Product Intelligence on demand

Skills needed for big data analysis?

2012-02-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

A recent article in Forbes opined that Big Data Analysis required Data Scientists and Quant/Excel jockeys. We agree - to an extent.

While these skills are important for an organization that wishes to do everything in-house, there are companies like us that are obviating the need for acquiring this talent. Especially if you are a manufacturer of computer-centric technology products you don't need to look beyond our SaaS-based offering to easily collect and analyze data.

What's really important is to adopt a practice, nay culture, of building products designed to collect and send back operational data. That's the battle half-won. Leave the rest to us.

And think twice before posting that Excel guru req!

McKinsey weighs in on Big Data

2012-01-31T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Q4, 2011 issue of McKinsey Quarterly focused exclusively on big data and its implications for various industries moving forward (Free registration required). Makes for a very interesting read!

Some key takeaways:

-- Industries with the most potential for reaping benefits from big data include Finance, Insurance, Transportation and Warehousing, and Health Care.

-- Big data is spawning new business models - in some cases companies that genuinely embrace big data are turning into big data consultants for other firms

-- The majority of the economic surplus from big data is being garnered by consumers - in the form of reduced prices, better information etc

-- Big Data is putting up big numbers: A beverage manufacturer improved forecasting accuracy by 5%; retailers reducing the number of items it stocks by 17% and so on.

-- And perhaps most importantly for this economy, Big Data Analytics is expected to generate 140K-190K additional specialist jobs, as well as create the need for an additional 1.5 million managers!

Way to go!

So, what is SPL?

2012-01-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

Simply put is stands for Semiotic Parsing Language. But, more importantly it is the core of our technology.

SPL is an intuitive language that describes the structure and semantics of a class of documents. For semi-structured data, as is typical with our customers, it means we can utilize the structure inherent in the data and reflecting it in a high-performance and highly normalized data warehouse.

The SPL description of a class of documents and its semantics is passed through an interpreter to generate the database Data Definition Language (DDL) for staging, database DDL for the final warehouse, DDL and Data Markup Language(DML) for metadata to generate the UIs, and internal representations to perform a parse, a transactional or bulk load, and ETL transformations.

Please contact us if you need more technical details on our technology.

Our customer-onboarding process

2012-01-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

We've developed an effective process for bringing new customers on board.

While a detailed description of each phase is beyond the scope of a blog post, here's an outline:

1. Discovery and Documentation - document amongst other things what aspects of a log file need to be processed.
2. Analysis - essentially study log files and the feasibility of parsing relevant sections with SPLi
3. Design - here's where we identify and codify the relationships between various objects.
4. Development - develop cool SPL code to parse our client's data.
5. Testing
6. Deployment - including setting up the infrastructure and populating it with existing/historic data.
7. Provisioning - ensuring user access to the system.

Keen to try it out? Start off with a Jumpstart

Glassbeam and support teams

2012-01-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

We're in the midst of finalizing a case study featuring how one of our customers used Glassbeam to make it's support organization more efficient. Will be sure to update you when we launch the case study, but can share some key findings,

One of the greatest benefits of using Glassbeam was the usage of threshold events and automatically opening cases in CRM systems (hitherto done by L1 support personnel). This resulted in substantial cost savings.

Further, the client was able to support a growing install base without increasing headcount in a linear fashion. Thereby, accruing more revenues without corresponding increase in cost - all adding up to revenue and margin increases!

Bottom lime was a 20% reduction in costs. And, a more satisfied and productive support team.

Ending 2011, and Ushering in 2012

2011-12-25T17:02:00.000-08:00

We're glad to be authoring this post in the midst of a bunch of exciting activity.

2011 proved to be a very productive year - with product enhancements, notable media coverage, customer wins and more. 2012 promises to bring in much more - on these fronts, as well as with new partnerships and new initiatives that we embark on!

Best Wishes for a great Holiday season!

Glassbeam and Medical Devices

2011-12-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

We recently posted a case study on how we help a prominent medical devices company uses our solution to monitor how, which and when products are being used by medical professionals. This has helped the company make decisions on product features and even to identify the right cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Interesting read!

