eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
SOASTA, a provider of performance analytics solutions, has entered into the realm of companies trying to address the data scientist shortage and enable organizations to more easily work with and analyze data.
Data.world, meanwhile, launched on July 11 to help users more easily access and work with open data to solve problems.
SOASTA recently delivered a new version of its Data Science Workbench, which provides performance analytics for digital businesses and enables users to glean insights from their data based on those analytics.
“No competitor has data science capabilities that focus entirely on digital performance and its relationship to conversion, revenue and business outcome,” said SOASTA Executive Chairman and founder Ken Gardner, in a statement.
The new release of the SOASTA Digital Science Workbench (DSWB) adds third-party resource analytics, conversion impact and activity impact scores, session path analysis and predictive analytics to enable users to gain insights from their data.
In a nutshell: SOASTA’s Data Science Workbench makes pulling insights from data easier without having to hire a data scientist.
“SOASTA is bridging the data science gap by making data science accessible and turnkey,” Gardner told eWEEK.
By providing a real-time analytic platform in DSWB with prebuilt analytics notebooks, companies can analyze immense amounts of data and have the ability to visualize, in an intuitive and precise manner, exactly what they need to do to increase digital performance whether it be e-commerce, advertising or financial services, he noted.
“We do the heavy lifting for them so that they don’t have to,” Gardner said.
With its new support for the conversion impact score and activity impact score, DSWB provides a way to prioritize page group optimization by user sensitivity to performance, relative to conversion and session length, SOASTA said. These visualizations, typically handled by a data scientist, help organizations identify the highest-priority pages for remediation and fix the pages most important to their business first, the company said.
Gardner claims that DSWB is the only data science technology available in today’s market with a complete focus on the performance of application, Web and mobile digital properties.
“Marketing and e-commerce teams that look to customer data and analytics to drive better marketing, customer experiences and sale completion rates know that along with content, offers and design, app performance also drives customer success,” said Milan Hanson and James McCormick of Forrester Research in a February 2016 report.
Moreover, with the new version, SOASTA’s DSWB now offers analytics and visualization capabilities for third-party resources. This enables users to pull insight from third-party resources that were previously out of their control and may have negatively impacted site and application performance. SOASTA provides analytics about each resource loaded on a page, as well as the domain that served it, the type and size of the resource, and performance information for that resource, the company said.
SOASTA, Data.world Help Users Access, Analyze, Optimize data
Most commercial Web and mobile user experiences depend heavily on third-party content to deliver everything from syndicated content to video to advertising to interaction with social media, Gardner said.
“It is quite common for us to discover that customers and prospects don’t know how many third-party resources are being used and where, much less the impact of those resources on site performance and, ultimately, user outcomes,” he added in a statement.
Data.world to Help Users Access Open Data
Meanwhile, in a separate move to help organizations more easily access and work with data, Data.world, a new company that facilitates finding and using data to solve problems, launched on July 11. Data.world also announced that it secured $14 million in a Series A round of funding led by Shasta Ventures, with additional investment from other venture capital firms and more than two dozen angel investors.
Data.world focuses on providing users with access to open data to use for solving problems. Open data is data that can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose. And it is shaping up to be one of the most important forces impacting humanity today, said Brett Hurt, co-founder and CEO of Data.world.
“This movement can speed our cure for cancer, help keep governments accountable, curtail climate change, and positively impact other important world issues,” Hurt said in a statement.
Hurt and his team built Data.world to facilitate these breakthroughs—by allowing professional and amateur data scientists, analysts and researchers to instantly find, use and share data, he said.
Hurt noted that there are more than 18 million open datasets today, yet less than 10 percent of all open data is published as machine-readable under open licenses. Moreover, on most projects involving open data, 80 percent of the time is spent getting the data ready to analyze. Hurt argues that there is a digital divide between the people who have data and the people who need it.
That’s why he joined Data.world—to democratize access to the world’s data and create a sustainable archive.
“Once every two or three years, you see a company and idea that could be hugely transformational,” said Jason Pressman, partner at Shasta Ventures and member of the Data.world board of directors, in a statement. “Data.world has the potential to re-define what we think is possible in our lifetimes and create massive value for society.”