately owned Tega Industries, a manufacturer of consumables for the mining industry. In 2011, it exited its five-year-old pre-IPO investment in telecom firm Idea Cellular through share sales in the open market.

In April last year, it invested in e-payment processing services provider BillDesk which is part of IndiaIdeas.com Ltd.

A minority stake in Fractal Analytics was bought by TA Associates worth $25 million. Fractal Analytics is a company that provides advanced analytics serving several Fortune 500 companies. TA Associates is among the largest private equity firms with focus on middle-market businesses. The financial advisor of Fractal Analytics to the deal was Avendus Capital.

“We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity as companies have understood the power of data driven decision making but are struggling to operationalize and institutionalize analytics inside their organizations,” according to Naveen Wadhera, Country Head and Director of TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd.

Wadhera will join the board of directors of Fractal Analytics as part of the stake acquisition.

“Fractal is one of the most respected players globally in this space and has been experiencing accelerated growth, making it the ideal company with which to partner. We look forward to working with the company’s management team to further build value in Fractal,” added Wadhera.

TA Associates was provided legal counsel by Nishith Desai Associates and Goodwin Procter LLP.

Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies, received a $25m minority investment from TA Associates.

In conjunction with the investment, Naveen Wadhera, Director and Country Head, TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd., and and Kenneth T. Schiciano, a Managing Director at TA Associates, will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors.

The company intends to use the capital to expand its presence globally.

Led by Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder & CEO, and Pranay Agrawal, Co-Founder and EVP, Fractal Analytics provides analytics solutions that allows customers to develop a deeper knowledge of customer behavior and make better data-informed decisions.

Its Customer Genomics™ solution features proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms that learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including from social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions.

The company has offices in San Francisco Bay area, Greater New York area, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai.

Fractal Analytics, a San Mateo provider of analytics software and services, has sold a minority stake in the business to the private equity firm TA Associates for $25 million

Naveen Wadhera, director and country head of TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd., will join the Fractal Analytics board of directors, as will Kenneth T. Schiciano, a managing director at TA Associates.

Srikanth Velamakanni is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Analytics, which has offices in Boston, Menlo Park, London, Mumbai and Hong Kong.

MUMBAI: American private equity fund TA Associates is set to invest 150 crore to pick a minority stake in Fractal Analytics, a Mumbai-based data analytics provider, which helps companies on pricing and product strategies.

“Fractal fits well into our global strategy of backing promoters who have managed to build a niche business services company to a scale and have global ambitions,” said Naveen Wadhera, director and country head in India for TA Associates, which manages $18 billion globally. “We have been very selective in investing in India and have been investing in just one-two companies every year,” Wadhera said.

Fractal Analytics helps financial institutions, consumer companies and retailers to understand consumer behaviour and consults companies on their various products and pricing strategies. Founded by former investment bankers Srikanth Velamakanni and Pranay Agrawal in a one-bed apartment in a Mumbai suburb in 2000, the company now employs 600 executives in seven offices across the world.

The company posted revenues of about $20.5 million in 2012-13 and expects to touch $35 million this fiscal. It has almost tripled its revenues from just $7 million in 2011. “Almost all our revenues come from global Fortune 500 companies,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, group chief executive officer of Fractal Analytics.

The company will use the capital to expand to other countries, grow its sales team and build more products with intellectual property rights. “Since the company is profitable and is generating cash, we would not need more capital in the immediate future,” said Velamakanni.

The total Big Data market, which clocked $11.4 billion in 2012, is projected to reach $18.1 billion in 2013, growing at 61% and exceed $47 billion by 2017, according to Wikibon, an American firm that tracks data. “That translates to a 31% compound annual growth rate over the five-year period 2012-17.”

TA expects data analytics to grow exponentially and help companies such as Fractal expand manifold in the coming years. “We believe the big data space represents a very significant opportunity as companies have understood the power of data-driven decision-making, but are struggling to operationalise and institutionalise analytics inside their organisations,” said Wadhera, who will join the board along with Kenneth T Schiciano, TA Associates’ MD from Boston.

Investment bank Avendus Capital was the sole financial advisor for the transaction.

Investment Will Fuel Global Expansion of Fractal’s Big Data Services

BOSTON & SAN MATEO, Calif. & MUMBAI (BUSINESS WIRE) June 24, 2013

TA Associates, a leading global growth private equity firm, and Fractal Analytics, a global provider of advanced analytics to Fortune 500 companies, today announced that TA Associates has acquired a minority stake in the company for an investment of $25 million.

“We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity as companies have understood the power of data driven decision making but are struggling to operationalize and institutionalize analytics inside their organizations,” said Naveen Wadhera, Director and Country Head, TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd., who will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors. “Fractal is one of the most respected players globally in this space and has been experiencing accelerated growth, making it the ideal company with which to partner. We look forward to working with the company’s management team to further build value in Fractal.”