Archived Webinar, and more Resources

2011-12-09T10:11:00.000-08:00

Our Webinar on December 6 was well-received by an audience comprised of folks from the medical devices, testing equipment and wireless space.

We've set up a new Resources page that has links to all whitepapers, datasheets, webinars and analyst reports till date. We will be updating this page regularly to keep you abreast of exciting developments at Glassbeam.

Integrating services into our SaaS offering

2011-11-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

Our goal of accurately capturing, assimilating and displaying product operational data often results in the need to provide value-added Services to our clients.

One that results fairly often is the need for SPL Maintenance. We work with manufacturers of complex technology platforms whose products get upgraded frequently -- resulting in newer versions of call-home data and support bundles. These now have to be parsed and compiled; and our engineers routinely work with customers to update definitions that accurately reflect he nature of incoming data.

We also help with more 'traditional' services - integrating with existing Enterprise architectures, providing customized reports and Knowledge Consulting.

Check out our Services page to get details.

Partnering with Glassbeam

2011-11-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

Glassbeam is always interested in exploring partnership opportunities with companies whose offerings are adjacent to ours - Knowledgebases, BI, CRM etc

We've already written about our partnership with Opsource. We also partner with Vertica to help assimilate and store our data; and with LogiXML to provide the cool dashboards that help our users gain compelling visual insights from trends in this data.

Our partners help us stay focused on our mission of collecting and analyzing product operational data - and drawing inferences that help support, engineering, sales and marketing folks perform their tasks more efficiently.

Learn more about existing partners and do get in touch if you see areas where we could work in tandem.

Getting started with a trial account

2011-11-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, we have get feedback bemoaning the fact there is no way to get started with Glassbeam 'in minutes' (as is typical of many SaaS companies). We have to remind visitors that we collect and analyze complex operational data and it takes some upfront work to get going with our software.

Which is why we have a Jumpstart program. It lasts about 4-6 weeks and gives us time to understand, collect and analyze your product operational data -- and gives us time to provide a proof of concept and to determine what ROI you can accrue by using our application.

Contact us to learn more about Jumpstart.

Big Data and Big Insights

2011-11-10T16:31:00.000-08:00

A great article from Information Week cogently summarizes the problems many organizations face with capturing and harnessing big data.

We hear the same refrain from customers and prospects -- of data not being available easily; and even if it's available it being non-reliable, non-centralized and non-structured. All making it harder to assimilate and analyze.

To help combat possible biases against big data analytics in your organization, we've compiled some benefits that your sales, support and engineering will enjoy if they have relevant information at their fingertips.

Join us for a Webinar on December 6

2011-11-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

We look forward to your participation in our Webinar on December 6.

It is intended for a wide audience -- engineers, support folks, marketers -- essentially anyone interested in learning more about mining valuable product operational data. And, how this can help your team in cross/up-selling products, resolving support issues, or making smarter product roadmap decisions.

Registering is just a click away. See you on December 6.

SiliconIndia.com's Top 100!

2011-11-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

We promised this in a previous blog post and now we're delivering: SiliconIndia, in it's November issue, has included us in the Top 100 companies for 2011

The article accurately highlights our product's strengths: analyzing operational data and using our ground-breaking product analytics capabilities to provide actionable information for key functions including support, services, engineering, sales and marketing.

Congratulations to everyone on our hard working team!

Kudos from a respected research organization

2011-10-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

Our team is excited to know that we’ve been listed in the IDC's “Innovative Business Analytics Companies under $100M to Watch, 2011, Doc #230923, October 2011" (www.idc.com) - as one that exemplifies the growing trend in cloud based analytics. It’s always encouraging to receive kudos from outside – especially from a respected research organization.

Through this report, we’re also happy to describe and showcase how our innovative product analytics platform can address challenges in the medical device industry. Like other compute-centric verticals, the medical device industry also has products that spew tons of data that needs to be carefully distilled and analyzed.

We learned earlier this week of another exciting award in the pipeline. Will update you as soon as the news hits the wires..

Why build when you can buy

2011-04-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

We've had our share of occasions when this question was posed to us.

