Hosted Analytics: The Next Wave

A Conversation with Rob Jasper, Chief Technology Officer

Analytics is an indispensable technology for organizations that control substantial repositories of customer data. It is a young science which has only begun to reshape the way data-driven businesses work.

For Intelligent Results, the future of analytics rests with the ability to lower the barriers to using this indispensable technology. Rob Jasper, Chief Technology Officer for Intelligent Results, has been thinking a lot about the future of analytics, especially since the company was acquired by First Data Corporation earlier this year. "Models are at the heart of most high value analytics applications," says Jasper. "These models are developed by statisticians on desktop machines or shared servers inside corporate firewalls. The problem has been to bring together these models, which can make organizations more profitable and more efficient, with all the data that large organizations like First Data possess."

Hosting means separating the end users from the back end processing; it also means integrating large numbers of end users across an organization-or even beyond. Jasper points to Google and Amazon as examples of widely used analytics-based applications that have made hosted software part of everyday life. "Modern search and recommendation systems are driven by statistical models developed jointly by statisticians (behind the scene) and interactions by the end user of the system. Most people don't think much about the hosting infrastructure when they hit the search button, but it's critical to the success of Google and Amazon."

More and more companies are turning to hosting as a way of leveraging economies of scale and reducing cost of ownership. Jasper sees the demographic shift toward a distributed and global workforce as a key factor: "Hosting via the web can provide secure, worldwide access to both data and services. A distributed workforce requires facilities for collaboration. Hosted development platforms such as sourceforge.net have successfully shown how hundreds of people worldwide can collaborate via the web to build complex products. Our PREDIGY platform already provides a lot of innovative workflow, but within big organizations like First Data, we can take collaboration to a whole new level, as an extended plug-and-play architecture that's available where and when our users need it."

Analytics packages have tended to be inflexible and poorly integrated, often requiring a substantial up-front investment. One benefit of hosting is that it exposes just the right parts of the process to the right people in the right way. Imagine a team of marketers leveraging analytics rules to make informed decisions about target marketing, sales and inventory forecasting, or retention modeling. The interface is a web browser, but behind it are models crafted by analytics professionals with access to huge data repositories. The marketers don't need to know anything about the analytics applications—they control the one step in the process where their knowledge and expertise make a crucial difference.

Another compelling argument for hosted analytics is that it brings this potent technology out from behind the IT wall. Analytics applications can be resource intensive, but that doesn't mean users should have to contend with elaborate protocols, dedicated hardware, and backup/recovery/failover overhead. The software comes to the data instead of vice-versa. The data stays where it should-secure behind the firewall. Hosted software can be updated invisibly behind the scenes; what's even better is that this kind of housekeeping can be done without disrupting users or ongoing business processes.

According to Jasper, Intelligent Results has already begun to deploy hosted analytics: "We've developed hosted solutions for external partners who want to offer analytics as a service to clients, with customized, branded interfaces that expose just the right options. Meanwhile, within First Data, there is no shortage of opportunities to further advance and refine distributed analytics. Our new LIFT family of analytics solutions addresses key decisions in financial services."

Jasper's ultimate vision is of a large-scale distributed architecture that can tackle problems that simply can't be addressed with current analytics tools. First Data manages some of the largest repositories of financial transaction data in the world. Providing services that capitalize fully on these data resources requires a hosted approach that scales to the opportunity and allows people to collaborate. The Intelligent Results Research and Development team that Jasper heads up in Bellevue, Washington is ready to capitalize on the promise of hosted analytics.

Rob Jasper
Chief Technology Officer
Intelligent Results

About Rob Jasper

As chief technology officer for Intelligent Results, Rob Jasper is responsible for developing the company's enterprise-level software, including the PREDIGY™ decision management and analytics platform. Rob, who has been with Intelligent Results since its inception in May 2001, has more than 15 years of experience in software research and development. Throughout his career, Rob has focused on applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to real-world problems.

Prior to joining Intelligent Results, Rob was chief scientist at FizzyLab, where he managed the advanced technologies group. Rob's team led the development of the proprietary text mining and contextual search technology that formed the core platform behind FizzyLab's product-line, which was used by thousands of people as part of an application-service-provider-based content enrichment service.

Earlier, Rob spent over 10 years with the Boeing Company, where he led research efforts in the areas of ontologies, semantic web, automated reasoning and intelligent computer aided design technologies. While at Boeing, Rob co-authored a company-wide testing guide for use on all business, scientific and engineering applications.

Since 1996, Rob has served on the adjunct faculty of Seattle University's Master of Software Engineering program where he has taught courses on analysis, design, programming methods and optimization.

Rob holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Pacific Lutheran University and a master's degree in software engineering from Seattle University.