Saama
Going Beyond Predictive to Deliver Strategic Value

Almost 15 years back, when Enterprise Resource Planning systems were slowly starting to make significant inroads into numerous companies, Suresh Katta, Founder and CEO of Saama Technologies, saw one of the many shortcomings of those systems: they only acted as a data accumulator without offering insights. Recognizing the need to create actionable insights, Suresh Katta founded Saama Technologies; and over the years, it has evolved from being a services and consulting company to one that delivers analytics oriented solutions utilizing its own intellectual property.

At its core, Saama Technologies helps IT organizations build infrastructure to support their data and analytics needs. Today’s enterprises desire for more economical and seamless data warehousing capabilities and Saama Technologies has been leveraging Hadoop and heeding to their calls. Of late, the Silicon Valley company has been assisting enterprises in migrating from legacy BI systems to a next-generation data analytics environment; they realign existing infrastructures to support more challenging data environments in terms of quantity, diversity and velocity of data. “We help customers develop solutions to solve very specific business problems through the use of analytics,” says Todd Johnson, Executive VP and COO, Saama Technologies. Leveraging their own IP, Saama Technologies develops comprehensive solutions around churn, fraud, customer and pricing analytics, helping organizations to better run their business.

We help IT organizations build infrastructure to support their data and analytics needs

Saama Technologies believes that the biggest change in the data analytics space is not the technology but analytics’ impact on business processes. “Analytics is no longer a separate entity. It is pivotal to how businesses operate,” says Johnson. The company’s approach and IP, enables them to develop flexible solutions at a rapid pace, contributing to their many attributes that keep them ahead of the pack. Saama Technologies completely closes the loop by taking analytics and embedding them inside business applications. “Getting past just predictive and to the point of prescriptive is what we do,” asserts Johnson. Besides catering to life sciences and healthcare, insurance and large technology companies; Saama also helps companies build analytics and products.

In one of their recent churn analytics projects for a large network equipment provider, Saama Technologies spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the client’s massive amount of churn data to understand the core relation between customer churn and its influences. “But at the end of the day, we realized that if that data is not made actionable, it loses value,” says Johnson. So, Saama Technologies is in the process of generating a churn score that will be included in the CRM suite that the sales personnel can use when they pursue contract renewals. This effectively presents the sales team with valuable insights–such as, key attributes, risk points and mitigation plans–on a customer with a high churn score, which they can then use to deploy an effective and aggressive plan of action.

Having transformed from a business intelligence focused IT staffing firm to a data and analytics-driven company that is of much higher value to their clients, Saama Technologies is intent on being customer-centric and maintaining their steady upward progress–the company just came off its best quarter till date. With an experienced team of data scientists at its helm, Saama Technologies is looking to take on a number of challenging projects in the coming years.