And, instead of a standard and boring Excel spreadsheet, we decided to be eloquent in our response - with a Video

Our latest tete-a-tete with Krishna Roy at the 451 group

2011-01-29T15:26:00.000-08:00

We had a nice conversation with Krishna Roy at the 451 group – and the ensuing report articulates the big picture at Glassbeam.

Rounding off the year on a high

2010-12-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

We’re happy to sign off with a great Q4 – a quarter full of exciting, shall we say game-changing events. From an angel round of financing to validation from GROWCalifornia’s Game Changers Steering Committee to our entry into new verticals and impressive sales wins. Surely we’re firing on all cylinders!

The holidays give us time to savor these successes, reflect on the year gone by and recharge for the year ahead. To all customers, partners, well-wishers and dear blog readers – we look forward to sharing an exciting 2011 with you!

New name, New direction, Same passion

2010-12-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

We're happy to officially announce our new name - Glassbeam! As regular readers know, that's been the name of our SaaS-based product analytics offering that has been marketed under the Orchesys umbrella. We’re now focusing on our new direction – building and marketing Glassbeam and positioning it as the premier product analytics vendor in the marketplace. Thereby, helping large technology manufacturers better understand, infer and act upon data that their machines periodically generate. Read our official press release and CEO thoughts

While the name has changed, the passion has not. In fact, it has likely gone up a couple of notches! We’re now in the center of the exciting and innovation-fuelled intersection of predictive analytics, business intelligence, and big data. Our team is enthused to be part of this evolutionary space and hard at work improving the ‘Product IQ’ of numerous and varied offerings in high-tech, medical devices and the like.

Stay tuned!

Need a quick ROI on your Glassbeam investment?

2010-06-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

Here's an easy-to-use tool at your fingertips. The methodology used incorporates factors including support costs (explicit and implicit) incurred to resolve an issue, visibility (or lack thereof) that product and professional services team have into existing installs at customer sites.

Through this tool you can get at least a ballpark estimate that can confidently be discussed with other stakeholders in your group in an attempt to get buy-in. For a detailed demo, please ping us or email at sales at glassbeam dot com.

We have turned 1

2010-03-01T12:16:00.000-08:00

Well a little more than 1!. Definitely, stronger and wiser and growing (despite the harsh economic climate). We’ve received endorsements from major analytics players and achieved traction in a few different verticals like medical devices. Our hard-at-work engineers have enhanced our product’s pedigree by upgrading the functionality of Glassbean BI Workbench that presents the hard-analyzed data the in a visually appealing fashion.

Thoughts? Do chime in by leaving a comment.

Partnering with the best in SaaS

2010-01-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

We’ve always believed with partnering with the best in SaaS to power our evolutionary product analytics platform. That’s why we’re happy to announce a partnership with Opsource to power our on-demand SaaS offering.

This partnership serves 2 important purposes – allowing us to focus on developing our application without worrying about hosting, uptime, and so on; also, it adds a player with true street cred to our list of partners. The latter also helps us counter some typical (we think misplaced) concerns about hosting data in the cloud.

SaaS and BI

2009-04-10T11:06:00.001-07:00

At Glassbeam we are at the convergence of two very hot trends – SaaS and Business Intelligence. In this economy, companies need to invest in understanding and retaining their customers. They need to figure out ways to provide greater value to their existing customers by understanding how their products are used, satisfying unstated customer needs and providing faster resolution to existing product issues.

At the same time executives cannot spend time and money on in-house complex datawarehousing technologies and analytics tools to mine the required data. Further any investment in internal IT solutions is not going to payoff for at least 18 months.

Executives need a quick ROI, pay as you go option to add new value to their customers. Hence Glassbeam, which provides a fully managed SaaS solution for analyzing customer installed base and field information using product operational data such as log, configuration and system data.

Posted via email from Glassbeam Product Analytics

What is Product Operational Data?

2009-03-25T11:32:00.001-07:00

Innovation in the data center and in all computer-based systems is driving efficiency gains and cost savings. At the same time, innovations are creating more complex systems that are more difficult to understand and diagnose. For insight into these systems that can help you solve the problems, you can analyze the system’s operational data.

