Pyramid Analytics
A Strategic Approach to Data Analytics

As experts sing praises about the endless possibilities of big data, many business leaders have been quick to jump on the data analytics bandwagon in order to become more agile, improve operations, and generate value that propels their business into the digital age.
But truth be told, getting tangible and sustainable benefits from data analytics is not that easy. One of the biggest barriers is not every organization possesses the expertise needed to harness data and derive actionable insights. Furthermore, many businesses are inherently averse to change. A data-driven culture requires commitment from employees, organization-wide. There needs to be a cultural realignment toward placing data at the center of the decision-making process and elevating the value of data to a level higher.

In other words, the need of the hour is a cultural framework that enables all of the stakeholders involved in a data initiative to collaborate and make data the heart of organizational decision-making. Furthermore, to develop an analytics-driven culture, companies must break the information silos and eliminate multiple versions of the truth. This is possible only when a ‘single version of the truth’ is created for all analytics users, and they have access to data at all levels and can leverage insights from analytics.

As challenging as it sounds, Pyramid Analytics, an Amsterdam-based innovator in business analytics, makes achieving a data-driven culture a seamless affair. The firm has developed an enterprise analytics platform, Pyramid, which connects teams, supports confident decision-making, and produces winning results. The platform uniquely combines all the elements necessary for trusted analytics and enables businesses to make smarter decisions. Omri Kohl, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says, “We founded Pyramid Analytics as a strategic partner for chief data officers (CDOs) to implement their analytics strategy. Our vision is to become a strategic platform for organizations to implement holistic data strategies for all use cases and user profiles.”

Driving Business Value

The Pyramid platform serves as a unified, flexible, accessible, and collaborative analytics solution that creates unity among data and users. It is purposefully built to fully restore trust in analytics. The solution utilizes existing data sources, lets CDOs manage information, applies machine learning, builds models, explores business problems, presents analytics content, shares data insights across the enterprise, and does it all, at scale, without losing vital oversight control.

“We have seen our prospects and customers try and build a resilient analytics ecosystem that delivers value across the business only to experience the same age-old challenges: more silos, more software, and more chaos,” adds Kohl. With the Pyramid platform in place, businesses can manage and align data strategies across any environment (cloud, hybrid, or on-premise), regardless of the technology, while still maintaining governance and control by leveraging existing infrastructure investments. What makes the platform a cut above the rest is its fully browser-based application.

Becoming More Analytically Mature
Building an effective analytics strategy is not a cakewalk. CIOs and CDOs must take into consideration aspects such as the total cost of ownership, company culture, cross-team collaboration, security, performance, stability, and scalability, among several others. The burden is on data storytellers to breathe life into the data and give it meaning in the form of narratives that key decision-makers can understand and leverage to drive better outcomes.

The Pyramid platform gives organizations the ability to orchestrate enterprise-wide decisions built on trusted analytics. “We give users the power to bring their data to life, often using smart capabilities,” informs Kohl.

It also facilitates a consolidated analytics environment that brings people together and provides a reliable mechanism to share and collaborate. Within this shared analytics environment, everyone is looking at the same data and can make decisions based on trusted sources. Thus, decision-makers don’t need to bounce off different tools and solutions that don’t necessarily interact with each other. “When you commit all employees to a single version of the truth and empower decision-making at all levels of your organization, you create an undeniable foundation for long-term business success. Our platform provides the entire workflow of analytics from end-to-end,” adds Kohl.

Another critical issue faced by enterprises today is that the analytical tools are not matched appropriately to their users’ needs. The key is to implement BI keeping each user in mind: it should make analytics easier for everyone. The Pyramid platform enables data leaders to achieve a measurable return on enterprise BI efforts by aligning the data strategy with business needs.

What’s more? It provides powerful content management capabilities that data leaders need to implement a successful analytics strategy. The platform allows BI teams to stop acting as reactive report-writing factories and begin leveraging their subject-matter-expertise across the entire enterprise. At the same time, it empowers business users with best practices, guidance, curated content, and self-service tools.

As an enterprise-level BI tool, the Pyramid platform provides specific toolsets and functionality that are valuable to any participant in the decision lifecycle, thus increasing value at not only the department level but across the enterprise. For example, it is the only analytics tool that treats narrative reporting—which provides deep data-driven context beyond the static data views and visualizations found in traditional reporting—as a core part of the analytics lifecycle. With the platform’s Publish module, users can craft and automate engaging, dynamic narrative reports using the same platform they use to prepare data models and conduct advanced analytics inquiries. When reporting ties directly to data, includes dynamic content that provides deep context, and conforms to established security protocols, it delivers more than just pretty pictures or historical facts—it provides contextualized insights that show the way to better decisions.

