Data Preparation: The Definitive TOP-23 of Tools & Services

In order to get the insights you need from your data, it is often true that you will need to map data together from different platforms to get a view of the complete picture. The process of mapping data together is what data preparation tools, companies and software is for. There is a wide range of data preparation tools available, which helps the companies gather different kinds of data from numerous sources. These tools are user-friendly and can even be used by the average Joe with some training.

The latest data preparation tools offer ease of use, quick and efficient results and analysis, which is contrary to the programs used in past. By using these advanced tools you can now easily combine, change, assess and filter required data before doing the analysis. This has increased the value and relevancy of the gathered data. Date refined through these tools has value for data analysts and business managers. They get insightful knowledge about the required variables from the data.

What are Data Preparation Tools & Software?

Data preparation tools refer to various tools used for discovering, processing, blending, refining, enriching and transforming data. This enables better integration, consumption and analysis of larger datasets using advanced business intelligence with analytics solutions.

Usefulness of Data Preparation Tools

Latest data preparation tools offer self-service abilities for professional data analysts, IT departments, data scientists as well as ordinary business owners. These tools allow quick and efficient integration of separate data sources in one place.

The process of preparation, blending and refining of data provides a much better and smoother data analysis experience. This helps businesses gain practical insights to improve their functions. Most data preparation software provides governance, control, management of metadata and machine learning functionality. These features help improve overall software functionality.

Marketing Analytics is Taking Too Much Time

Gartner ran a study and found that marketing teams are spending WAY too much time on the wrong tasks, like data visualization, preparing data for analysis, and building charts dashboards and stats.

Improvado saves time for marketing professionals

And even though we’re all spending 10-20 hours of our week up to our chins in data, we’re not even getting what we really need out of the analytics tools we’re using.

Harvard Business Review and Alteryx ran a study that found that while we all agree that marketing analytics is critically important, executives are not getting what they need out of the tools they’re using.

Improvado helps to scale marketing and increase performance

Our mission is to help marketers find the marketing analytics tools they need to make reporting and optimization a breeze.

Who Utilize Data Preparation Tools?

Data-driven companies and businesses utilize the power of data preparation tools to empower their employees. These tools help them explore complex data in a simpler form, which enhances the company’s decision making and results in productive transformations.

After data preparation through these software programs, these companies use business intelligence software program to complete actual data analysis.

Qualification Criteria for a Data Preparation Tool

A product to qualify as data protection software should have the following characteristics:

Should be sold as an independent data preparation software program or as an integrated data tool, which has data preparation capabilities
Enables users to combine, merge and transform datasets for easy and simple data analysis as well as integration
Offers a higher level of refinement and enrichment for enhanced data quality
Should provide integration with data analytics and integration solutions.

Each of the following data preparation tools vary. Read through them carefully to determine which tool is the right fit for your marketing needs.

1 Improvado

What is Improvado?

Improvado is a marketing analytics tool made for marketers, brands and agencies. The tool allows marketers to gather all of their data into a single destination without logging into each individual platform. Automated reporting and dashboards in real-time makes manual reporting a thing of the past.

Who should use Improvado?

Improvado is Perfect for Marketing Leaders & Analytics Leaders.

Maybe you’re the Director of Marketing, a VP or a CMO at a mid to enterprise size business. You’re responsible for deciding how to spend a large budget and you’re also responsible for presenting marketing performance to the leadership team.

If that’s you — Improvado will allow you how to own your analytics with confidence, like the sophisticated data-driven leader you are!

Or, maybe you’re an analyst, the VP of Engineering or the CTO at a mid to enterprise size business. You’re responsible for mapping data together across the business and presenting visual insights to the leadership team. You’re sick of replying to one-off requests from the marketing team about building out APIs and running scripts.

If that’s you — Improvado will show you how to build a clean flow of data that puts an end to one-off marketing requests, once and for all!

How it works

Improvado was designed to focus specifically on the marketing data dilemma. It connect to virtually any platform marketers will ever use. Plus, integrations run deep, meaning you can view data on the campaign level, adset level, keyword level, and even view ad creative across every channel, all in one dashboard. This makes it quick & easily spot performance outliers and optimize campaigns & channels fasted than ever before.