Operational data is information about how well a system is performing, how a system is configured, and how the system is being used. A system is any hardware or software that performs a complex set of functions, such as a software application or a home electronic gadget. Operational data is either logged by the system or extracted through system queries and typically contains information about the operation of the system such as configuration, alerts, performance statistics, and general status.

Operational data can help with reactive diagnostic activity, proactive and predictive problem identification, and business intelligence analysis if the operational data is designed to contain rich information and is sent to (or accumulated into) a central repository. The content and format of the operational data and the way the data is stored or transmitted should be part of a well-designed product. Unfortunately, systems are often designed with little attention paid to the operational data to be collected and how it will be logged.

Read more in this whitepaper on Best Practices in generating product operational data.

Posted via email from Glassbeam Product Analytics

Glassbeam listed as Gartner cool vendor

2009-03-25T09:55:00.001-07:00

Glassbeam Named "Cool Vendor" by Leading Analyst Firm

Product Analytics - Behind the scenes

2009-03-16T15:04:00.001-07:00

Download now or preview on posterous

product analytics.pdf (840 KB)

Look into Glassbeam’s technology. See the power of SPL to parse semi-structured data.

Posted via email from Glassbeam Product Analytics

Product Intelligence and Analytics

2009-02-03T15:58:00.001-08:00

The Emergence of Product Analytics & Intelligence

A new Harbor Research White Paper explores the game changing impact of product analytic tools.

Early adopters of product analytic tools—particularly IT equipment and infrastructure providers—see its game changing impact. They believe product analytics will bend the traditional value chain into a “feedback loop”; valuable information from connected products will continually flow back through the complex business alliances that create, deliver, and support those devices.

Most IT equipment manufacturers are classic product companies. They tend to limit their service and support offerings to the minimum capabilities required to ensure customer satisfaction. In recent years many IT equipment players have advanced their networked service and support offerings as a new means to generate sustainable growth. However, while most support automation programs do impact the costs and effectiveness of delivering services, they do little to make use of “product intelligence”: the vast stores of information value based on the usage and behavior of connected IT equipment. A new generation of analytic tools is emerging that takes the value of connected products a significant step further. These tools dramatically increase a product OEM’s focus on customer needs—in many cases before the customer recognizes these needs. As it evolves, product intelligence will amount to nothing less than a “digital nervous system” that automates functions and processes, allowing equipment OEMs to achieve undreamed-of customer intimacy.

Harbor Research's latest www.harborresearch.com%2forchesys.html">White Paper explores the adoption climate, benefits, economic impact and success factors arising from connected product analytics. It was provoked by the introduction of www.glassbeam.com%2f">Glassbeam, a new product analytics offering from Orchesys. Glassbeam offers a unified solution for analytics related to product usage, behavior and support, based on leveraging embedded intelligence in IT equipment. Glassbeam is not an incremental new support scheme. Rather, it offers a significant step-function change in the way systems and equipment performance will be analyzed and managed in the future.

Currently, most of the discussions concerning product support automation focus almost exclusively on the basic monitoring of values such as alarms and alerts. But the attention that basic monitoring is receiving threatens to steal the limelight from the real revolution: utilizing connectivity and analytic tools to tightly integrate customers and their equipment partners. This is where the real value lies.

The feedback we have gathered from early adopters shows that while field intelligence provides significant improvements to product support, there is much more hidden value in product intelligence than heretofore understood. Connectivity enables many additional values including transparency into the usage and behavior of products as well as feedback to customers to help optimize systems and application performance. Armed with better customer intelligence, services organizations can now deliver value added services such as health checks and audit reviews to their customers, realizing higher revenues and increasing customer satisfaction and adoption of new products and solutions.

We believe product data analytics presents a unique dimension to the broader connected products and services story. Any equipment manufacturer that chooses to network-enable its products and leverage this information through product analytics holds a brand-new trump card: the manufacturer gains valuable information and insights generated from networked devices. This creates a profound empowerment that is surprisingly under-appreciated.

Posted via email from Glassbeam Product Analytics