Analytics & Visualization Tools From Vizbi Analytics

vizbi-analytics-shabda-raaj-and-akshar-raaj

Interview: Kalyan Banga in conversation with the Founders of Vizbi Analytics to understand how they are revolutionizing the visualizations market through Vizbi tool.

  • Who you are (Founders /Co-Founders) and what’s your background and why did you chose to join hands together?

Vizbi is founded by Shabda Raaj and Akshar Raaj. They are brothers and have been work together on their previous company which provided app development and data engineering consultancy for the last seven years. Vizbi was a natural growth from there to fix the problems they saw in the current tools.

  • How was Vizbi idea created and what made you chose that particular idea?

The two problems we saw with current data analytics tools are:

  1. Data preparation takes too long. Vizbi shortens this by providing data preparation inside the Vizbi app itself.
  2. Any large scale analytics development with current market leader tools such as Tableau, Microstrategy and Congnos requires using their SDK, which requires learning custom API and languages. Since many data analysists already know Python, Pandas, R and SQL, Vizbi provides this right inside the platform.
  • How is big data changing the way businesses work?

Many of us read that story around when Target predicted the pregnancy of a teen girl before her father know. As creepy as that was that kind of targeting and segmentation is only going to get more common. Businesses, both big and small are looking to better understand their customers, better understand their vendors.

Every business is already collecting the data. They are asking questions from that data. Self-service analytics is a train which is only going to get faster.

  • How can businesses of all sizes make use of analytics?

Self-service analytics is something which businesses of all size, and even individuals can use. Even the smallest company has data about the things they care about – number of leads talked to, number of called made, number of new features added. Conventional wisdom says that Monday is a bad day to send marketing emails, but what if your target segment is receptive on Mondays? You won’t know until you have asked questions from your data.

  • What are the challenges faced by the companies in adopting Big Data Analytics?

Big data has become mainstream and has gained wide adoption everywhere including the C-suite. The challenges now are

  1. Proving ongoing ROI on Analytics efforts
  2. Minimizing the time to implementation
  • What is the USP of Vizbi Analytics and how does your engagement model differ from competitors like Periscope data and Mode Analytics?

Vizbi seeks to provide the ease of Tableau and the power of SQL/R/Python inside the platform. Vizbi has both a GUI mode and a code mode. We are in some ways similar to Persicopedata and ModeAnalytics, but we

  1. Provide Python and R during data preparation, not only during analysis mode
  2. Provide multi language support. We are planning to provide all common languages and libraries used by data scientists in our platform.  
  • How is data visualization adding value to the deep insights clients are looking for? How has been response of clients to use of advanced visualizations to represent data innovatively and draw deep insights?

The biggest question the C-suite is asking is how can they get ROI on their investments, be that human capital, marketing dollars or budget for new software tools.  Tools such as Vizbi which allow mixing data from multiple sources, and then building visualizations out of them help any business prioritize its resources.

  • Can you elaborate with one case study the challenge your customer was facing and how you solved their problem through your Vizbi tool?

One of our clients is a marketing agency which used a standard marketing reporting tool to create monthly reports for its clients. It was hard for them to justify getting additional funding for them as long because the decision makers weren’t convinced with raw metrics such as pageview and conversion percentages.

With Vizbi, they merged that data with the financial reports and showed similar reports in a dollar value terms, which led to additional funding on the better performing marketing channels. 

  • Please brief about any challenges/hurdles faced till now and how those were overcome successfully and the lessons learnt.

Big data, Analytics and Visualization has become a crowded marketplace, with many vendors vying for attention. It is not necessarily a bad thing. Our prospects don’t need convincing that they need a analytics strategy, we only need to prove that Vizbi is the right tool for them. We are using our multi language and data preparation support to differentiate from the competition. 

  • What Analytical Tools do you use to growth your business on a daily basis?

We are data driven and use Google Analytics and Mixpanel to get user data. We then use StitchData to pull this in to our DB, and then connect that with an export from our Trello board to understand which of our features is driving engagement.

On a personal level, I believe in quantified self and track many parts of my life. I use Resucetime to automatically track my day, then Google Fit +Gramin Vivoit device to track how active I am. I like to see every detail of how I am using things. For fun here is an analysis of my uber trips.

  • How do you source talent for your organization and what kind of expertise do you look for. Are you looking for any immediate talent? Where can our readers apply for the position?

We were lucky to have been running a data engineering consultancy for the past few years, so we already had people working with us. At the moment we are looking at hiring some people with a mixed stats and R background. Please send a mail to hello@vizbi.com if this interests you.

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Kalyan Banga226 Posts

I am Kalyan Banga, a Post Graduate in Business Analytics from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, a premier management institute, ranked best B-School in Asia in FT Masters management global rankings. I have spent 14 years in field of Research & Analytics.

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