“We chose to partner with TA Associates because of their excellent track record in helping profitable companies become outstanding businesses,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder & CEO of Fractal Analytics. “We are passionate about helping companies leverage advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimize pricing & marketing and compete more effectively in the marketplace. Our partnership with TA will help us fuel this passion further.”

“Fractal has a top notch team of data scientists and world-class analytics solutions that continue to create tremendous business impact for leading Fortune 500 companies,” said Kenneth T. Schiciano, a Managing Director at TA Associates who will join the Fractal Analytics Board of Directors. “We are delighted to back the company in its mission to institutionalize data driven decision making in corporations, and anticipate a very mutually beneficial relationship.”

“Over the last two years, Fractal has seen revenues almost triple in size, making us one of the fastest growing companies in the industry,” said Pranay Agrawal, Co-Founder and EVP, Fractal Analytics. “We are excited about how this partnership will help us expand our footprint and meet the growing client demand for analytics solutions. We are confident this collaboration with TA will prove beneficial to our clients and employees.”

Nishith Desai Associates and Goodwin Procter LLP provided legal counsel to TA Associates. DSK Legal provided legal counsel to Fractal Analytics. Avendus Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to Fractal Analytics. TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd. provided advisory services on the investment.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning. Fractal Analytics serves clients from offices in San Francisco Bay area, Greater New York area, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai. For more information, please visit www.fractal.ai.

Fractal Analytics’ flagship Customer Genomics(TM) solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. Its proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms learn from every transaction and customer interaction, including from social media, helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In May, information technology and research advisory company Gartner named Fractal as one of the top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics, 2013.”

About TA Associates

Founded in 1968, TA Associates is one of the largest and most experienced global middle-market growth private equity firms. The firm has invested in more than 425 companies around the world and has raised $18 billion in capital. With offices in Boston, Menlo Park, London, Mumbai and Hong Kong, TA Associates leads buyouts and minority recapitalizations of profitable growth companies in the technology, financial services, business services, healthcare and consumer industries. More information about TA Associates can be found at www.ta.com.

CONTACT:

For TA Associates:

TA Associates
Marcia O’Carroll, 617-574-7696
[email protected]

or

BackBay Communications
Philip Nunes, 617-556-9982, x227
[email protected]

or

BackBay Communications
Toby Mitchenall, +44 203-475-7553
[email protected]

or

For Fractal Analytics:

FleishmanHillard
Nathalie Van Krimpen, 925-216-3383
[email protected]

or

FleishmanHillard
Ranjana Mukherjee, +91 77-3836-9622
[email protected]>

or

FleishmanHillard
Abhishek Vora, +91 90-0466-9760
[email protected]

For some people, the solution to the shortage of talent skill in big data analytics is to have the world’s colleges expand their analytics programs.

However, companies that are growing their workforce by 33 percent this year don’t have the luxury of waiting two, three, or four years for the education system to churn out a fresh crop of data scientists.

Fractal analytics — offering global consulting services and products focused on customer engagement, price optimization, and data harmonization — recently received a $25 million investment from TA Associates to support its growth. The company, based in San Mateo, Calif., but with significant operations in India and offices in New Jersey, Singapore, the UAE, and London, expects to grow its workforce from 600 people to 800 before the end of 2013. That should keep the paper pushers in HR busy.

Someone has to guide those new employees into the world of big data analytics and the way Fractal does business. That’s where Fractal Analytics Academy comes in.

This summer, 120 new college grads will join the company, and will go through a six-week introductory training program. Other employees will participate in more advanced and specialized programs.

“We recognized a long time back that there simply isn’t enough trained talent in this space, and we knew there would be a shortage,” said co-founder Pranay Agrawal, who is executive vice president for global client development at Fractal. In a telephone interview, Agrawal said that when the company hires people for all types of jobs — even roles such as sales — recruiters look for several core traits, not necessarily experience in analytics. Then everyone goes through the academy.

The core traits that the 13-year-old company looks for include an ability to solve problems, a natural curiosity, high desire to excel in a field, and a client service orientation.

Holistic understanding

The academy has been operating in Mumbai and Delhi, but is due to be replicated in the US and other regions. The logic behind having all new employees go through the academy, even if they aren’t going to be doing heavy analytics work themselves, is that everyone needs to understand what the company does, the methodologies it employs, and the company values.

So, the introductory program is loaded with classroom training and practical exercises focused on problem solving, visualization, and communication.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on presentation, the whole dimension of communication, oral communications and written communications, because a lot of the value in what we do is explaining what has been done,” said Agrawal.

Problem-solving exercises focus on using the company’s internal methodologies, utilizing issue trees that identify possible issues and possible solutions.

