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Month: October 2020

Accelerating the Social IQ of an Organization Using BI and Analytics

Posted on by Ces_creative

A peak into a technology tool for the social savvy Chief Marketing Officer

Consumer data: A social currency

Over the last decade, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have fundamentally changed the way we interact with others in our personal and professional lives. Our interactions have become less social (in a traditional sense) and more digital, leaving behind troves of data that is up for grabs as a new currency. How effectively your business is banking this social currency?

Social media platforms make billions of dollars because we (consumers) cannot seem to get enough of “social dose” at every chance we get. Rightfully and consequently, brands need to be where their ideal customers hangout. Ten years ago, most of us would have been quite puzzled if someone introduced themselves as a ‘social marketer’. Now earning an MBA in Social Media Marketing is a real deal.

The challenge for CMO

Unless your organization is lucky-enough to have a marketing budget that has 1 followed by 6+ zeros (i.e. over $1 million), you may not have a social media department and the latest (and expensive) social media measurement tools and business processes.

Understandably, then your social media monetization formula may look something like this:

Hand-pulled analytics data
+
Gut Feeling
+
 Trial & error learning
=
Hope of maximizing ROI on social spend

Such a formula may do the trick for some and keep the ROI in a positive territory. However, there will be plenty of missed opportunities that should be availed. This is where CES can help elevate your social media game to the next level within your budget constraints.

A good solution does not have to be super complex or cost prohibitive. The CMO has help!

A tool with social sensibility

CES recently helped an ecommerce client develop a technology framework and tool for monitoring social media channels. Its Business Intelligence (BI) services division developed a configurable multipurpose tool to gauge consumer ratings for the client’s products. 

Social data integration simplified

The easily customizable tool eliminated the need to manually log into different social media platforms like, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to capture needed data and insights.

A simple visualization layer made it easy for the business user – the product team – to gauge the market reaction and take appropriate actions.

This turned out to be an excellent tool for social media analytics, and in refining marketing strategy and measuring the outcomes.  It helped the marketing team maximize ROI by running targeted promotions and offering discounts based on the market sentiment. One could say that the tool helped build Social Quotient of the product and the organization.

The tool enabled near real-time social analytics, centralized social data visualization, and aided in dynamic pricing/positioning of the products. 

The technology stack used for this accelerator includes application interfaces, relational database, and data-visualization software. Consideration was given to open source technologies to save cost.

Other applications

CES’ social media accelerators can be customized for organizations across different industries that rely on social media analytics in a standalone manner, due to budget constraints or otherwise. A customized tool can be hosted on the cloud and delivered in a SaaS model via a portal. It can further be enhanced to calculate Consumer Sentiment Score to gauge positive and negative reactions/comments to products/services of a company in the social media.    

Please stay tuned for our future articles on how analytics for individual social platform can be enabled and leveraged.  For more information or a conversation on how CES can develop BI systems to support your marketing and product teams, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.

Cloud Migration: Lessons From Cyber Trenches and Foundries

Posted on by Ces_creative

Key considerations for developing a sound cloud migration strategy

The cyber world is witnessing rapid changes in technology and business processes. The millennial or digital-native companies have lived on the cloud from day one.  However, the legacy companies do not have that advantage.  They are required to cloudify without impacting their existing business operations.  Cloudification provides an opportunity to companies of all kinds to reengineer their business processes.  It helps ensure system availability, data protection, and smooth rollback/recovery.  Most importantly, it offers improvement in overall operational efficiency.

System Integrators

The technology market is flooded with System Integrators who claim to have expertise in cloud migration.  Companies need an experienced partner who can devise an appropriate migration strategy and ease their journey to the cloud.  They need a partner who will travel with them through thick and thin with a stake in the success.

Cloud Migration: Key Considerations

CES is a System Integrator that has successfully guided customers in agribusiness, bioscience, ecommerce and other industries to migrate to cloud.  In our experience, the following aspects must be considered in developing a strategy for cloud migration.