No developers are needed to assist you in implementation or to make changes, as the platform is simple & intuitive.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of Improvado is that customer service representatives are highly attentive and included in every one of the platform’s packages. These customer service reps can assist you with integrations and building out custom dashboards to make sure your data is visualized exactly how you want it.

You can choose to view your data within the Improvado dashboard, send it to a data warehouse, extract the data and download it, transform or prep the data, or visualize it using any BI tool you wish, such as Looker or Tableau. Here you can find Looker vs Tableau comparison

Pros:

Customer service representatives included with full support
Ability to map data across various platforms and create custom metrics
Granular and deep marketing integrations lets you view data at keyword and ad level
Plug and play
No need for developers
Reduces manual reporting time by up to 90%
Great for in-house marketers managing campaigns on multiple platforms or ad agencies managing campaigns for several clients.
Get all your data in real-time, in one place
Entirely customizable with any custom integration available

Cons:

More granular features can be a tad complicated, however, customer support is great about walking users through any issues.
There may be a bit of back and forth initially with support in order to get your dashboards set up and your reports visualized exactly how you want.

Improvado Pricing:

Improvado does custom pricing for its platform. If you set up a call with them, they will assess your needs and share pricing details.

Improvado.io Integrations

500+ Integrations
Custom integrations can be built out for any data source you may need.

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2 Alteryx

What it is: It is a leading self-service tool for data preparation and analytics.

What it offers: Alteryx Analytics offers unique and easy data preparation, blending and analyzing capabilities in a single tool. It makes use of repeatable workflow, provides deployable analytics and then shares the derived analytics to provide deeper data insights in just hours.

How it’s different: Data analysts and scientists love this platform because it enables quick and easy connection and cleansing of data directly from data warehouses, data spreadsheets, cloud applications and various other sources. It easily integrates the data then conduct a predictive, statistical and spatial analysis without the need for writing another code. It uses a similar intuitive interface for users for this purpose. It offers scalable analytics, which can translate into your organizational success.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, analytics leaders, BI directors, IT and data management teams, C level executives, students, academics, and non-profit organizations.

Prominent Clients: AnalyticsIq Inc, Belk, BloominBrands Inc., Cardinalhealth, Cineplex, Dairy Queen.

3 Microsoft Power BI

What it is: Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool for analyzing and visualizing data as well as sharing insights. It enables efficient business monitoring for quick and informed business decision making, using rich real-time user dashboards for every device.

What it offers: Microsoft Power BI enables users to transform data into striking visuals, which can be shared with team members on different devices. It allows visual exploration and analysis of data both on-premises as well as on cloud. Users can collaborate on reports and share customized dashboards with interactive data reports. It comes with built-in control and security features, which are scalable across your business.

How it’s different: It comes with built-in interactive and real-time dashboards with analytics, which enables data visualization. It helps you generate actionable business insights. It comes with a feature that allows you to build exclusive apps in just minutes not hours, which can be connected easily to your data. It provides you with powerful workflow automation directly to your app without the need of coding. This connects you to innumerable and popular applications and services.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, analytics leaders, BI directors, IT and data management teams, developers, non-profit organizations, and healthcare providers.

Prominent Clients: Heathrow Transportation, Meijer Supermarket Chain, Elizbeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, Hewlett Packard, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Adobe, GE Healthcare, and Associated Press

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4 Tableau Prep

What it is: Tableau Prep is well-known data preparation software which helps you shape, combine and refine your data for final analysis. It makes your data easily comprehensible and intuitive.

What it offers: Tableau Prep is an intuitive data preparation software tool which quickly combines, gives shape and refines data so can do the analysis. You can create your data extract, publish its source on the Tableau server, Tableau online and even on the Tableau Desktop application anytime while working. You can always view your data, directly fix the issues in values and view the outcomes of each change you make.

