New Release of Logi Vision – Business Intelligence for Just About Anyone
It seems as though many companies are working on getting some of the data-oriented activities out of the hands of IT and into the hands of the business managers. This is a growing trend that’s sort of shaking the landscape of how IT and business managers are used to working. It can certainly have its benefits, such as faster and better decisions from business managers and more innovation from IT once they are freed from the burden of satisfying end-user report requests. However, this creates a challenge for Business Intelligence providers to offer products that are user-friendly and intuitive for the non-technical users to operate, manage, and master.
The gauntlet has been thrown and a company that has accepted this challenge is Logi Analytics, as seen in its recent data discovery product release called Logi Vision 1.3. The new version includes new mapping, social activity stream, and binning capabilities for just about anyone. Recently, I was fortunate enough do a Q & A with David Abramson, Director of Product Management at Logi Analytics.
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SR: Can you tell me a little about Logi Vision 1.3?
David Abramson: “Logi Vision 1.3 was developed around a data discovery use case but was approached in a similar way as our core BI platform to bring something into the market that’s done differently – allowing more users to experience the benefits of data insights. We wanted to capture the functions and mechanisms that are not native to the BI landscape, but maybe found in web-based applications. Mechanisms such as recommendations and relevancy that you find in popular consumer applications such as Amazon or Google’s search engines and social features such as trending, favorites, and tagging that are found on Twitter or Facebook.”
SR: Can you talk about your mapping features?
David Abramson: “Logi Vision delivers a homegrown geographic mapping solution that automatically geo-codes continents, countries, states and populated places. The solution delivers customizable geomap data to the users – and doesn’t require a third-party license. This feature enables Logi Vision users to perform complex analysis across their location-specific data.”
SR: What is binning?
David Abramson: “Instead of taking days or weeks to build out separate models for all the different iterations around the data, automatic binning can look at strings, dates or numbers in many different ways and group them appropriately to create a model while you are interacting with the visual. Through binning you get fully customized control over the way you shape the data and better understand it through the interactions of the Logi experience. This not only saves the user time, it also happens during the analysis process instead of requiring, time-consuming data preparations beforehand.”
SR: Can you describe the social activity stream?
David Abramson: “A major update in the latest release is our enhanced social collaboration enabled with our Activity Stream. It’s similar to a Facebook news feed where you can see popular events that are being worked on and pieces of data that are taking up someone’s time and attention. Users can leverage this information to help make better decisions and to also follow what’s happening in their organization quickly and easily.”
SR: How do you think your self-service model differentiates itself from other tools on the market?
David Abramson: “What we strive to do with our tools is expose these self-service data exploration capabilities in a different way. It starts with putting the data front and center for the user. A lot of tools allow you to collect data sources but show you the data in a list of columns and from there you have to figure out what the columns mean and how to build out visuals without a solid understanding of the data or what types of things you want to expose. A lot of those products can be intimidating and daunting to a typical business user who is trying to get more insight into their day-to-day operations.”
Click here to read the Logi Vision 1.3 press release.