  • Planning:  It is important to develop a prioritization framework for determining the order in which the business applications should be moved to the cloud.  A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.  It takes into consideration all the key parameters that influence the success of an implementation.

A wholistic approach to doing this would be to consider prioritization of technology stacks, technology tiers, business functions, and applications.  In determining whether the migration approach should be a lift-and-shift or cloud-native development, consideration may be given to decoupling the front-end from the backend and migrating them independently. 

A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.

  • Architecture:  Certain applications or certain parts of the technology stack may need to be retained or re-written or retired.  We should consider pros and cons for options like – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Function as a Service (FaaS), Backend as a Service (BaaS) – in reimagining the future business and technology architecture.

Breaking application architecture into micro apps and micro services via Domain Driven Design (DDD) would be worth considering. Large monolithic applications are hard to maintain and scale. Newer applications follow the micro services-based architecture. The front-end and mobile applications can be broken in micro apps for specific functionality. This eliminates single point of failure, reduces down-time, improves performance, increases scalability, etc.  This also helps bring the cost of infrastructure down as many smaller instances are generally cheaper than one large instance of combined capacity.

  • Platform Vendor Selection:  AWS, Azure and Google are the main Cloud Service Providers.  However, depending on the business need, consideration may be given to niche providers like Rackspace or even a more traditional IBM if it makes compatibility and economic sense. 

Then, there could be a need to migrate thick-client desktops to the cloud and access them via VMware for easy portability and/or security reasons.  An experienced SI should be able to review your compute, storage, and bandwidth needs and recommend the right platform vendor.

  • Methodology:  An iterative or agile methodology is suited for modern application development.  In deciding the right methodology, companies may need to assess their resource skill level as well as the systems documentation quality.  For instance, if the system documentation levels are low, which is normally the case for traditional companies with legacy systems, Test Driven Development (TDD) approach would be a suitable methodology for Cloud Migration.  This would ensure that a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) has been documented and agreed upon upfront.
  • Technology: The technology selection is perhaps the most difficult decision to make because of the existence of a plethora of technologies in the market with every technologist having their own favourite.  There are proprietary software and community-supported open-source software to choose from.  We have technologies like .NET Core, Node JS, Python, Java, RoR, etc. for the backend and have Angular, ReactJS, VueJS, Blazor, etc. for the frontend of applications.  A good SI will provide an unbiased advice on what technology would fit best in an organization.
  • Teams: The technology and domain skills of individuals is an important consideration.  It helps in determining the number of sprints, the size of scrums, the throughput of teams, defining milestones, etc.  This assessment also helps in determining skills gap, training and sourcing requirements.  The IT departments should work closely with the HR department in this assessment.
  • Other Considerations: There are other aspects like company policies, security, operating procedures, regulatory requirements, maintainability, etc. to keep in mind as well.  Data backup and data retention policies, down-time requirement, user base, geographic presence, etc. are also important considerations in developing a good cloud migration strategy.

The TDD approach ensures a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) is documented and agreed upon upfront.

An Ideal Partner for Cloud Migration

An ideal SI partner would have experience and a proven cloud migration framework to assess and develop a tailored strategy for the needs of any IT department.  They would take into consideration the combination of people, processes, and technologies to develop the right tools like, checklists, templates, calculators, reusable assets, etc. to expedite the migration process.

An experienced Cloud Migration Partner will help you evolve into a “Cloud Native” IT department.  Cloud Native computing is helping companies upgrade existing applications, build new applications, and deliver automated services across private, public and hybrid clouds faster.

For more information or a conversation on Cloud migration, please contact rohit.vipinmathews@cesltd.com.  If you are interested to know how CES can help  you in your cloud journey, get in touch with us at sales@cesltd.com.

To Cloudify or Not To Cloudify: The Question is No More Why, But When. So, Why Not Now?

