UnlimitedViz Inc
UnlimitedViz: Building Intelligent Analytics for Office 365

The Office 365 user base reached 85 million last fall, and Microsoft’s latest numbers show that they have already surpassed the hundred million mark here in early 2017. Such explosive growth of Microsoft’s Office 365 platform has caused many organizations to rethink their adoption strategies. With every new deployment, companies focus on driving adoption–but knowing which levers to pull to drive that adoption, can only come with a deep understanding of the data analytics emanating from the Office 365 tenant space. Though the platform ships with some level of native analytics capability, many Microsoft customers reach out to the ISV partner community for assistance in building out more advanced measurements of their collaboration activities. One such partner is UnlimitedViz, an ISV dedicated to building intelligent analytics tools for the Microsoft Office 365 platform.

UnlimitedViz is the creator of tyGraph, a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) solution that amplifies the signals and reduces the noise from the big data produced by an Office 365 tenant. “Our data analytics solution allows customers to focus on what is important so they are not distracted by extraneous details,” remarks Dean Swann, Director of Product at UnlimitedViz. “Take Yammer, for example. With millions of messages being created in the customer’s network, how can they know what’s important? tyGraph puts the crucial information right on the users’ dashboard so that they can focus on taking action instead of compiling data.”

What tyGraph can provide, in terms of deliverables, is the ability to aggregate large amounts of disparate data, and then create and present visualizations to key stakeholders in a way that allows them to take action. The tyGraph solution enables the user to overlay internal system data with their Office 365 data, deriving secondary and tertiary insights. “Oftentimes we get questions like: ‘How is my executive suite dealing with the digital transformation initiative?’” explains Ed Senez, President of UnlimitedViz. “How can one answer this empirically if there is no system of measurement in place? If we overlay the executive roles with the data from the Office 365 tenant, we can answer these kinds of questions with confidence.”

In one customer scenario, tyGraph was used to amplify network data with HR data, adding user roles, functional areas, organizational hierarchy, and regional data to each user profile.

tyGraph also developed a ‘Thread Algorithm’ that weighed a series of activity factors to publish real-time contextual analysis of end user participation for community managers and business stakeholders. What seemed impossible to measure—not only awareness of what each user contributed to the network, but how and where people responded, mapping all of this data to the organizational structure—was now readily available for management analysis and action. Apart from these insights, Senez believes that tyGraph can deliver a ‘primetime’ view of the network, stating “We can also pull up visualizations for what time of day, and day of the week, would be the best time to post a corporate communication, allowing internal communications teams to target maximum active responses. When you’re dealing with a staff of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000, that’s incredibly valuable.”

Our data analytics solution allows customers to focus on what is important so they are not distracted by extraneous details

In their mission to show customers the value of their own networks, and to help them validate their strategies, initiatives, and campaigns, UnlimitedViz is focusing much of their forward strategy on machine learning – with current research and development efforts already showing huge improvements in speed and performance. With machine learning, the company wants to help companies move from looking at data from the past, and focus on analytics that predict the future. “Right now we can generate alerts for existing scenarios and recommend actions to the users. Being able to alert them on prescriptive actions to execute on future events—that’s something that interests our customers and the market at large,” summarizes Senez.