11Ants Analytics smart data technology has travelled through the cloud and landed in yet another continent – this time Latin America.
A major retail chain on the continent has quickly deployed 11Ants RAP (retail analytics platform) in a Spanish language environment. The way RAP works through graphic interfaces helps overcome language issues and within a few days the retailer’s customer relationship management (CRM) team successfully analyzed customer data informing new business strategies based on those findings.
It’s the latest win for 11Ants Analytics in a story that has taken it through Australasia and into Asia.
The company also recently won the Innovative Software Product of the Year award at the 2016 Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards in April. Microsoft subsequently selected 11Ants Analytics to participate in its new cross-border, go-to-market program.
Tom Fuyala, 11Ants Analytics’ CEO, says 11Ants RAP is tangibly demonstrating several proof points that tie into the vision of Microsoft.
“We’ve proven that a small, innovative software developer in New Zealand can deploy within a few days a highly complex, customer analytics solution for a retailer in Latin America, all built on the Microsoft Azure platform as a service,” Fuyala says. “At the click of a button by the users, 40 servers come to life and build highly complex models that deliver in a pictorial format actionable stories about their customers, products, promotions and stores. This just has not been done before.”
Fuyala says Microsoft’s cross-border readiness support allows his team to tap into international marketing experts, whose mission in life is to make independent software vendors (ISVs) apps successful. “With the assistance of the Microsoft marketing machine, global distribution is a reality,” he says. “It certainly vindicates our early decision to utilize Microsoft as a foundation for the 11Ants RAP and, more recently, the 11Ants Airline Analytics Platform.”
The company has embraced the airline sector since it was acquired by a global consortium comprising Air New Zealand (NZX: AIR) and Canadian loyalty giant Aimia (TSE: AIM) last year.
ShiSh Shridhar, Worldwide Director of Data Insights, Retail Industry at Microsoft, says he saw 11Ants RAP for the first time eight months ago: “11Ants Analytics has harnessed and elegantly integrated retail best practices, high capacity cloud computing, high end customer analytics and data science. Furthermore it delivers it all to customers’ desktops via a browser. This is an example of the highest and best use of the Microsoft Azure platform.”
11Ants RAP is built using Microsoft technologies and is delivered as software-as-a-service to customers via the Azure cloud platform. The RAP product has been built utilizing a Microsoft stack, including: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, SQL Server and Windows Server.