How it’s different: There are three built-in coordinated views in Tableau, which allows you to view row-level data, column profiles and your complete data preparation process. You can easily pick the view you want to see according to the task you are performing. It helps turn repetitive tasks into a single click function. The smart feature allows you to quickly fix common issues in data preparation. You can open your data output on the Tableau Desktop and can also share it with your colleagues via Tableau Server or Online.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, analytics leaders, IT and data management teams, executives, students, academics, non-profit organizations, and different types of businesses.

Prominent Clients: Lufthansa Airlines, Charles Schwab, University of Michigan Medical Center, PepsiCo, JP Morgan Chase Co., Honeywell, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Lenovo, Seattle Cancer Care.

5 IBM

What it is: IBM SPSS tool for data preparation is a complete and well integrated IBM SPSS Statistics module. It streamlines the data preparation stage through the use of advanced techniques, which deliver swift and more accurate data analysis and results.

What it offers: IBM SPSS Data Preparation software is designed to automate the data preparation process, which removes complex and time-taking manual data preparation. You do not need to perform manual checks for data validation, which gives you better performance with accurate data. It automatically detects any discrepancies and problems in data to ensure optimal data accuracy.

How it’s different: This data prep software comes with separate tabs to show variables and perform basic checks on the variables. You can apply standard as well as custom rules to individual variables that help in the identification of invalid or missing values. It automatically prepares data for evaluation in a single step. It offers an optimal binning feature with three binning options, which allow you to set cut off points/bin for various scale variables.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, IT and data management teams, executives, students, academics, research scholars, non-profit organizations, and different industries.

Prominent Clients: DSK Bank, BWG Foods, Medtronic (Healthcare), Brownells Inc., American Airlines, GameFly Streaming, and Leveraging Technology.

6 Trifacta

What it is: Trifacta is basically data wrangling software which is designed to improve the efficiency of the data analysis process or use new data sources to conduct analytics initiatives.

What it offers: Trifacta is efficient software which enables the individuals as well as organizations in more efficient exploration, transformation and integration of diverse data for analysis. Whether you have data files on the desktop, scattered data on Cloud or data spread across the large-scale data environments, Trifacta helps arrange raw data and accelerate this process of organizing the data to make it readily usable.

How it’s different: This data wrangling software transforms the sources of raw data inputs into arranged and organized outputs ready to be utilized for data analysis and for other business purposes. It discovers structures, cleanses, enriches, validates and publishes data for analysis.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, and IT leaders.

Prominent Clients: Bell, Google, Gsk, LinkedIn, PepsiCo, Orange, RBS, Sanofi, Zurich, Rank Group, and Nordea.

7 Qlik

What it is: Qlik is a business intelligence tool which provides a complete range of advanced analytics for BI needs. Qlik Sense is their most advanced and powerful multi-cloud solution developed for modern BI.

What it offers: Qlik offers a next-generation powerful platform for data analytics, which quickly combines the different data sources irrespective of their size and number. It offers a range of interactive selections with a global search option. With its smart visualization and AI-integrated recommendations, you can achieve aesthetically appealing and precise data outcomes.

How it’s different: You combine all data sources regardless of their volume and number into a single integrated view. The association engine in Qlik allows indexing of every possible data relationship which means quick insights. It also allows you to explore data in your desired direction. There is no pre-aggregation of data with pre-defined queries, which means you can ask queries and create new analytics without the need of experts. You can use it efficiently on any device. With its robust and flexible security, Qlik comes with two versions: Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Sense Cloud.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, IT teams, and data developers.

Prominent Clients: Lenovo, McKesson, Daiichi Sankyo, and Rentokil Initial.

8 DataWatch

What it is: DataWatch gives you the ability to efficiently work with larger data sets with unification in data gathering, analysis, and visualization for more accurate predictions.

What it offers: DataWatch provides you with unified software for better data management which ensures the integrity of data with user lineage and governance. You can access internal and external as well as enterprise-wide data sources in detail for greater focus on insights for accountability and trust within organizations.

How it’s different: It gives you a unified data management system which prepares, predicts and visualizes data for better predictions and business outcomes.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, IT teams, and data scientists, portfolio managers, compliance officers, business analysts, and human resource departments.

Industries it caters to: Energy, telecommunication, IoT, capital markets, financial services, retail, government departments, credit unions, healthcare, manufacturing, and education.