The academy is all about getting employees ready to work with clients and excel in the shortest possible period of time.

Looking forward, the program will have to grow in terms of keeping pace with developments in the software sector and how use of data is exploding. In addition, company officials are looking at ways to integrate open-source training programs such as Coursera into their offerings.

Facing the talent challenge

So, that’s how one company is moving to ensure that it has the big data expertise that it needs. We want to keep the discussion about big data talent moving forward.

What is your company doing to bring big data talent and data scientists on board? What have you seen working — or not working — in other companies? Are companies doing their own training programs? Are there cash bounties for the hiring of data scientists? Or, can your company wait until the colleges move the next generation of data scientists down the pipeline? Share a comment, and let’s talk about the possibilities. Or, if you know of an interesting approach to the big data analytics talent crunch, drop me an email.

SAN MATEO, CA–(Marketwired – Jun 11, 2013)

Fractal Analytics, the most global provider of analytics, has been named a Fast 50 Asian American Business by the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce (USPAACC). This recognition spotlights the outstanding achievements of Asian American-owned businesses while recognizing their continued robust growth.

“We are honored by this recognition, it reflects how our clients are leveraging Fractal Analytics to drive advanced analytics and data driven decisioning in their organizations,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder and CEO, Fractal Analytics. “This award recognizes the market opportunity to deliver business analytics to the largest global brands.”

Each year USPAACC, one of the oldest and respected non-profit organizations of its kind, selects Asian American companies with the highest revenue growth over a three year period. All entries are independently verified and ranked by the professional services firm Ernst & Young.

Fractal Analytics enables its Fortune 500 clients to make better business decisions through deep understanding of consumer behavior and drive higher business performance globally. Fractal’s proprietary solutions Customer Genomics™ for customer intelligence, Concordia™ for data harmonization and Pincer™ for pricing optimization have been deployed by clients in CPG, financial services, insurance, retail and technology segments. Fractal has recently been identified as a Cool Vendor of analytics by Gartner in their ‘Cool Vendor in Analytics 2013’ report.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning.

We help businesses: (a) Understand, predict and shape consumer behavior through advanced analytics; (b) Improve effectiveness of marketing, pricing and supply chain management; and (c) Harmonize data, tell visual stories and forecast business performance.

We are the most global analytics provider in the world serving Fortune 500 companies in CPG, financial services, insurance, retail, technology and life sciences in over 150 countries. We have offices in San Mateo, New Jersey, London, Singapore, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Dubai.

Awards

2013: Fractal Analytics named “Cool Vendor in Analytics” by Gartner

2013: Fractal Analytics features in “Worldwide Big Data Revenue by Vendor 2012” report by Wikibon

2013: OVUM’s “On the Radar” report features Fractal Analytics

2012: INC 500 – #114 fastest growing company in Business Products and Services

2012: ValueNotes Research ranks Fractal Analytics #2 in analytics service providers

For more Information,

Visit us at www.fractal.ai or
Follow Fractal Analytics at:
Twitter: @fractalites
Facebook: Fractal-Analytics
LinkedIn: Fractal-Analytics
YouTube: Fractalanalytics
Blog: http://fractalanalyticsblog.com/

Analytics player Fractal Analytics, which has operations in India, US, London and other places, will add about 400 people by end of this financial year even as it is hopeful of nearly doubling its revenues on the back of demand from its overseas clients, according to Srikanth Velamakanni.

According to him, there is demand for analytical services from its existing clients as well as new clients. It is said US needed about 2,00,000 professionals who had handle analytics and India was the key market to provide the manpower, he said.

The company derived revenues by running a programme on the clients data or by setting up a team with the client to handle analytics, he said adding that the company was now tapping around Rs 110 crore or so and was hopeful of taking it to Rs 210 crore by the end of this financial year.

“We have created a product -customer genomics- which is a machine learning way of understanding customer behaviour rapidly. There is interest from the clients for this as this can be used in retail and consumers facing industries,” he said about the prospects of monetising it for tapping additional revenue streams.

There are many start-ups that have made a beginning in the analytics space.

The rise of predictive genre and thus new players to fill some nooks and corners of the city called Analytics is hard to ignore. The plot turns another new page as CMOs enter the stage too.

What’s new about new

IBM Research – India started putting its capability into Edge Analytics, which it tags as a lightweight, non-intrusive and pluggable technology that connects a bank’s customers with contextual information on the go and in real time, it cross-references where the customer is with what he or she is doing to provide useful insights and location-based recommendations, such as offering a discount at a specific store.

“It could also alert the bank about customers who use a competitor’s credit cards (causing “capital leakage” in bankers’ terms) and offer incentives to use their credit card, instead. Or, the technology can identify customers with home or auto loans with other banks (more “capital leakage”), and offer them refinancing options. Edge Analytics is embedded within participating banks’ customer channels, such as Net Banking, ATM, SMS, Phone Banking, etc.

