David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Organizations are continuously searching for new business opportunities hidden in their data. They are using various technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to uncover granular insights that can support decision-making. Existing tools and dashboards are effective for observing standard metrics; however, they do not address follow-up questions, such as why things are happening or how those events impact performance. Organizations also struggle to derive complete value from big data. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research shows that only 1 in 5 organizations are very confident in their ability to analyze large volumes of data.

Decision intelligence is a framework that enables organizations to use data and AI to make faster and more consistent decisions that address various needs of the business. Tellius was founded in 2016 to help organizations reduce the gap between business intelligence (BI) and AI. It provides a decision intelligence platform that allows business users (including non-technical users) to collaboratively answer questions such as what, why and how. The platform includes ad hoc query, natural language search, visualization and AI/ML capabilities.

The company offers its products and services to various industries, including financial services, pharmaceutical and life sciences, retail, healthcare, insurance and communications. Tellius recently announced its Series B round of funding for $16 million, bringing the company’s total fundraising to $33 million to date. The funding will be used to enhance Tellius’ decision intelligence platform, expand the company’s go-to-market capabilities and support talent acquisition across sales, marketing and product engineering functions.

Tellius offers three data processing modes to optimize performance. Its In-Memory Mode caches data to improve performance. It is best suited for data from operational sources and to combine data from multiple sources. Live Mode pushes queries down to data source for processing. It is best for analytical data warehouses and fast SQL sources. Data Lake Mode runs search and ML processing as Spark jobs on Hadoop nodes to utilize shared resources in existing data lakes.

Tellius’ Vizpads are the company’s interactive dashboard capability for assembling collections of tables and charts of information. Each VizPad can have multiple tabs for sets of related information. Tellius uses Apache Spark framework to provide an interactive experience where users change the data selections and explore their data through visualizations.

Tellius enables users to build ML models via point-and-click interactions. The platform’s automated ML combines AI capabilities with data prep, insights discovery, visual exploration and ML modeling. In addition, data scientists and others can bring their Python and Spark code to the platform for maximum flexibility and customization.

Tellius is one of only a few vendors focusing on the decision intelligence space. They should continue to focus on improving their platform by adding more automation capabilities to speed up data and analytics operations. I recommend that organizations that are looking for a decision intelligence platform consider Tellius. Its capabilities enable business users and analytics teams to quickly understand reasons and key drivers behind business behaviors. 

Regards,

David Menninger