Rapidly advancing and technology driven industrial sectors are the most significant areas, responsible for the flourishing world economies. Penser Analytics is a prominent company, focused on helping the ‘Citizen Data Scientist’ to access data and analytics at the speed of thought. Its product, Sherlock is the only analytics platform that meets the needs of business and IT. It empowers organizations to make sense of large data volumes, get answers to their toughest business questions, build beautiful data visualizations, and ensure one version of the truth (1VOT); at any scale, on any device within a minute. Sherlock was designed from the ground-up to provide a simplistic solution to every business user, allowing them to play the role of a data scientist, with no IT expertise required, to gather insights and make business decisions.
Influential & Inspiring Leader
Swarochish Chekuri & Shashi Kumar are the co-founders of Penser Analytics. Swarochish is a proven thought leader and an ex-IITian, who has been consulted, for his expert advice and impressionable recommendations for over two years in the field of analytics by prestigious companies like General Motors, Payback.
Shashi Kumar is a talented and thorough professional from the Big Data & Analytics field with over 12 years of experience. Shashi has worked in various early stage companies with a passion to turn ideas into products.
Before initiating Penser Analytics, Swarochish & Shashi, both saw a gap in the industry where organizations were taking ages to draw data based decisions. It was due to issues such as lack of infrastructure, inaccurate and deficient data preparation, data scientist taking long time to build models and write algorithms, which were faced by organizations on a day to day basis. To mitigate the above issues, Penser Analytics and subsequently Sherlock came into existence.
Leveraging Platform For Retail Industry
Sherlock is an AI based retail solution, based on a real time decision support system with all the advanced Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning Algorithms built especially for retailers. It provides an analytics platform, ensuring uniform view of the business from every department. It also enables everyone in an organization with relevant advanced analytics. And above all, the complete sets of analytics are delivered within a minute.
With their unique product, users can gain insight into their data without having to worry about the algorithms running behind the scene. One can type their business questions in English, where Sherlock in turn, analyses the query and responds with a visualization with AI driven insights answering exactly what the user is looking for within a minute. Sherlock takes care of the complicated part of integrating various data sources, integrating clients’ existing machine learning & AI algorithms and also default algorithms from users into an easy to access UI.
List of Other Services & Solutions
- Financial Services & Insurance: The e-retail service provider enhances the customer experience and profitability by better positioning. It also maximizes new business, increase customer retention, reduce leakage, identify fraud, manage risk and predict customer behavior, and boost operational efficiency.
- QSR: Penser Analytics gain insights into sales, margins and customer experience through data driven analytics.
- Education: It helps to streamline operations, transform recruitment, drive financial planning, engage alumni, enhance student learning experience and promote student achievement.
Powerful Clientele Base of Penser Analytics
As Penser Analytics provide industry specific customized solution, numerous multinational companies have adopted the Sherlock platform in their respective business ecosystem.
- Marks & Spencer use Sherlock solution to ensure a 1VOT across the organization, as well as their cost-effective, role-based and a real-time BI solution to ensure every department has unfettered access to data.
- A fashion retailer based out of India, uses solution by Penser Analytics to provide a view to their vendors about the market trends so as to proactively understand the fashion trends.
- A jewelry retailer uses forecasted footfalls from Sherlock to gamify attendance of salesmen.
- A medical claim denial management company, uses Sherlock to identify ideal steps/ checks for each claim to ensure faster payment.
Factors behind the Success
The rise of data awareness and an industry-wide drive to move towards data backed decisions has indeed put a spotlight on companies like Penser Analytics. The fact that its product is simple to use, has a clear ROI both in terms of man-hours as well as from clear, actionable business insights from Sherlock, has helped them to demonstrate the value of Sherlock.
Future Challenges & Upcoming Strategies
With time, the founders and the team believe that there would be quite some changes in their field. For example, there would be an increased focus on machine learning algorithms which are very specific to a clients’ use case. Also, the speed of data access would increase. This is the reason, why Penser Analytics believe in modularized development. Sherlock is built on specific modules that could be interchanged and re-built with changing times and client requirement.
Words of Wisdom
The experienced founders of Penser Analytics advises the young generation to cultivate a clarity in their thoughts. This is an exciting time to be in this dynamic space of Big Data Analytics. One thing that has helped them over the years is the ability to break down complex problems into a cluster of (interrelated) simple problems.
