10.19.2015
Paxata, provider of the only Adaptive Data Preparation platform for the enterprise, today announced the availability of its Fall ’15 release. The latest release delivers across all five pillars of the platform, with innovations in data integration, data quality, enrichment, collaboration and governance. Designed with the needs of the enterprise in mind, the Paxata Fall ‘15 release includes self-service automation, mixed workload management and ongoing enhancements across the entire user experience.
“In 2012, we set out to change the lives of every business analyst with Adaptive Data Preparation,” said Prakash Nanduri, Co-Founder and CEO of Paxata. “With our Fall ’15 release, we take one step further to fulfilling our vision of an enterprise information fabric that seamlessly integrates with all BI tools out of the box, addresses all analytic use cases, scales to handle unlimited data variety and volume, and is deployed where customers want it – on premise or in their choice of cloud hosting vendors.”
“The business has an insatiable appetite for data and insights. Even in the age of big data, the number one issue of business stakeholders and analysts is getting access to the data,” according to “3 Ways Data Preparation Tools Help You Get Ahead Of Big Data,” a February 2015 blog by Michele Goetz, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Goetz continues: “The goal is to get insight that helps them smartly navigate through increasingly complex business landscapes and customer interactions…Companies like Paxata saw this problem and set out to eliminate it, not with a backend data integration and data management approach, but with a front-office data preparation tool that connects subject matter experts intimately with their data.”
“The pace of innovation in the self-service data preparation market continues to accelerate, and we’re proud to continue to lead the charge,” said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Paxata. “Last year, we were the first player in the industry to deliver a code-free, sample-free, machine learning-based automated approach to data preparation on an elastic Apache Spark based architecture. The Paxata Fall ’15 release raises the bar even further. Now, analysts across the enterprise can close the loop between Hadoop or non-Hadoop based persistence environments and their BI tools, automate their data preparation processes themselves, and take advantage of a system designed to adaptively regulate itself depending on the workloads running on top.”
“Our customers, particularly those in financial services, service providers, and healthcare, need the ability to operationalize and industrialize self-service analytics,” said Christian Franklin, Managing Partner and CTO of TamGroup. “Paxata is the only self-service data preparation platform that delivers a user experience designed for the business analyst coupled with the horsepower and enterprise-grade automation, security, governance and industrialization that the information-driven enterprise demands to make self-service analytics pervasive.”
The Fall ’15 release will debut at the Tableau Conference, booth #227 on October 19-22, 2015. Key innovations for the business analyst include:
Usability enhancements for freedom and productivity of analysts preparing data – The latest version enhances usability with user interface and application flow improvements for data quality, governance, integration and transformation. An enhanced context-sensitive user interface, including task-aware navigation filters and search, has been added to the Paxata workspace. New shortcuts speed up the ability to find relational data sources, AnswerSets and projects. Fall ‘15 also allows analysts to view nulls, blanks and errors within columns compared to other values in those columns, to rapidly understand completeness of the dataset. It interactively identifies anomalies with missing values and errors for removal or further investigation of outliers in order to make the experience more fluid.
ClicktoPrep functionality with SmartBlending for Tableau ensures quality and timeliness of Tableau insights – While traditional blending allows Tableau analysts to manually clean, merge and organize small, non-complex datasets, Paxata dramatically modernizes that process with blending that is powered by sophisticated semantic machine learning capabilities for complex pattern matching, anomaly detection and semantic data profiling. This release makes it even easier to take advantage of Paxata SmartBlending powered by IntelliFusion, with contextual bi-directional integration with Tableau and other business intelligence tools. ClicktoPrep allows analysts to go directly from Tableau into edit or filter mode within Paxata and seamlessly move between the two to view, clean, prepare and combine data to quickly fix data issues, while maintaining focus on the analytic exercise.
Self-service automation supports analysts need to operationalize data prep – Often, business analysts have to pull the same data or run the same projects on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. These repetitive tasks tie up resources, which would otherwise be applied to higher value work. Paxata’s new automation features are designed with that in mind, allowing anyone with appropriate permissions to direct the system with two “set-it-and-forget-it” scheduling options: update data from its original source and generate new AnswerSets by re-running existing projects against newer datasets. Analysts can now seamlessly go between their ad hoc and operational data preparation processes on the same platform without the need for complex, lengthy development cycles.
To empower business teams and improve enterprise data operations, Paxata’s Fall ’15 release includes new capabilities including:
Open persistence architecture ensures efficient access and ingestion of all enterprise data – With significant demand for adaptive data preparation capabilities from customers with traditional data warehouse environments, Paxata’s latest release offers a new open persistence architecture that expands Paxata’s deployment options beyond pure Hadoop environments. Unlike other self-service data preparation solutions that require all data to be in Hadoop before any preparation work can be done, Paxata’s Apache Spark-based architecture can now run in any IT environment through support for local Linux-based file systems and Network File Systems (NFS) in addition to HDFS. Paxata will continue to be engineered to work exceptionally well with Hive, Avro, and other Hadoop-ecosystem components, but can now also serve as a terrific bridge for organizations looking to optimize their existing BI tool and data warehouse investments while they look to move to a Hadoop-based architecture in a phased fashion.
Mixed-workload management supports requirements from all parts of the business – Unlike traditional batch ETL solutions, Paxata offers both interactive and batch data preparation capabilities with the introduction of self-service automation. Paxata’s latest release delivers new workload management capabilities that serve the broadest set of users by giving Paxata administrators the ability to better manage the execution of both interactive, ad-hoc and batch processing of data preparation projects. The system adaptively allocates resources depending on the nature of the workload so that urgent, quick-turn projects are prioritized ahead of larger jobs, which can be scheduled during lower-demand timeframes. This capability continues to push the state of the art in leveraging Apache Spark in elastically scalable, cloud-based deployment models in addition to being invaluable for on-premises deployments.
Comprehensive governance with every step of data prep projects – Paxata’s latest release enhances its’ market-leading governance capabilities with a dedicated panel for versions including end-user annotations. In addition to capturing the sequence of end user steps, time stamps, and the end user who made the changes, Paxata now offers the ability for analysts to add textual annotations explaining why they made data preparation changes in a given step. This adds additional context to the data preparation process by providing a mechanism to capture knowledge that would otherwise be tacit in the analyst’s head. The new versions panel can be filtered to only versions that are published or only those with annotations, in line with other contextual usability enhancements in the Fall ’15 release.
Ways to see Paxata’s new release:
• Visit Paxata’s booth #227 at the 2015 Tableau Conference, Las Vegas, October 19-22
• Learn more by visiting our website
• Register for a live demo in one of our weekly webcasts
• Check out our demos on PaxataTV
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