Posted on by Ces_creative

If you have delayed your cloud journey till now to gain second mover advantage, your time is up.

Cloud migration: The need of the hour

The businesses that wanted to have the second mover advantage, for them the inevitable has arrived.  They can no longer put off their plans to cloudify their business systems. There is a constant need to evolve and move to newer, comprehensive solutions and have flexibility in scaling up/down the technology infrastructure resources.  This coupled with the need to meet the expanding needs of enterprises and dynamic demands of customers, businesses have no choice but to take the journey to the cloud.  Migration to cloud offers cost effective storage and flexible access to data in addition to several other benefits.

The reasons for the delay

There are a few reasons — some of them justifiable – why some businesses and their IT departments have waited till now to cloudify their IT.

  • Cloud technology was not mature
  • Lack of a business case (cost vs benefits)
  • Did not know where to start
  • Lack of in-house capability or good outsourcing option

One of the major reasons companies had put off their cloud adoption was a lack of mature System Integrators (SI) they could rely on. 

Selecting the right system integrator

If a business thought that the entire process of cloudification is cumbersome, they should worry no more. The market is now filled with experienced Cloud Service providers and SI’s who can help with the migration process.

There are the white-glove SI partners who can assist their customers with insight, strategy, and execution. They can walk you through every step, from planning to implementation to training, so businesses can reap the most out of the cloud-based system – but all at a high premium.  

On the other hand, there are those less experienced System Integrators who can provide cloud migrating services for any budget.  They could be very good executioners of your cloud migration strategy if you have one. However, they may not have the expertise to sail you in the right direction or navigate through unforeseen turbulence. 

Then there is CES that partners with a customer to assist with a cloud migration strategy and customizes solutions to accommodate the unique needs of the customer without demanding a hefty premium.

It’s time the second movers got future-ready with Cloud migration plans without any further delay.

What makes CES the right choice

Cloud migration is an imperative that every organization is facing.  However, there are some important aspects to keep in mind to make the journey successful.  It is important to understand which legacy applications should be retained and which to be replaced, which one needs to be re-written and which to be retired.  Then there are considerations of which technology stack should be moved first.  Should it be a migration for IaaS or PaaS; or for FaaS or BaaS?  CES can bring deep insights and help with these decisions.

CES has experience in all three major cloud platforms – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – to help move a business to the cloud.  We have helped several businesses, from start to finish, in migrating their IT systems to cloud.  We have taken up multi-year migrations and walked businesses through this important and intensive journey.  Our solution is flexible and service cost-effective.

For example, we helped a customer, who is a leading provider of integrated business solutions for the agribusiness industry, migrate to cloud.  The client embarked on a decade-long journey to cloud-enable their software platform to host the software on the cloud and provision it from there in a SaaS model.  They started the journey five years ago and engaged CES as a partner of choice in this migration.  CES helped the business with assessment, methodology, and technical execution of the migration process.  Migrating to the cloud helped the business improve flexibility and maintainability of their SaaS infrastructure and its provisioning.  It led to significant cost savings but more importantly it improved overall Customer Experience (CX) of their software service manifold. 

CES brings insights, helps with key decisions, and offers value at comparatively more practical consideration.

Cloud is not the limit

Cloud environment is scalable, cost-effectiveness, convenient, accessible, and reliable.  To reduce operational costs and mitigate security risks, to meet the rapidly increasing capacity needs and accommodate new geographies, a company needs to shift to the cloud. Cloud migration gives a company the much-needed competitive edge over business rivals.  And the time to act is now! 

Those who have refrained till now in order to gain the second mover advantage may feel tempted to wait even longer.  Though the option of further delaying and waiting for the migration costs to go down even more is tempting, it is not a well thought out decision.  The time to migrate to cloud later will be longer as the legacy applications will have greater technology chasm to bridge.  The competitors who went ahead in this journey will have matured more and will be in a better position to take advantage of newer technologies in future as their systems will be comparatively nimbler and can easily adapt to change. 

