Startup Targets Predictive Analytics

Quant5, a predictive customer analytics software as a service (SaaS) startup, and Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading strategy and technology consulting firm, have teamed up to help users prepare for the onslaught of big data.

The two companies have joined forces to begin to educate businesses on strategies for increasing profits and operational efficiencies by harnessing the power of predicative analytics and visualisations.

Cutting through the noise

“What we’re trying to do is cut through the noise,” Doug Levin, president and chief executive of Quant5 told eWEEK. “We are entering into partnerships and trying to cut through all the noise about harnessing big data and helping businesses improve their customer experience. Our focus is on small and medium-sized enterprises.”

Levin and Marcelo Ballestiero of Quant5, and Alex Cosmas and Robert Love of Booz Allen Hamilton published a white paper, entitled “Leveraging the Big Data Revolution in Customer Analytics.” Businesses can use the paper as a framework for adopting customer analytics, resulting in increased revenue, increased customer retention and loyalty, and increased operational efficiencies and ultimately profitability, Levin said.

The paper is one example of cooperation by Quant5 and Booz Allen Hamilton, who have witnessed across dozens of sectors how customer analytics can glean new insights from burgeoning social media data streams and anticipate customer purchasing behavior for new or in-place products and services.

According to Levin, many businesses wait far too long before making the investment into robust customer analytics. They waver over internal issues, such as the difficulties of gathering data, the challenges surrounding the creation of actionable insights from big data and the shortage of real expertise. They know spreadsheets are inadequate because they produce ineffective two-dimensional analyses and graphs, and high-end software systems take months to produce analytics that are out-of-date as soon as they are available.

Open source vision

“One of the reasons Quant5 teamed up with Booz Allen on this white paper is their perspective gained from providing businesses with a framework and the business case for taking on customer analytics projects,” Levin said. “For decades businesses have recognised the efficacy of off-the-shelf software applications. Today an off-the-shelf analytics and visualisation solution is available from Quant5. This white paper examines two cases of customer analytics projects and several visualisation examples.”

Levin, previously a Microsoft exec, is the founder and former chief executive of Black Duck Software and is considered something of an open-source visionary. He also has advised or launched several companies, including social gaming startup Ayeah Games, which Levin launched in 2010. Levin launched Quant5 in September 2011 after working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Operations Research Centre. Indeed, several of the Quant5 employees are MIT grads. And Quant5 is based in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

“With the cloud we can build services or individual modules that companies can subscribe to,” Levin said.”We deliver high-grade analytics right down to the marketer. So we wanted to have a ‘Fisher-Price’ user interface that anybody can use.”

Business optimisation

Quant5’s strategy is to help customers transform exponentially growing mountains of unstructured and heterogeneous data into actionable business optimisation. By leveraging Quant5’s Customer Analytics SaaS big data solution, business organisations gain deeper, richer and more accurate insight into customers, marketing activities and budget, and the company itself. This intelligence leads to uncovering new business opportunities, making better and faster decisions, and speeding time to market while gaining or maintaining competitive advantage.

“IBM has identified this market as a multibillion dollar opportunity; we will see our share of that,” Levin said.

The company worked from October 2011 to May of 2012 to deliver the alpha version of its platform and has since had more than 14 customer engagements. They target enterprises with revenue of less than $1 billion (£620m) and focus primarily on marketing departments, Levin said. Next up for Quant5 will be a product strategy, he added.

Are you a Google expert? Take our quiz.