When the bank’s customers access their account on these channels , Edge Analytics uses transactional and other contextual data feeds to better understand the customer’s transaction behavior and preferences, for example to detect customer’s transaction location in real time or infer the transaction category and spend pattern, preferred shopping location, preferred restaurant or cuisine, etc. These insights help the Bank understand their customer transaction behavior and priorities better. After all, one needs an environment that should have a ready-to-use system , with good data quality and no conflicting data sets or incomitant data,” explains Vishal Batra from IBM Edge Analytics.

“Then, users who are the consuming end of analytics are usually business people with no background or inclination for complex SQL queries. Data is structured in tables and retrieving it is a task. It can become slow for business users to dice and slice this data with no real-time mechanism whatsoever to analyse customer behavior.”

That made the company work on and come out with something that it calls easy to deploy, agile with business scenarios and something that can work on good integration. It is useful when an enterprise customer wants recommendations usually capable only from in-house systems even as most only use third-party boxes.

Another attempt with a new angle at analytics space can be spotted with Fractal Analytics.

It has a Customer Genomics solution, which as it states, helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. “The proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms underlying Customer Genomics learn from every transaction and customer interaction including from social media helping marketers build a dynamic 360 degree view of the customer across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. Customer Genomics has enabled a major US retailer in doubling coupon redemption and driving significant incremental store traffic.” A confident Natwar Mall, Senior Vice President, Fractal Analytics explains.

The company shows up a report card of y-o-y growth of 70 per cent working with top 30 Fortune 500 companies. Its users vary with 51 per cent from FMCG/CPG and retail; 44 per cent from Financial Services and Insurance/BFSI and five per cent from Technology.

“We believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. We help businesses to understand, predict and shape consumer behavior through advanced analytics; improve effectiveness of marketing, pricing and supply chain management; and harmonize data, tell visual stories and forecast business performance.” He adds.

The Report Recognizes Innovative, Impactful and Intriguing Vendors

SAN MATEO, CA (Marketwired – May 14, 2013)

Fractal Analytics, the most global provider of analytics, announced that it has been selected as one of the top five in the “Cool Vendors in Analytics 2013″(1) report recently published by Gartner. ‘Cool Vendor’ is an annual report that identifies the new cool vendors in key technology areas according to Gartner. The report mentions, “By delivering various combinations of domain expertise and higher levels of automation, this year’s vendors improve the analytic accuracy, adoption and productivity of organizations.”

“We are happy to be recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ of analytics by Gartner. This reinforces the excitement our Fortune 500 clients have shown in partnering with us to solve their Big Data and advanced analytics challenges,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder & CEO of Fractal Analytics. “Companies must supplement their traditional ways of understanding consumer behavior with new ways relevant for the age of Big Data, such as Customer Genomics(TM) for machine learning-based personalized marketing.”

Fractal Analytics’ Customer Genomics(TM) solution helps marketers learn complex customer behavior at an individual level. The proprietary pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms underlying Customer Genomics learn from every transaction and customer interaction including from social media helping marketers build a dynamic 360 degree view of the customer across attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. Customer Genomics has enabled a major US retailer in doubling coupon redemption and driving significant incremental store traffic.

About Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics believe analytics is critical to develop a deep understanding of consumers and earn customer loyalty, and make better data-informed decisions. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and institutionalize data-driven decisioning.

We help businesses: (a) Understand, predict and shape consumer behavior through advanced analytics; (b) Improve effectiveness of marketing, pricing and supply chain management; and (c) Harmonize data, tell visual stories and forecast business performance.

We are the most global analytics provider in the world serving Fortune 500 companies in CPG, financial services, insurance, retail, technology and life sciences in over 150 countries. We have offices in San Mateo, New Jersey, London, Singapore, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Dubai.

Awards

  • 2013 Fractal Analytics features in “Worldwide Big Data Revenue by Vendor 2012” report by Wikibon
  • 2013 OVUM’s “On the Radar” report features Fractal Analytics
  • 2012 INC 500 – #114 fastest growing company in Business Products and Services
  • 2012 ValueNotes Research ranks Fractal Analytics #2 in analytics service providers

For more Information,
Visit us at www.fractal.ai or
Follow Fractal Analytics at:

Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

(1) Gartner “Cool Vendor in Analytics 2013” by Gareth Herschel, Khushbu Pratap et al., May 2nd 2013

For further information, please contact:

USA
Ranjana Mukherjee
[email protected]
415-318-4145

India
Ranjana Mukherjee
[email protected]
7738369622
Abhishek Vora
[email protected]
9004669760

A look at some of the hottest topics in six critical industries.