9 Quest

What it is: Quest is a predictive business data continuity solution which is designed to meet the needs of the Cloud era.

What it offers: Quest helps in the management and protection of data while giving you control over hybrid environments. It also allows tracking of all devices connected to the network and controls each identity present across the organizational network.

How it’s different: It helps you minimize your data storage footprints, helps with easy management, monitoring, migration, replication, protection and security of your data. It gives control over on and off the premises access. Through its automated data development and management, it enhance productivity, performance and ensures top-notch coding to reduce costs.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, IT teams, data scientists, and business analysts.

Prominent Clients: Intel, eBay, Barclays, Ford, Uber, AT&T, American Airlines, Microsoft, Merck.

10 DataMeer

What it is: DataMeer is a Saas-based platform for big data analytics, which is particularly designed for departmental deployments.

What it offers: DataMeer offers exclusive features which lead to Hadoop Altiscale and BigStep cloud providers. It helps simplify the big data analytics environment into a single platform in addition to Hadoop.

How it’s different: DataMeer offers a powerful combination of integrated self-service data with analytics and visualization functionality. This feature provides the fastest insights into data. It also offers more than 70 pre-developed data connectors that can connect any kind, size or source of data, a user-interface in form of a spreadsheet and more than 270 pre-developed points and click functions for analysis.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, IT teams, data scientists, and business analysts.

Prominent Clients: Anthem Blue Cross, Barclays, HCSC, LabCorp, National Instruments, Scotiabank, SIEMENS, TargoBank, UPS, and Vodafone.

11 Microstrategy

What it is: Microstrategy is a powerful desktop data discovery and analytics tool which allows you to explore and analyze data. It offers comprehensive analytics capabilities, which set it apart from other similar tools on the market.

What it offers: Microstrategy offers an intuitive interface and set of tools with built-in templates. It allows you to create compelling visualizations in easy steps with interactive dossiers; you can do it quickly and efficiently. It has a powerful analytical function which is designed especially for individual business owners.

How it’s different: The capability of Microstrategy to construct dossiers allows simple and quick organization of dashboards, data reports and visualizations. You can transform your reports into intuitive chapter and pages structure through which your data can tell compelling and better stories.

Who can use it: Data Analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, IT teams, and business analysts.

Prominent Clients: Data Fact, The HADA Group, Third (i), Wipro, Amazon Web Services, Accenture, Cognizant, Cloudera, Informatica, and TeraData

12 TIBCO Software

What it is: TIBCO software is a powerful data wrangling tool which allows you to connect, clean, combine and wrangle data from different sources, including your big data storage.

What it offers: TIBCO Software offers quick and easy in-line data wrangling, which allows users to make adjustments according to their requirements. It provides complete API support and enables users to add functions to develop deeper insights.

While doing data wrangling, you need not to document the changes manually. It automatically self-documents the changes made in the documents.

How it’s different: It has a built-in recommendations engine for data structuring and relationships which give automatic suggestions to save your time. Its native connectors allow you to easily connect and blend data from different databases and sources to cloud applications.

Customized connectors can also be created. TIBCO offers automation as well as scalability to fit your analytic requirements.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, and business analysts.

Prominent Clients: Cargill ETM, Riteway Foods, CNG Nueva Granada.

13 Paxata

What it is: Paxata is a truly adaptive platform that converts data into reliable information at lightning fast speed. It has three application layers that are built using HTML5 user interface that is integrated into a single platform.

What it offers: Paxata is a self-service and adaptive tool for data preparation, which allows business analysts to swiftly gather information, explore, transform and then combine it. It gives them a degree of freedom which they are used to in analytics.

How it’s different: With Paxata business analysts can create ready to use data sets for ad-hoc analytics without the need of painful traditional manual steps. As it has a built-in data management layer, it retains the data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) along with a real-time parallelized columnar in-memory data preparation engine that is fuelled by Intellifusion.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytics executives, IT leaders, data scientists, and business analysts.

Prominent Clients: Polaris, Unilog, Precision Profile, Standard Chartered, Loyalty One, Vizinet, Petco, Cetera Financial Group, and Cox Automobile.

