“A picture is worth a thousand words”. This seems to be the premise on which Gramener, the new age data visualization company is built. Founded in 2010 with its headquarters in Hyderabad, India, Gramener is one of the first few companies to be based on the big data and the visualization service offerings.
A couple of days ago, I had a chance to talk to Mr. S Anand, Chief Data Scientist at Gramener and the brain behind the powerful visualizations.
Anand and his team offer a unique, unconventional but highly useful service to their customers – translating data into meaningful information. This may sound very mundane and obvious but only till you take a look at some of their demos. For example, imagine how long will it take for you to find out which of the sections of the 18 books of the epic Mahabharatha has a mention of Krishna and which characters of Mahabharata interacted with Krishna more than the other. Gramener has a cool visualization to find this.
This technique can be highly useful for a retail company to perform sentiment analysis of the real time streams coming from various social media channels. When you get lost in the sea of numbers, data visualization plays a significant role in helping you focus on the results that really matter. This will help enterprises quantify results from various investments that have made. According to Anand, despite investing heavily in expensive data warehousing technologies, organizations still struggle to get the results that they really want. Many times CIOs face the challenge of justifying the massive investments they made in the enterprise OLAP platforms since they don’t really deliver the key data points that the CEO and CFO would love to see. This is exactly where Gramener found their niche. They complement existing tools and platforms and simplify the process of getting insights from the historical data that the organizations would have mined over a period of time. Gramener delivers the real results that matter to the decision makers in just a few days which the internal IT team may take months to deliver. Anand says that their competition is not really the traditional enterprise data warehousing companies, but a tool that all of us use which is Microsoft Excel!
When I asked Anand on his views about the latest trend, Big Data, he sounded slightly skeptical. According to him, before going out to grab large datasets, organizations should take a hard look at their existing data where valuable insights are buried. He says that majority of the facts that contribute to the decision making process are not a part of Big Data yet but come from a highly concentrated and smaller datasets that the organizations fail to exploit! I tend to agree with his viewpoint. In my experience of dealing with enterprises, I have rarely come across CXOs making the best use of their OLAP investments.
Gramener has customers coming from various verticals including retail, manufacturing, pharma and utilities and boasts of high profile clients like Airtel, BOSCH, AP Transco, Tamilnadu Education Department.
I strongly encourage you to play with the demo visualizations that Gramener published on their web site to witness the power of their offering.
We thank the organizers of The Fifth Elephant where we first interacted with Anand.
Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in