Health Care & Big Data

Behold the ever expanding rings of tech’s most overhyped sector. Demand is fierce for software, hardware and consulting services that let companies process and store giant streams of varied and frequently changing information. It’s an $18 billion industry heading to $50 billion in five years, according to tech researchers at Wikibon. Make note of the names in the inner circle. They’re the pure plays with the newest science & and are likely to get gobbled up by the growth-hungry incumbents on the outside.Air Force One. But plenty of folks see the value in flying private: 30% of current private jet owners say they’ll purchase a new jet in the next five years, and more than 10,000 new business jets are expected to be delivered over the next decade, at a cumulative value of $250 billion.

Forbes features Fractal Analytics in the inner circle of pure play companies with the newest science

During the last one-day international series between visiting England team and India, Mu Sigma, a provider of decision sciences and analytics services, got a chance to test its analytics tool to help take intelligent decisions on the cricket field. Though none of the predictions the analytics tool made were made public, some of the suggestions and predictions it had come out with before the match proved to be unbelievably accurate.

For example, at the beginning of the game, the tool suggested what could be the winning factor and what kind of combinations the teams should play to snatch the match, crunching tonnes of cricketing data available.

Indian cricket using analytics tool may be a long way off but cricket is just one of the many applications of what analytics is capable of.

Big data and analytics has started to play a significant roles across global corporations today for faster and intelligence decision making. Even though corporations belonging to different sectors are at the various levels of maturity cycle in harnessing the power of analytics, most of them realise how significant it is going to become for their future.

According to a recent survey by Capgemini, most of the respondents acknowledged that ‘data’ has actually become the fourth factor of production now, even as essential as land, labour and capital.

According to the survey estimates, the respondents agreed that in the processes where Big Data and analytics have been applied, they have seen 26% improvement in performance over the last three years. They also said that they are expecting those processes to improve by 41% over the next three years. The survey saw participation from 607 executives and decisions makers from different corporations across the globe in February last year.

“Customers today are seeing real value drive through analytics, which is boosted by the amount of data that is available today through various delivery mechanisms. Corporations are clearly able to see the benefits of Big Data and analytics to take meaningful decisions,” said Andrew Cameron, Head of Business Information Management at Capgemini UK and Middle East.

While global technology giants like IBM and Accenture are aggressively warming up to the opportunities in Big Data and analytics, Indian pure-play analytics services providers are not far way. Companies like Mu Sigma, AbsolutData and Fractal Analytics are taking the mathematical skill of the Indian workforce to offer a host of analytics services such as marketing analytics, risks and supply chain analytics, clinical trial, sales analytics and social media analytics.

These services are shaping the future of the corporates in many different ways.

Take for example the case of Gap, a US-based clothing retailer. In 2010, it launched a new logo to give it a more contemporary and modern look. However, within hours of the launch of the logo, it witnessed lot of negative publicity in various social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which was conveyed to the company by its Indian service provider. Finally, the company decided to go back to its old logo. But by that time, the company had lost so much of its brand value.

Globally, Indian analytics services companies have managed to give the country a distinct identity in the area of data analytics working with global clients, mostly leaders in their own spaces. Mu Sigma, a company founded in 2004 by a former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant, Dhiraj Rajaram today works with over 100 companies across the globe.

For example, it is working with one of the largest insurance company in the world, helping them predict pure premiums. It helps the insurance company in determining the amount of money it should charge a customer, analyzing various factors.

Similarly, AbsolutData is working with large global computer manufacturers to help them identify potential customers, who can be provided with customised discount schemes, which will help the company in cross-selling many other computer peripherals.

“It is a huge cost saving for the company since they don’t need to give a discount scheme to each and every customer,” said Suhale Kapoor, Executive VP and Co-founder, AbsolutData. AbsolutData does it after analyzing tonnes of internal data available with the customers and marrying those with external data available in Internet and social media platforms.

Here is an interview with Pranay Agrawal, Executive Vice President- Global Client Development, Fractal Analytics – one of India’s leading analytics services providers and one of the pioneers in analytics services delivery.

Ajay- Describe Fractal Analytics’ journey as a startup to a pioneer in the Predictive Analytics Services industry. What were some of the key turning points in the field of analytics that you have noticed during these times?

Interview with Pranay Agrawal

Pranay- In 2000, Fractal Analytics started as a pure-play analytics services company in India with a focus on financial services. Five years later, we spread our operation to the United States and opened new verticals. Today, we have the widest global footprint among analytics providers and have experience handling data and deep understanding of consumer behavior in over 150 counties. We have matured from an analytics service organization to a productized analytics services firm, specializing in consumer goods, retail, financial services, insurance and technology verticals.

We are on the fore-front of a massive inflection point with Big Data Analytics at the center. We have witnessed the transformation of analytics within our clients from a cost center to the most critical division that drives competitive advantage. Advances are quickly converging in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and game theory, changing the way how analytics is consumed by B2B and B2C companies. Companies that use analytics well are poised to excel in innovation, customer engagement and business performance.

