11.1.17
Periscope Data today launched a new software platform that meets the unique needs of professional data teams, the fast-growing community of data analysts, data engineers, data scientists and chief data officers that are driving the future of business. Periscope’s Unified Data Platform is the industry’s first to address the complete analytics lifecycle, allowing data teams to ingest, store, analyze, visualize and report on data — all from one connected platform — and deliver deeper insight to their organizations.
Often called the next natural resource, corporate data is the lifeblood of most businesses and drives significant technology investment. Yet most organizations struggle to efficiently and accurately harness insights from this data. The reason: Data is fragmented across the business, managed by an array of disconnected tools, and analyzed by siloed teams that can’t ensure accurate metrics or consistent insights into business performance.
With Periscope’s Unified Data Platform, businesses can create a data-driven culture by combining a single source of truth — a data warehouse — with deep analytics capabilities, empowering data teams to collaborate and be more productive and efficient. Periscope’s platform is designed to overcome the high costs of incomplete, out-of-date and potentially inaccurate data, which costs a typical business nearly $10 million per year1 — creating a $3.1 trillion annual drag on the U.S. economy2. The platform also addresses the large and growing market for big data and analytics software, predicted to be worth $60 billion globally by 2020, according to IDC3.
“Companies have more data than they can handle — but never enough insight,” said Harry Glaser, co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data. “Business leaders know they’re not getting what they need, and their data teams are hamstrung by siloed, inefficient systems. How often does a CEO get conflicting views of data from different departments? And how often do businesses make product decisions without fully understanding customer behavior? This has to change, and we’re excited to empower data teams with a fast, smart, unified platform.”
“Data is essential to Flexport’s mission, which is to fix the user experience in global trade,” said Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO, Flexport. “We use data internally to run a better operation, and also to add more value to our customers. If we didn’t have Periscope Data at the core of our business, organizing all our data, making it accessible and helping our teams make decisions, we would really struggle and be back in the dark ages. We use it to do everything, and we’re steering the business strategically based on the insights that we find in Periscope Data.”
Founded by managers from Google and Microsoft, Periscope Data has already become a hit with its core product (Periscope Data Analytics), which instantly turns SQL queries into interactive charts and dashboards that are easy to share. Periscope’s customers write 16 million queries and share 30,000 dashboards per day, spending an average of 20 hours every week in the software, and over 90% log in to the platform every day. Since 2016, the company has tripled its customer base to more than 950 brands, including Adobe, Crunchbase, EY, Flexport, MoneyLion, New Relic, Supercell, Tinder and ZipRecruiter.
Periscope’s new Unified Data Platform extends the core product with built-in data warehousing capabilities based on Amazon Redshift, as well as new capabilities to ingest data from any source, all without leaving the Periscope platform. The Unified Data Platform is comprised of the following core components:
Ingestion: Connect to data from virtually any source, easily and instantly. Through partnerships with Alooma, Fivetran, Matillion, and Stitch Data, data teams can now use Periscope Data to ingest data from disparate data sources into Periscope’s managed warehouse, creating a single source of truth for accurate analysis and reporting.
ETL: Analysts are now able to transform data prior to loading a data warehouse, or after, allowing them to apply logic to data where it makes sense.
Analysts can also use the platform to define and reuse SQL-based data models that update automatically and are tailored to their objectives.
Storage: 100% data warehouse, 0% IT hassle. Periscope Data’s platform embeds and extends Amazon Redshift to deliver best-in-class data storage and management via the cloud. For the first time, analysts have full visibility into data dependency and data latency to ensure they’re using the correct data sources. With Periscope, data analysts can spin up a powerful data warehouse — including full control over user access, data permission, cluster performance and query management — with no IT help required.
Data teams can connect data sources that Periscope will keep fresh and up-to-date automatically — or data teams can write in their own data via JDBC.
Periscope also allows data teams to build materialized views on top of the full, raw data set using SQL, and keeps them up-to-date automatically without requiring the customer to do any engineering. This radically reduces the time and effort to get to CEO-ready insight and charts.
