Lavastorm Pushes Analytics Collaboration

An upgraded analytics engine rolled out this week by Lavastorm seeks to deliver greater transparency in how analytics are created as a way to repair what the company argues is a “disjointed” process of creating and sharing analytic applications.

Boston-based Lavastorm touts its Analytics Engine 6.0 as promoting transparency as a way to encourage collaboration among the authors and users of analytic programs. To that end, the latest version of the analytics engine includes data flow logic and interim data to provide understandable metadata about analytic applications. It can also re-run an analytics application using dynamic parameter values.

The approach would allow decision-makers to better understand data to the point where they would be able to “show their work” if necessary.

“There is an inverse relationship between our technological abilities to process yottabytes of heterogeneous data and the ability of individuals to understand the context of each data source, the meaning of the fields in each record type, and to find keys to join these data into coherent analytic foundations,” the company said in a blog post.

“What one data stream calls an apple, another data stream might call a pear, and a third data stream might call a banana. Without the ability to reconcile these relationships, it’s hard to discover meaningful patterns, to ask deeper questions, or to develop comprehensive end-to-end analysis.”

The upgrade also allows the authors of analytic programs to send users a web link to an application that is viewable and executable on a mobile device, Lavaworks said. A separate view-only mode based on a HTML5 web interface requires no installation or download.

Among the use cases cited by Lavastorm for improving collaboration between authors and analytics users are the distribution of view-only graphs within an enterprise by quality assurance managers to solicit feedback. This could be accomplished without reviewers having to download software, the company stressed.

Another would allow compliance teams to file regulatory reports after verifying that data and logic are accurate and consistent with corporate policy. In yet another scenario, run-time analysts could launch pre-built analytic applications with dynamic parametric values and deliver them on an on-demand basis. This would allow analysts to meet ad-hoc requests while maintaining data accuracy and consistency, Lavastorm said.

The company also believes it has found an emerging opportunity for greater collaboration in the analytics market stemming from growing regulatory reporting requirements that are placing a premium on analytic accuracy.

In industries such as communications, financial services and pharmaceuticals, Lavastorm CEO Drew Rockwell noted, “regulators are not only levying significant fines for reporting errors, but they are beginning to look ‘beyond reports.'” Rockwell cited and example from last year in which a U.K. regulator fined a large bank for misreporting equity sales. The error was due to software coding errors.

“These kinds of issues across multiple industries have prompted regulators to look beyond the report, and ask companies to ‘show their work’,” Rockwell noted.

Lavastorm said its Analytics Engine 6.0 is available immediately.

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