In summary, a CIO or CTO can no longer afford to put off their plans to cloudify their business systems.  The era of cloud has already arrived for a while.  A business will gain no incentive by delaying any further their journey to the cloud.

Please stay tuned for our next blog on “3 things a CIO should focus on in creating a Cloud Migration roadmap”.  For more information or a conversation on how CES can help with Cloud Migration, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com. 

Leveraging Data Aggregation and Process Automation Capabilities for Pricing Advantage

Posted on by Ces_creative

The AI platform that helped a retailer gather competitive price intelligence from the market

Price intelligence: A business imperative

It is always a war of prices in the e-commerce world, more so now than ever before. Irrespective of the size and type, e-commerce companies need valuable market intelligence to ensure market share, optimum stock levels and, most importantly, profitability.

Price intelligence is the timeless need for any business.  Companies need to have this knowledge on real-time basis.  They must also maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers. Dynamic market price analysis is the key for this business need, and it must be performed as often as possible in reaction to real-time market changes. 

Process automation to the rescue

In the retail space, especially, in the online market, data aggregation by combing the web is a feasible option.  This being an oft-repeating activity, automation of the process becomes the key aspect of the solution.  The data intensive and automated processes can further be strengthened by building intelligence in the automation algorithm for weighting key competitors higher over less important ones.  This method also ensures that the sellers that use click-baits or the new sellers with no significant online sales record are ignored or weighted less by the algorithm.

A CES customer, which is a leading online auto parts retailer in the US, was facing the above situation and wanted to rework on its product pricing strategy to maximize sales and stay ahead of the competition. CES conducted a detailed analysis of the customer’s new pricing strategy and developed an intuitive AI based solution that used data aggregation and process automation to crawl into competitor websites, acquire product pricing details, and rank the websites based on the weights attached to each competitor.

Customers must maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers.

CENTIPEDE: AI based process automation platform by CES

TO implement the solution, CES developed CENTIPEDE, an intuitive AI based automation platform, that generated pricing intelligence using data aggregation and process automation methods. 

Data aggregation is the process of collecting information from disparate sources to perform statistical analysis and generate meaningful insights.

CENTIPEDE is a low-code/no-code AI platform with a simple and user-friendly GUI. The user can drag and drop the data nodes, connect the processes and, on a click of a button, execute a process in an automated manner.  It also provides the ability to build custom logic around a pre-defined process step with minimal coding.

Real-time retail price intelligence

The AI based Machine Learning solution – CENTIPEDE, has the innate capability to process and correlate structured and unstructured data, identify repeating patterns, and data insights. This modern AI solution can effectively join the dots across a plethora of data sets such as websites, images, documents, databases, etc. to predict upcoming business trends and provide alerts.

CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites, compile information for the product list, analyze pricing trends, and other relevant information. Process automation was used for repeatability, to eliminate errors and to minimize cost.

This AI platform uses Machine Learning based mapping algorithm and provides tapered learning to analyze and monitor competitor pricing, recommend pricing thresholds to neutralize competition with zero human effort.  The Centipede solution empowered the auto parts retailer to improve sales and gain an edge over its competitors.

CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites.

Business advantages offered by CENTIPEDE

Some of the key business advantages that CENTIPEDE offers are:

  • Easy integration with any unstructured data set within or outside the company
  • Push button or trigger-based automation
  • Modern architecture – AI/ML concepts
  • Data-driven decision making

CENTIPEDE platform has other possible implementations for automation. It can be used to automate a process where there is a need to eliminate human agent that interacts with a customer (another human).  It has further implications in automating machine to machine conversations as well.  For more information or a conversation on how the Centipede automation platform can support your business case, please contact us at: sales@cesltd.com.

