Data Analytics Services

1. What We Offer

Prism Informatix offers analytics services on both a consulting and contracting basis. Our principal area of expertise is in the data science aspects of extracting information from distributed data. Our consulting services provide expert assessments and recommendations, and our contracting services assist with implementation of your chosen data analytics strategy.

Our customers are companies with distributed (fragmented) data sources that need assistance with developing cross-silo descriptive and predictive analytics capability.

Our specialized expertise with distributed analytics platforms affords us a unique vantage point from which to assist with your distributed data strategy.  We will naturally keep an eye toward opportunities to avoid the costs of data integration, and will look to modularize and abstract your analytics services to future-proof them. We are in the exclusive position of being able to leverage our Collaborative Analytics platform to help with assessments and/or deliver you an operational solution.

2. Problems of Value

Maximizing ROI on data analytics projects means targeting the spending to deliver answers at the required fidelity as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Increasingly, small and medium enterprises are realizing the business opportunities locked up in their data, e.g., for targeted marketing or compliance risk monitoring, but they may lack the in-house expertise and critical mass of staff to understand what they can do with the data they have, and what additional data they need to be collecting to meet their goals. They may not be in position to identify the most cost effective approaches based on state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning and artificial intelligence. They may also need help via implementation of an end-end solution, and recommendations on how to modify current practices to become an even higher performance data-driven enterprise in the future. 

Within larger enterprises, which may have sizeable inhouse IT and analytics groups onboard, it can be the case that large up-front investments in data platforms and master data management strategies to establish cross-linkages to other platforms dig deep holes of cost that the analysis results are challenged to ever backfill and deliver return on.  Business leaders may believe there will be value in bringing together all that data, but they don’t know how much value they can realize until they aggregate it and analyze it, with the attendant delays in time-to-results further impacting the value proposition. The analytics lifecycle can become high cost and low agility. And once in place, the next level of work and spending spins up to sustain that commitment; meanwhile, the world around them and all the data that speaks to it just keeps on changing and changing, so follow-on costs to maintain and build upon previous investments remain painfully high and they don’t abate.

At Prism Informatix, our approach is focused on understanding the critical questions of a business and its functional requirements, then assessing the available support in the various sources of data, and providing the most cost effective and efficient means to get at those answers. Our specialized expertise with distributed analytics platforms and agile modeling frameworks gives us perspective that brings added value, whether just as an aid to navigate the complexity and prioritize the effort for data integration, or in the form of your ultimate operational fully distributed data microservices.

3. Consulting Services

Our consulting services support you in establishing achievable analytics goals, and creating strategies to realize them through a disciplined process of requirements definition, stagewise planning, and rigorous test and evaluation along the way.

Assessment of the data resources available and their support in answering your critical business questions is an essential aspect. We can help you develop a comprehensive analytics strategy that can scale with your business in the most cost-effective way.  We are uniquely poised as a vendor to help you understand the cost, performance, and latency tradeoffs between centralized and distributed analytics solutions to your needs.

Additional areas we can provide support:

• Translating your business functional requirements on analytics to technical/system requirements and specifications
• Recommending build vs buy solutions, based on our knowledge of what is available in the market, and help with identifying potential vendors
• Recommending the phasing of your implementation strategy based on state of your data assets, available staff and resources, etc. 
• Helping to identify potential data processing architectures and assessing the attendant tradeoffs on cost, performance, and time-to-deliver
• Identifying the best known methods for various classes of machine learning problems

In addition to providing assessment and recommendations, we can also help you with implementation via our contracting services.

4. Contracting Services

Our contracting services support you in implementing end-end analytics solutions, from requirements on the front end to deployed capability on the back end.  Prism working with its partners can assist you with any and/or all steps in the analytics workflow, as pictured below and summarized in the table that follows. 

Details of Work Required at Each Stage of Analytics Workflow.  Prism can Help with These Tasks.

Prism has expertise in a wide variety of descriptive and predictive analytics techniques, machine learning / AI algorithms used for classification and regression, and is versed in learning approaches that span supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised, as they apply to given methods.  This expertise has developed as a byproduct of the way Collaborative Analytics plugs into the analytics stack, at the top end, to integrate various analytics capabilities as illustrated in the following figure. 

Some specific categories of analysis algorithms and illustrative examples we can bring to bear to help you include:

• Decision Trees: CART, stump, C4.5/5.0
• Regression: linear, logistic
• Ensemble Methods: boosting, bagging, random forest, gradient boosted trees
• Bayesian: naïve, belief network, tree augmented naive
• Clustering: k-means/medians, EM, hierarchical
• Association: apriori, eclat
• Dimensionality Reduction: pca, pcr, lda, pursuit
• Support vector machines: ls-svm, svc, svr
• Deep Neural Networks: cnn’s, tensor flow package

We have designed an extensive suite of automated cross-validation tools to improve our ability to predict performance of the resulting analytics solution.

We can implement solutions in Python or R, as appropriate to requirements.

Support for Collaborative Analytics

For customers that have adopted our distributed analytics platform, we provide additional services including:

• Application support services: assistance in using our toolset in a way that maximizes value on your particular problems and data
• Customer-specific designs: development of custom interfaces, specialized features and capabilities, etc. to tailor the platform to best meet the requirements of a specific business

5. The Reason to Choose Us

Our depth of experience in engineering end-end systems for distributed data analysis gives us a broader perspective than most service providers. The typical vendor’s thinking will be entrenched in historically well known approaches to data mining and machine learning, involving significant centralization of data, and not taking advantage of the latest advances in computing infrastructure and large-scale optimization methods.  We can provide that kind of capability as well, but also much more, including being able to bring to bear a totally new kind of distributed analytics platform to help address your requirements.

Our team’s background make us a uniquely qualified and effective partner:

• Extensive and broad industry experience, including leadership of functions such as business process definition, planning and execution of product development lifecycles, implementation of ERP systems, and P&L management; we understand how to translate business requirements into effective AI-based technical solutions
• A demonstrated track record in leading projects from requirements definition through to delivery of operationally hardened deployed systems, e.g., for the US military
• Theoretical training at a PhD level in quantitative methods of statistics and computer science, leading to “non ad-hoc” and highly principled designs for mathematically-intensive intelligent systems
• Ongoing close connections to the latest academic research achievements and trends from leading institutions such as MIT that can bring disruptive new capability in the fields of data analytics and AI

6. How to Engage with Us

Our services are priced on an industry-competitive Time and Materials (T&M) basis.

The best steps to engage with us are as follows:

• Make initial contact through Contact Us
• Request a telecon to assess whether we can meet your needs
• If we can help, host a follow-up face-face meeting on your premises to solidify scope and requirements
• Prism will issue a proposal for review:
  • consulting proposals are based on hourly rate and minimums
  • contracting proposals are based on a costed statement of work with a project plan and schedule that is broken out by task area

We look forward to partnering with you to bring our unique balance of expertise to your analytics challenges.  Let’s work on something together!

Maximize the business value of your distributed data.