Customers don’t need to purchase and maintain infrastructure, or worry about redundant manual work to schedule, backup, restore and/or archive data.
Data is always up-to-date and in one place, freeing data engineers from spending countless hours copying data from system to system, allowing them to focus on system performance and optimization.
Analysis: Surface actionable insights in seconds — not hours or days — and go deep on business insights. Periscope currently delivers fast and powerful queries using the SQL database language, and will add support in early 2018 for R and Python, the most popular statistical programming languages.
Periscope’s SQL Editor helps analysts get their jobs done quickly with fewer manual steps and repetitive queries.
“Snippets” allow analysts to store frequently used code to a common library, and “views” allow them to reuse entire queries. The system also provides query revision history, autocomplete, formatting and universal syntax.
Periscope delivers fast queries across the board by pre-processing data in materialized views, so analysts can go from data to insights in seconds. The system proactively notifies the analyst if a view requires their attention.
R and Python support will empower data scientists to work within the same platform as data analysts and data engineers, providing common management, common compliance, and a common toolset against a unified dataset.
Visualization: From data to charts instantly. Superior design promotes greater usability so Periscope curates the types of charts, options, and color schemes available to create a friction-free environment. Analysts can build interactive and dynamic charts and dashboards with just a few clicks, capturing accurate and actionable insights for business users without compromising flexibility or control.
From bar charts to maps, Periscope offers hundreds of visualization options ensuring that analysts can answer any question with just the right visualization.
Visualization is highly efficient, including automatic defaults to reduce the need for configuration.
The best-in-class IDE includes positional error highlighting, automatic code formatting, autocomplete, partial query runs and many more features so that analysts can do all their work in one platform without switching to a separate code editor.
Data consumers can drill down, pivot, filter and aggregate to answer questions themselves without writing SQL or chasing down busy analysts.
Reporting: Embed insights and drive action. Periscope enables analysts to deliver actionable and accurate insights to business stakeholders when, where and how they want it.
Persistent connectivity, coupled with automated queries, ensures that charts are always accurate and up-to-date, and detailed annotations allow users to collaborate and gain immediate insight.
Charts can be embedded within a web page, intranet portal or directly within a product via Periscope’s embed API, which allows analysts to easily and securely share dashboards with anyone in the world.
Charts and dashboards can also be shared via links, email, Slack, PDF or CSV files, and even full-screen TV mode.
“Most companies have data scattered all over, with disparate teams and too many tools,” said Tom O’Neill, co-founder and chief technology officer, Periscope Data. “We’ve re-engineered the process to regain control over runaway data, empowering individual data experts to do their jobs faster — and allowing data teams to collaborate across the analytics lifecycle. Unifying data and unifying data teams will be critical to the future of data-driven businesses.”
“As a business manager, I need to have fresh and accurate data to make the best decisions,” said Alexandra Mack, head of marketing for Crunchbase. “We chose Periscope Data because it unites all of our disparate data sources, aligns our data teams, and gives my staff the power to be data experts far better than any other solution we evaluated. We’re banking on Periscope for our strategic planning — in fact, our 2018 plan wouldn’t make sense if we took Periscope Data out of the picture.”
Availability
Periscope’s Unified Data Platform is available today, including both Periscope Data Analytics and Periscope Data Warehouse. Support for R and Python languages will be available in early 2018.
As an enterprise-grade system, Periscope’s Unified Data Platform delivers the highest levels of management and security functionality. Using the platform, data teams can monitor their cluster’s CPU and memory usage, which queries are being run by whom, as well as control who has access to which data. Additionally, Periscope Data delivers a cloud security infrastructure that follows industry best practices and standards, including:
End-to-end encryption for data at rest and in transit using AES-256
TLS 1.2 support
Monitoring, access logs and intrusion detection systems
Support for single sign-on and two-factor authentication
SOC2 and HIPAA compliance