Ajay- What are analytical tools that you use at Fractal Analytics? Are there any trends in analytical software usage that you have observed?

Pranay- We are tools agnostic to serve our clients using whatever platforms they need to ensure they can quickly and effectively operationalize the results we deliver. We use R, SAS, SPSS, SpotFire, Tableau, Xcelsius, Webfocus, Microstrategy and Qlikview. We are seeing an increase in adoption of open source platform such as R, and specialize tools for dashboard like Tableau/Qlikview, plus an entire spectrum of emerging tools to process manage and extract information from Big Data that support Hadoop and NoSQL data structures

Ajay- What are Fractal Analytics plans for Big Data Analytics?

Pranay- We see our clients being overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of the data. While they are all excited by the possibilities of Big Data, on-the-ground struggle continues to realize its full potential. The analytics paradigm is changing in the context of Big Data. Our solutions focus on how to make it super-simple for our clients combined with analytics sophistication possible with Big Data.

Let’s take our Customer Genomics solution for retailers as an example. Retailers are collecting information about Shopper behaviors through every transaction. Retailers want to transform their business to make it more customer-centric but do not know how to go about it. Our Customer Genomics solution uses advanced machine learning algorithm to label every shopper across more than 80 different dimensions. Retailers use these to identify which products it should deep-discount depending on what price-sensitive shoppers buy. They are transforming the way they plan their assortment, planogram and targeted promotions armed with this intelligence.

We are also building harmonization engines using Concordia to enable real-time update of Customer Genomics based on every direct, social, or shopping transaction. This will further bridge the gap between marketing actions and consumer behavior to drive loyalty, market share and profitability.

Ajay- What are some of the key things that differentiate Fractal Analytics from the rest of the industry? How are you different?

Pranay- We are one of the pioneer pure-play analytics firm with over a decade of experience consulting with Fortune 500 companies. What clients most appreciate about working with us includes:

  • Experience managing structured and unstructured Big Data (volume, variety) with a deep understanding of consumer behavior in more than 150 counties
  • Advanced analytics leveraging supervised machine-learning platforms
  • Proprietary products for example: Concordia for data harmonization, Customer Genomics for consumer insights and personalized marketing, Pincer for pricing optimization, Eavesdrop for social media listening, Medley for assortment optimization in retail industry and Known Value Item for retail stores
  • Deep industry expertise enables us to leverage cross-industry knowledge to solve a wide range of marketing problems
  • Lowest attrition rates in the industry and very selective hiring process makes us a great place to work

Ajay- What are some of the initiatives that you have taken to ensure employee satisfaction and happiness?

Pranay- We believe happy employees create happy customers. We are building a great place to work by taking a personal interest in grooming people. Our people are highly engaged as evidenced by 33% new hire referrals and the highest Glassdoor ratings in our industry.

We recognize the accomplishments and contributions made through many programs such as:

  1. FractElite – where peers nominate and defend the best of us
  2. Recognition board – where anyone can write a visible thank you
  3. Value cards – where anyone can acknowledge great role model behavior in one or more values
  4. Townhall – a quarterly all hands where we announce anniversaries and FractElite awards, with an open forum to ask questions
  5. Employee engagement surveys – to measure and report out on satisfaction programs
  6. Open access to managers and leadership team – to ensure we understand and appreciate each person’s unique goals and ambitions, coach for high performance, and laud their success

Ajay- How happy are Fractal Analytics customers quantitatively? What is your retention rate- and what plans do you have for 2013?

Pranay- As consultants, delivering value with great service is critical to our growth, which has nearly doubled in the last year. Most of our clients have been with us for over five years and we are typically considered a strategic partner.

We conduct client satisfaction surveys during and after each project to measure our performance and identify opportunities to serve our clients better. In 2013, we will continue partnering with our clients to define additional process improvements from applying best practice in engagement management to building more advanced analytics and automated services to put high-impact decisions into our clients’ hands faster.

About

Pranay Agrawal -Pranay co-founded Fractal Analytics in 2000 and heads client engagement worldwide. He has a MBA from India Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, Bachelors in Accounting from Bangalore University, and Certified Financial Risk Manager from GARP. He is is also available online on http://www.linkedin.com/in/pranayfractal

Fractal Analytics is a provider of predictive analytics and decision sciences to financial services, insurance, consumer goods, retail, technology, pharma and telecommunication industries. Fractal Analytics helps companies compete on analytics and in understanding, predicting and influencing consumer behavior. Over 20 fortune 500 financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail and insurance companies partner with Fractal to make better data driven decisions and institutionalize analytics inside their organizations.

