The Boulder BI Brain Trust

 

John Myers: November 2009 Archives


BIS2Logo.JPGIntroduction:
Today Mukesh Gordhan (CEO) and Andrew Cardno (CTO) of BIS2 joined the BBBT for a look at their vizbybis2 product and the various visualization features that  BIS2 offers.  We covered: Customer Stories; Product Offerings, Architecture and Demos; and Partner Arrangements.

Some of this was under NDA....  Some not....

Data Visualization vs Data Analysis:
The BIS2 approach to tackling the "hard" visualizations and providing "quick" information for a particular vertical should be applauded.  Having cut their teeth in the 'gaming industry' ( ...read las vegas where time literally is money... ); BIS2 has a significant history in not just visualizing data into a graphic/meter, but making that graphic/meter meaningful to the user in a quick amount of time.  BIS2 does this using their Super Graphics bundled for particular industry verticals where large amounts of data and time sensitivity easily overwhelm traditional data visualization tools/toolsets.

In this BIS2 is a data visualization tool/toolset.  However, the analysis capabilities of the BIS2 Super Graphics pushes the definition of data visualization...

Data Analysis Capabilities:

WOW!  I must say that level of information provided in the BIS2 Super Graphics is amazing.  My personal favorite was the temporal presentation "super graphic".  This cross between a heat map and a pie chart ( ...and that's in no way doing justice to the information being communicated... ) has the ability to condense an entire day, month or year into a "relatively" easy ( ... i will expand on that in a moment... ) read/understand graphic.  Imagine taking all of those hourly stacked bar charts from a day or the daily bar charts from a year and being to instantly compare like time frames and find those areas of interest without all the annoying "scroll bars" to move across the entire data set.
 
BIS2_temporal.gifGranted.... The BIS2 Super Graphics look a little like tie dye colored donuts ( ...in the case of the temporal example to the right.... ) or a Jackson Pollock paintings for some of the other Super Graphics: Spatial, Inspatial, Quartal.  However, to the trained eye, the amount of information being presented is impressive.  You can instantly determine areas of high or low values for the data set and correlate those values based on the appropriate analysis. 

Product Technology:

Significant usage of Flash technology make the end user and development client packages less cumbersome than you might imagine... in particular if you have been using some of the "big vendor" data visualization development toolsets on a regular basis.

Product Portfolio:
BIS2's vizbybiz2 product has an associated family of vertical offerings:

  • retailViz
  • telViz
  • insuranceViz
  • entertainmentViz
  • gameViz
  • manufacturingViz
  • moneyViz
In each of these, they are again tackling the industries where big data and time sensitivity are key to the business model(s).

Double-Black - No Guts! No Glory
BIS2 is a data visualization application.  However, that's like describing a Porsche as "just" a car.... And just as a Porsche isn't exactly for dragging groceries around the planet, BIS2 isn't for simple data visualization exercises or tasks. BIS2 is targeting much more difficult tasks than presenting a single product, single time frame or location.  For the expert ( ...double black diamond for colorado skiers... ) data analysis tasks associated with the high data volume and low data latency industries targeted by the vizbybis2 product suite; I would definitely recommend a look at what BIS2 has to offer.

However, the analysts who use the Super Graphics will need to take the time to appreciate the amount and level of data being presented as they will be challenged to master the new territory.  But like the Double Black Diamond ski slope, it will be well worth the challenge and the effort.
   

 

This page is a archive of recent entries written by John Myers in November 2009.

John Myers: February 2008 is the previous archive.

John Myers: December 2009 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.