Before, they were trying to enable their brokers with daily reports that sampled some of the data and once a day they’d be emailed a PDF report, showing them how they were doing. That was mildly helpful but what they really wanted to be able to do was bring analytics into the quoting application. Using Zoomdata which has an open architecture, it’s very easy to integrate or embed into an application. They were able to do real-time analysis of the entire data set in Hadoop and correlate that to the specific individual who they were quoting a policy to, as the quote was being issued.

What it meant to them was an immediate 50% reduction in policy cancellations, because they were able to quote better packages to the customer, creating much more customer satisfaction and lowering that cancellation rate by 50%, which is a fantastic improvement of productivity.

We’re seeing adoption across industry, but we’re also seeing it in different kinds of use cases. We were talking about Markerstudy where it’s being used inside an insurance company to improve worker productivity. We’re also seeing a number of organizations building new businesses, or new lines of businesses, around unpackaged data driven applications. A great example there would be our customer Bidtellect. Bidtellect is a software company that is basically a exchange for real-time advertising placement on mobile and websites. So 50 milliseconds is the average time that Bidtellect takes to place an ad on an individual screen based on the content that they’re browsing.

That’s an incredibly high performance in a true streaming data environment. They’re literally running billions of ad placements and ad auctions a day, so you have to think about the data architecture for building those kinds of applications in a different way. You literally don’t have time to take data and put it somewhere and analyze it and then present the results.

Everybody grows up with a smartphone today. They know that a data-driven application can help them find a better restaurant or deposit a check in their bank or see what their latest credit card bill is. So the notion of contextual analytics is becoming familiar organically and businesses need to catch up with the consumer market, if you will, and think about how do we bring anlaytics to bear for all of the users in the organization.

Adrian: Thanks Nick, so that’s Zoomdata, providing visual analytics for big data and streaming data. My key takeaways where: Zoomdata is positioning its offering as a platform so developers can integrate Zoomdata’s analytics into their applications to provide real-time analytics in context for business users. They integrate data from multiple sources; Modern streaming data, data from cloud apps and historical data, which then looks like a single source to a user, it can be viewed as a stream.

Finally, for complex queries on very large data sets, Zoomdata’s data sharpening technology generates thousands of micro-queries that can be processed in parallel to provide fast access to meaningful results while the full query is processed to refine and deliver complete results. Learn more at Zoomdata.com and see more videos in the series at RTInsights.com.