Fractal sets up analytical centers of excellence for its clients to tackle tough big data challenges, improve decision management, help understand, predict & influence consumer behavior, increase marketing effectiveness, reduce risk and optimize business results.

Fractal Analytics is the most global analytics provider in the world serving Fortune 500 companies in CPG, financial services, insurance, retail, technology and pharma in over 150 countries. Headquartered in San Mateo, they have offices in New Jersey, London, Singapore, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Dubai.

In this interview with Srikanth, we talk more about the offerings at Fractal.

(AIM)Analytics India Magazine: What are some of the main tenets (philosophies, goals, attributes) of your analytics approach and policies?

SVSrikanth Velamakanni: Fractal Analytics seeks to be the most respected analytics brand in the world. We believe analytics is critical for business to- 1) make better high-volume decisions to achieve breakthrough business performance, 2) deeply understand and engage customers to earn and inspire their loyalty, and 3) change the game and drive competitive advantage through Big Data and technology .

Our core values are demonstrated in everything we do. These values include: client value creation, excellence, speed, innovation, professionalism integrity, and respect and fairness.

We also believe taking good care of our employees create an empowering environment to make happy customers.

AIM: What according to you is your biggest USP that differentiates your organization with similar sized players in the analytics space in India?
SV: What clients like about us is-

1) we have the broadest global footprint among analytics providers with experience in data and consumer behavior in more than 180 countries and 7 offices around the world;
2) we have deep industry expertise and leverage cross-industry knowledge to solve problems;
3) we are building proprietary products and advanced machine-learning platforms and increasing process automation; and
4) we are building a great place to work because we, are very selective in our hiring process, and have the lowest attrition rates in the industry.

AIM: Please brief us about some business solutions you provide to your customers and how do they derive value out of it.

SV: Our key solution areas include: 1) Customer Insights and Analytics, featuring Customer Genomics for personalized targeting; 2) Pricing Analytics, featuring Pincer for insurance price optimization; 3) Marketing Analytics for more effective marketing mix, media and promotions management; 4) Forecasting and Business Intelligence, featuring Concordia data harmonization that creates clean, organized and consistent data as inputs into visual storytelling dashboards and predictive models; and 5) Analytical Centers of Excellence, bringing an experienced team of data scientists, analysts and consultants to help in-house teams scale analytics, drive implementation and foster a data-driven decision culture.

Fractal Analytics has enabled more than 200 clients in consumer goods, retail, financial services, insurance, technology, telecom, pharma and government to make better data-driven decisions with analytics.

We help companies answer questions like:

“Where can we make more effective use of our marketing budget?”

“Which product features or brand attributes should we target to which customers through which communication channels?”

“What’s the best pricing and promotion approach to increase consumer loyalty while maintaining profit targets?

Some exciting business problems and results that excite us include:

  • Optimized pricing decisions for over $100 billion in revenue
  • Forecasted demand for 15,000 country/categories for a top 5 global consumer goods company
  • Developed predictive models for more than 200 clients
  • Increased returns on marketing allocation for advertising and promotions for 5 Fortune 500 CPG companies
  • Helped a Fortune 500 financial services company increase customer loyalty by understanding and predicting customer response to brand advertising and promotions
  • Redefined assortment, product promotions and pricing for one of America’s best known retailers
  • Predicted and reduced crime for state police departments

AIM: Where do you see the bulk of your business coming from? Do Indian organizations have the same affinity towards BI/ Analytics as that of organizations from other regions?

SV: Our clients are global Fortune 500 companies, headquartered in the United States with market reach in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and Middle East/Africa markets. We also work with several large financial institutions and insurance companies in India, largely due to the rapid growth in Big Data and emerging analytics talent pool in India. According to recent study by NASSCOM and CRISIL, the Big Data industry is expected to grow from $200 million in 2012 to $1 billion in US dollars by 2015. While India is in the early stage of the analytics adoption curve, we expect the market will steadily adopt more advanced business approaches.

AIM: Please brief us about the size of your analytics division and what is hierarchal alignment, both depth and breadth.

SV: Today we are 460 employees and expect to grow to 700 or more employees by September 2013. Fractal Analytics has a flat organization structure and the vast majority of Fractalites are engaged in the client-delivery functions, broadly classified in four tracks – analytics consulting, big data engineering, data scientist and analytics program management. Every track consists of sales, account management, engagement and offshore delivery teams.

AIM: What kind of knowledge worker do you recruit and what is the selection methodology? What skill sets do you look at while recruiting in analytics?

SV: We are very selective in our hiring approach. During the past 9 months we received over 10,000 applications and hired less than 2%. Fractal Analytics is recognized as a recognized recruiter brands among the top colleges in India where we seek engineers, management graduates, statisticians, mathematicians, and economists. To qualify, candidates must demonstrate an analytical mind, inclination to solve problems, a drive for learning new skills, and a passion to serve clients. Candidates are also required to align with Fractal Analytics’ core values.