From Unstructured Data to Insight: Operational Information on Fingertips for Executive Decision Making

Posted on by Ces_creative

AI as a digital sieve to obtain critical information without manually sifting through data files

Time: A commodity under pressure

In the era of information overload and increasing regulatory paperwork, the time permitted for any action is not anymore linear by the strictest definition.  With attention span shortening – especially among the executives – and with the time-to-market shrinking, the time available for analysis and decision making has reduced exponentially.

If your job involves dealing with stacks of paper – physical or digital – requiring you to find not only answers but also insights and advice, your job is unequivocally unenviable.  You might be able to find a proverbial needle hidden in the haystack more easily than scanning for intangible information from the stack of digital pages with your eyes.  The job is not only thankless, prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, but also inefficient in this competitive world — the world where strategy and people are not the only differentiator but the computing/processing power as well.

A job that involves dealing with stacks of physical or digital paper to find insights is unequivocally unenviable. 

Speed, diligence, and intelligence

Businesses run on time-wheels involving tight schedules. Time is a commodity, but the time of executives and decision makers is a highly premium resource.

It is thus critical to reduce this seemingly mundane but highly detrimental activity of gleaning information from documents.  The process must be streamlined for producing better, quicker results using the right technology.  The era of Artificial Intelligence with the advancements made in Deep Learning algorithm coupled with enhanced processing power of machines has a promise to make such outcomes feasible. 

Intelligence beyond binary responses

Given this daunting ask, DIG (Data Insight Generator), the Reading Comprehension engine developed by CES, has fulfilled one such promise with its AI based Deep Learning algorithm.  This engine was developed and deployed for a Financial Advisor to help them with reading regulatory documents and collecting important compliance information relevant to the Financial Services industry.

This bot – with Deep Learning algorithm built in – was designed to work like a mini search-engine. It takes a query from the user in English and instantly gets informative answers from the data files.  It is built not only to provide binary – yes or no type – answers but also to be trained for sophisticated conditional answers.  The bot was initially trained by feeding it hundreds of documents.  It ‘learnt’ the various possible answers through adversarial methods by developing a cross-reference table of positive and negative words and understanding the underpinnings of such nomenclature. When CES ran the drill of training the bot, it proved that it could be trained in just 2-3 days instead of several weeks that was originally anticipated.

This bot is effective in any domain that involves reviewing reams and databases of paperwork and requires augmenting the human for effort reduction.  It can read not only text-based documents but images and scans as well through integration of OCR technology.  It has the potential to read operational information and generate summarized answers for quick executive decision making.

This bot is effective in and augmenting the human effort and getting insights from reams and databases of paperwork.

Other areas of influence

CES also developed Deep Learning algorithms that made a difference in work frames in other domains.

Smart Inventory Scanning

Inventory Management was another area that CES delved into using Deep Learning algorithm. The technique employed here was Object Recognition. A firm involved in packaging and transporting farm produce used the technique of scanning barcodes on each crate to update their inventory which was a time-consuming process. CES developed an algorithm wherein the neural network was trained to recognize barcodes in bulk just by clicking a picture of the stacked crates with a Smart Phone. The neural network-based app was used to scan 30 barcodes at a time and update the database for further processing thus reducing the effort 30x in this instance.

Predictive Intelligence in Healthcare Provisioning

An algorithm created for the Health Care sector, made ‘Care Steps Generation’ for patients simple and fast. A neural network was created by accumulating notes of care coordinators and the subsequent steps to be taken for therapy or follow-ups.  When a new test ‘note’ was fed to the network, the Care Steps Algorithm that CES developed was able to predict the next course of action or therapy, thus, demonstrating the promise of simplifying the work for the care coordinators.

Other possible enhancements

There are many other applications of this Deep Learning technology.  The above bot has been designed for basic Q&A purpose.  However, its functionality can be further enhanced by integrating it with Chat Bots to converse with humans and provide from a database confirmed answers or research-oriented options for further analysis. 

For more information or a conversation on how DIG can augment document reading and analysis to generate insights for your organization, please contact us at: sales@cesltd.com