Empower: Analytics as a Service

Help prepare your company for the future of data

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Overview

Introducing: Empower

Take full control of your data through Analytics as a Service (AaaS) with Empower. Featuring an enterprise-class data platform on Azure Data Services — complete with a data lake, automated data acquisition, data quality tools, industry data models, machine learning and optional custom reports — this platform includes the best tooling available for enhancing the base Azure platform, combined with ongoing support from the most awarded analytics team in the business, accelerating your team’s ability to drive better business decisions.

Packaged as a continuously updated platform in your Azure environment, Empower gives you the means to oversee and excel in the orchestration and operations of Azure data analytics regardless of your team’s maturity or size: for smaller teams looking for the basics, or large teams interested in advanced APIs and tooling.

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Analytics as a Service 101

What is Analytics as a Service?

Analytics as a Service (AaaS) is a solution that provides all the features of an advanced data analytics platform combined with the advantages of cloud-based software. Similar to other cloud solutions, AaaS helps to address different needs for many different organizations:

  • Operations teams, data scientists, software developers, and external partners all have the need for data and information, but may lack the budget, time, or resources to implement a modern data estate quickly or efficiently.
  • As the availability of data increases, so should the ability for organizations of all sizes to effectively utilize data quality and exploration tools, predictive analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to parse large data sets.

    • Analytics as a Service helps companies achieve more, by avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel.

Challenges

Enabling Analytics Which Necessitate AaaS

The complexity of data analytics can make it challenging for different organizations to realize its myriad benefits:

  • Small and midsize businesses may not have the technical expertise to establish an analytical platform, nor the budget to hire a third party to create one at the level of sophistication desired.
  • Running data analytics pipelines and designing enterprise quality reporting can be complicated for different members of an organization, requiring extensive training and a dizzying myriad of products.
  • Hardware and IT teams know they need to leverage advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities to have a secure environment, but these are often cost-prohibitive investments for organizations.
  • Even when organization possess the right support and skillsets – there are so many elements to a large data estate, building one from scratch (or continuing to maintain one without software automation) is ineffective as data sources increase and modern data estate require constant failure triaging, maintenance, and upgrades.

Empower, as an AaaS offering deployed into your environment, solves for many of these challenges since it does all the heavy lifting. The Empower suite of products provides more than what could be achieved with a buildout — all at the click of a button.

Benefits

How Empower Analytics as a Service Benefits You

Our AaaS offering adds business value through a proven platform that is deployed (into production) week one, enabling any organization to get data flowing into its Azure Data Lake (gen2), with fully automated data onboarding, data quality tools, APIs, advanced monitoring, and user-friendly interfaces. Together this AaaS product offers tangible business benefits:

  • Delivering decision makers timelier information from organizational data that are currently in data silos, or not being processed as promptly as they could be.
  • Providing greater visibility into core business processes — sales invoices, marketing campaigns, forecasting, and so on — and insight into how to enhance the customer experience.
  • Allowing BI teams to focus on novel problems by eliminating mundane tasks with Empower through automation; especially the 80% of data engineering time spend on searching, governing and preparing data.
  • Bridging the supply and demand gap for infrastructure experts in the cloud, by leveraging Hitachi’s economies of scale to deliver hyper-optimizations to customers.
  • Granting the ability for different team members to easily join data across systems, integrate third party applications, and effectively share results.
  • Enabling IT teams to rest easy with continued support and automatic updates to enable a best-in-class reporting infrastructure, without the need for costly specialized maintenance.

Empower Product Suite

Complete flexibility

We created Empower to be flexible enough to meet any organization’s needs; as such, each product is designed to work as part of our service, or in coordination with existing architecture.

Data Acquisition System

Hours, not days or weeks

The foundation of Empower, this system features metadata-driven data acquisition from source to target. Pre-built connectors and standard pluggable APIs for premium products accelerate data acquisition to hours rather than days or weeks.

Mapping Engine

Keeping it simple

Keep things simple for users by adding custom fields to standard models and automatic deployment of configuration updates. Easily convert raw data to base data models through a simple drag-and-drop UX.

Industry-specific Data Models

Save time

Reduce development time by up to 80% using pre-built models that serve as the foundation for advanced analytics and business reporting.

Analytics Catalog

Superpowered reporting

Enhance and support business reporting through an extensive repository of Power BI visuals and pre-canned reports — all collected, indexed, and searchable thanks to Empower.

Observe

Complete control

Gain better observability over your data estate with proactive monitoring and integrated security. Enjoy complete and comprehensive control through enhanced UX, data governance, anomaly detection, and more.

How you Benefit from Empower

  • We build, deliver, and update a data platform for you to build on top of, without the hassle and expense of an implementation.
  • Out of the box automation of major services including Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • Accelerated implementation means you get business insights by week one, with sophisticated history and query technology — and no engineering on your part.
  • Our advanced data engine handles any schema change thanks to a data foundation that can be tailored to your business, no matter the industry.
  • We provide ongoing maintenance and feature enhancements, including automatic updates, advanced UX, and APIs that enable your users to work smarter, not harder.
  • Enjoy reliable security thanks to infrastructure as code (IaC) combined with 24/7 managed services for any issue not autocorrected.
  • Reduced operational and technical burden combined with low up-front costs means a reduction in your total costs, giving you more power for less money.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Empower cost?

Empower uses a subscription-based pricing model designed for transparency and flexibility. It also offers a low up-front costing compared to traditional all up-front development and the option of no implementation costs through limited time partner pricing. With different module options and three tiers of data source support, you can easily customize your Empower deployment to suit your budget.

How can my company implement the Empower platform?

Empower is designed to be a modular platform. You can choose to implement all of our available products and have our team to do the work. Alternatively, you can choose to integrate only the products that you need to work in tandem with your existing architecture.

How is Empower different from other AaaS platforms?

Empower sets itself apart by being fully-managed and subscription-based and offering a dramatically faster time to value with common Azure tools. Our model not only allows you to get more out of your modern data estate, it also provides full support included in the licensing charge. Compared to a typical implementation, Empower’s subscription-based model enables organizations of all sizes to become competitive with other larger companies, without the significant cost of investment in architecture. What normally takes months to build, Hitachi builds in weeks utilizing advanced products and accelerators.

What do you need from us to be successful?

As part of the Empower engagement, our team will provide a straightforward onboarding guide. Within a business day, most clients are up and running with data flowing. From there, customers should be expected to commit 5 hours / week per subject matter for an expert to validate the calculations and metrics Hitachi builds. Exact requirements will be discussed as part of the workup process.

How long will the implementation take?

It depends on sub-industry and specific client requirements. Clients can exact detail to be provided as the output of the Phase 0 engagement. For reference, we target 2-6 months for most customers.