We believe exceptional people with a good education foundation that share our values can be trained to serve. We set up Fractal Analytics Academy (FAA) to provide a six-week client-ready education on tools, data and modeling techniques, domain knowledge and soft skills training. We are big on continuous learning so new courses and instructors are added to our FAA curriculum regularly to provide all Fractalites with electives and access to new courses for an average of 85 learning hours per person throughout the year.

AIM: Would you like to share any example of an Insight that generated a huge positive impact for your clients?

SV: Our Customer Genomics solution is changing the way marketers engage with their consumers. Unlike traditional marketing models that segment people into boxes, Customer Genomics is a machine-learning algorithm that adapts its understanding of customers on more than 200 dimensions, and learns from every consumer interaction. It decodes and learns about customers from every shopping transaction, every tweet, and every store visit. Armed with deep customer intelligence, we helped our Fortune 100 retailer client gain unique insights into the kinds of products and promotions that would most resonate with individual customers.

During this project we uncovered the following insights:

  • Novice users more likely to buy expensive items with inexpensive accessories
  • 40% of apparel spend among brand neutral shoppers occurs during holidays
  • People who move spend 4 times the average amount weekly 5 weeks prior to moving

This retailer is now able to personalize its messages, promotions and product mix to increase sales among its 60 million households.

AIM: What are the most significant challenges you face being in the forefront of analytics space?

SV: It is widely reported that there is an expected shortage of data scientists with business skills and real-life problem solving that will challenge the analytics industry worldwide before the end of this decade. Fractal Analytics is well positioned to help companies bridge the gap by providing deep expertise, proprietary solutions and highly trained and experienced data scientists, analysts and consultants to solve real-world data problems.

Airing Schedule: Download PDF

BOCA RATON, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Multi-Media Productions (USA), Inc. is pleased to announce that Fractal Analytics, the most global provider of analytics, will be airing on 21st Century Business on CNBC.

Successful companies know analytics is the key to harness the power of Big Data to turn customers into fans and drive more profitable decisions. Companies want to understand consumer behavior more completely so they can build products that customers’ love. To decode this behavior, companies are turning to experienced analytics companies to help them transform their data into insights that drive customer and shareholder value.

JL Haber, Vice President of Programming at Multi Media Productions, added, “Fractal Analytics is well positioned to create substantial value for businesses that seek growth and compete more effectively through analytics. Their ability to design, build and implement breakthrough analytics across industries makes them a natural fit for our show. We are excited to have them as a guest on our program.”

The segment includes a field report by Fractal Analytics’ client Agustin J. de Dios who shares how Kimberly Clark uses analytics to better understand customer perception of their billion dollar brands.

“Kimberly Clark is a great example of a leading company that uses analytics to define market and customer-centric strategies. We help them understand what drives demand to optimize and forecast the bottom-line impact of their product, promotion and pricing decisions,” says Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder & Chief Executive Officer, Fractal Analytics.

About Fractal Analytics

We believe analytics is critical to deeply connect with consumers, earn customer loyalty, make better decisions to reduce waste, and ultimately improve lives. Fortune 500 companies partner with Fractal to build breakthrough analytic solutions, set up analytical centers of excellence, and create a culture of data driven decisioning.

We solve problems, operationalize solutions to drive results, and ultimately drive change in organizations towards fact-based decisioning. We help businesses: (a) Understand, predict and influence consumer behavior; (b) Improve marketing, pricing, supply chain, risk and claims management; (c) Harmonize data, visualize information, build dashboards and forecast business performance.

About 21st Century Business

21st Century Business is an award winning targeted business show that is independently produced by Multi-Media Productions. The show provides its business viewers an in depth opportunity to find solutions to the industry problems from some of the top business leaders from across the world. Each exclusive segment is taped in our state of the art South Florida Studio Once selected, companies are able to present their story and solutions to industry problems in an exclusive way that sets their company apart from the others. With more than 6,000 companies participating on over 600 shows, 21st Century Business continues to be the premier and targeted outlet for the latest business stories.

21stCentury Business airs on various national cable networks that are viewed by over 100 million viewers nationwide as well as internationally via DirecTV and Dish Network. The show can also be viewed through video on demand via http://www.21cbtv.com. The 21CBTV Series is also available at more than 27 prestigious college universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, Howard University, Dartmouth College and Georgetown University.

For specific market-by-market air dates and times, please e-mail [email protected] For more information, please visit http://www.21cbtv.com.

For more information: www.fractal.ai Careen Foster Chief Marketing Officer [email protected] 510.229.2166,

This information was brought to you by Cision http://www.cisionwire.com

Careen Foster, Chief Marketing Officer, 510.229.2166,

[email protected]

Source: Fractal Analytics