Ana-Data Consulting
Redefining Data Analytics

It is a fine Wednesday morning in New Jersey and Ana-Data Consulting’s office is bustling with mid-week rush as work pressure builds and employees uplift themselves with cups of coffee. The company’s CEO, Lal Vaghji can sense the anxiety build and apprehension gather on his team’s shoulders. As a passionate practitioner of yoga and meditation, he directs the team to close the eyes and take a deep breath, making them focus on inner peace. “Yoga and meditation are enlightening and help people redefine their path toward achievement. I make it a point to advise everyone to practice meditation or calm their nerves with yoga poses like Baddha Konasana or Supta Baddha Konasana,” begins Vaghji. “In this busy schedule, whether we are doing presentations or on the go 24x7, yoga helps us stay calm and reduce stress, so we can concentrate better on the task at hand.”

Vaghji founded Ana-Data, a technology consulting company specializing in building software applications to help clients meet their strategic and operational needs. Once, while assisting a large beverage firm using the Nielsen IRI data to understand how promotions in retail outlets can impact the sales, he saw challenges in viewing the data. “Off the shelf tools take about 70 percent of the market, but when the user needs more specific analysis, the tools fail,” he explains. “These tools are designed to be generic and so we developed our own set of components with various adaptors to view the data by customizing it according to their requirements.” Based on over 20 years of experience building custom software applications and user interface designs, Ana-Data through its product, Clear Analytics, offers an enterprise-strength self- service Business Intelligence (BI) solution. “After two decades of experience we have learned that business users breathe and live on Excel so we created a tool inside Excel, easing almost all their data problems,” adds Vaghji.

Calming the Data Unrest

According to Vaghji, the big data arena has been lacking technology that can combine data from diverse sources at a faster rate and analyze it to get the required results. “Right now, it takes too long to process the data and aggregate it to a form that users want,” he adds. “My biggest accomplishment has been assisting clients in analyzing and finding the right solution that can fulfill their organizational needs with Clear Analytics.”

Ana-Data’s Clear Analytics empowers users, removing the middleman and building a ‘direct line,’ connecting business users to company data—by introducing powerful self-service tools. Clear Analytics permits effortless extraction of data from a user’s trusted sources and enables this data to be leveraged by any and all of the Power BI feature-sets, further giving the liberty to publish the enterprise datasets to the Power BI portal.

My biggest accomplishment has been assisting clients in analyzing and finding the right solution that can fulfill their organizational needs

Also, in order to eliminate the hassle of manually updating spreadsheets, Clear Analytics uniquely injects data while keeping a firm’s layout perfectly intact. This distinctive capability effectively separates the Excel templates from the data, allowing the templates to evolve freely while users dynamically refresh their changing data completely ‘hands-free.’ By maintaining a virtual link between the data on the spreadsheet and its source, the quality of the data increases exponentially. “Clear Analytics is empowering business user to gain direct access to data without relying on IT, by using the latest concepts in logical data warehouse methodology and self-service best practices,” adds Vaghji.

Chief Everything Officer

According to Vaghji the best part of being a CEO is, getting a chance to work with diversified clients with unique business challenges. “The feeling and contentment of being able to help clients resolve their challenges is highly satisfying,” he asserts. “There is so much data available in the marketplace with terabytes being getting generated each day—it is a challenge for us to know how to acquire this data. Being a CEO means experimenting each day and inventing solutions to make the lives of clients easier.”

But, “all work and no play” can make a CEO wearisome, hence the successful entrepreneur in Vaghji advices budding corporate honchos to take time off and travel. “Explore new places, get away from the office, and take a step back,” he adds. “That is when the ideas begin coming to you and pieces of the puzzle start falling in place.”

Surging toward the Target

“Results matter, not the long hours or extensive meetings. If you do not believe in an idea, it will be hard to make others believe,” he states. “Giving up should not be an option, we need to be persistent with our ideas and modify it according to market needs and customer requirements.” The zealous yogi wants to take his company to new heights by implementing unique data visualization techniques that can present data in a form that users can analyze and use directly. “For the future, we will focus on providing superior data analytics solutions, while surging in the data sciences field to analyze the data and coalesce it with our technologies,” concludes Vaghji.