More recently, Pyramid Analytics introduced a more robust, containerized version of its platform to support its growing AWS partnership. In addition, the firm also enhanced its platform’s deployment options for Kubernetes to support all of its customers’ cloud and multi-cloud ABI implementations.

Why Choose Pyramid?

Another notable aspect of Pyramid Analytics is the firm places customers at the heart of everything it does. “In every major release, atleast 40 to 50 percent of new capabilities are feature requests from our customers,” reveals Kohl. Besides, AI is woven into the fiber of the platform. The firm continues to strengthen and expand its traditional analytics and business intelligence functionality by threading AI-driven ‘smart’ capabilities such as NLQ Chatbot, Smart Insights, Smart Model,Smart Discover, Data Structure Analyzer, and more throughout its platform. It serves as a key driver for user adoption.

The Pyramid platform is, in fact, one of the first analytics solutions to include an ETL tool as a core module; users don’t need a separate offering to fix, condition, and improve incoming data. It offers users the ability to use a graphical tool to blend structured and unstructured data in numerous ways and then schedule data preparation operations so that complicated data prep efforts don’t have to be repeated over and over again in the same place!

Moreover, the firm takes things a notch higher by placing a constant focus on innovation.

Our vision is to become a strategic platform for organizations to implement holistic data strategies for all use cases and user profiles

Pyramid Analytics’ Tel Aviv-based development team—under the leadership of co-founder and CTO Avi Perez—works hard to build analytics software to solve today’s needs and anticipate tomorrow’s challenges. Traditionally, the firm has created one major release each year and one point release each quarter (four times per year).

In 2021, the company plans to come out with one major release and two larger point releases instead of four smaller point releases.
Building a Culture of Optimism and Success
Kohl emphasizes that Pyramid Analytics’ corporate culture and people are the glue that holds the firm together. “We are an incredibly diverse and distributed team, with operations in Israel, Europe, the UK, and the U.S. Some may view that as a liability, but I believe it has made us a resilient organization, especially as COVID-19 forced many companies into a work-from-home model. We had already been collaborating remotely for years, so while we faced our own challenges, we were very prepared for the changes,” states Kohl.
Furthermore, Pyramid Analytics encourages an open-minded and transparent culture. “We are constantly learning and trying to adapt to new realities—aligning with the demands of our customers and partners. This approach has played a major role in accelerating our growth, especially during the pandemic. In addition, although we are a multi-national company, we share common traits across our organization: we are change-resilient and share an underdog mindset, which makes us hungry for success,” says Kohl proudly.

The efficacy of Pyramid Analytics’ offering can be best explained through a customer success story involving a leading Dutch retailer, Blokker that sells household items and toys to over 340 stores. Blokker aspired to become a data-driven organization: to move beyond basic BI tools and have better visibility across the business to drive profitability. Prior to collaborating with Pyramid Analytics, everything—from maintaining inventory to checking product availability and more—the client did was manual (paper-based). This made it difficult to keep track of all the household items’ margins and distribution to online and offline stores. “The need for change was urgent. And, while the client was using basic BI tools like QlikView, they were very siloed, which added complexity without providing the centralized view of margin and stock data that the business wanted,” mentions Kohl. Together with Pyramid Analytics, Blokker created an analytical strategy and implemented it using the Pyramid platform.

Consequently, they were able to combine data from different systems and centralize it in one place for querying, modeling, and visualizing. The client was also able to improve their supply chain visibility to provide better insight into product availability and increase satisfaction. “Additionally, they were able to analyze store performance to better coordinate store hours and staff availability during the pandemic and track in-store versus online sales (orders of the in-store increased by 50 percent during the pandemic),” reveals Kohl.

Creating a Data-Driven Future

Pyramid Analytics’ goal is to be the ‘exclusive analytics tool’ for the enterprise market. To achieve this feat, the company will continue to help and guide businesses looking to implement effective analytical strategies. “During the pandemic, we saw a massive acceleration in digital transformation. Organizations are in need of better access to infrastructure to cater to their customers, be more competitive, resourceful, and resilient. And that puts us in a unique position in the marketplace. Our growth almost doubled last year, and we are on track to be one of the market leaders,” wraps up Kohl.