14 SAP

What it is: SAP is an agile platform for data preparation that enables successful analytics, data migration and master data management (MDM) initiatives.

What it offers: SAP is a self-service data preparation tool that provides a facility of on-premise as well as on cloud deployment. It quickly transforms data into easily comprehensible and actionable information. It simplifies the way data is accessed, which makes it much more productive as well as agile.

How it’s different: With SAP user coordination and sharing is quick, simple and easy. It provides fast insights through single-click import of multiple datasets gathered from different sources. It also facilitates data curation with an interactive interface for better insights. It provides automatic data cleansing and duplication that delivers operational data sets.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytic executives, IT leaders, data scientists, business analysts, and business owners.

Industries it caters to: Energy and natural resources, financial services, automotive industry, consumer industry, public services, and service industry.

15 Clearstory Data

What it is: Clearstory is a data preparation tool that simplifies access to data from internal as well as external sources. It harmonizes data through an intelligent data harmonization process across different data. It enables fast and collaborative data exploration, which significantly reduces business waiting times for getting intelligent insights.

What it offers: Clearstory presents data insights in the form of interactive and collaborative storyboards. This platform is powered by intelligent inference as well as profiling engine which enables extraction of real-time metadata.

How it’s different: Clearstory is a simple and easy-to-use intuitive platform through which anyone can access, blend, prepare and harmonize data even if they do not have IT knowledge or BI expertise.

It uses breakthrough intelligent inference interface, which is perfect for business analysts and users. It gives more control as well as visibility to users when it comes to data blending strategies. It speeds up data processing across multiple different sources and provides better, richer and faster insights for complex data.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytic executives, IT leaders, data scientists, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: MARS, Getty Images, Avent, American Dental Partners, CarSaver, Procurement Advisors, LakeShore Recycling Systems, High Fidelity, and Flower Foods.

16 Oracle

What it is: Oracle is another powerful self-service data preparation tool which helps quickly unlock value of big data. It allows easy ingestion, enrichment and publishing of data through a unified cloud-based solution for data wrangling.

What it offers: Oracle is an Apache Spark powered data preparation platform, which is easy to use with full integration. It gives an intuitive, interactive and easy way to prepare complex business data for further processing. It also has full automation capabilities with natural language processing and precise classifications.

How it’s different: This data preparation tool converts complex data into structured and easy to understand format for downstream processing. It is a fast and intuitive platform that is designed for business users.

It is scalable and provides users with better recommendations for data enrichment using machine learning as well as NLP capabilities.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytic executives, IT leaders, data scientists, business analysts, and business owners.

Industries it caters to: Energy, financial services, automotive industry, consumer industry, public services, service industry and many others.

17 LavaStorm

What it is: LavaStorm provides enterprise-grade data preparation solutions. It is an agile ETL platform that provides powerful analytics and deep insights.

What it offers: LavaStorm is built exclusively for enterprise level data preparation. It has intuitive and user-friendly qualities. It covers a broad spectrum of different tasks, which are required for connecting, shaping, preparing, analyzing and delivering enterprise business data in the quickest possible time period.

How it’s different: LavaStorm gives power to IT users to work in collaboration in real-time. It employs the fastest waterfall methods with an incremental and iterative approach toward data preparation.

With its simple UI and APIs, it implements complex automation and orchestration models to scheduling. It uses the ETL process to develop and control data access as well as analytical logic.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytic executives, IT leaders, data scientists, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: Climber, Coney, Kubrick Group, Ntsays, PWC, Qlik, Pomerol Partners, Sweco, Tableau.

18 Zaloni

What it is: Zaloni is a self-service unified data preparation platform which automates data management along with cataloguing and governance. It produces scalable and actionable data results.

What it offers: Zaloni is a hybrid unified self-service data prep platform that can be easily used on-premises, using cloud or hybrid platforms. It adopts an enterprise-scale DataOps approach, aligns data stakeholders and balances governance for better collaboration and reduces time taken to draw insights from data. It enables the incorporation of data in routine business practices.

How it’s different: With Zaloni, it is possible to automate repeat management tasks and business processing. It gives businesses a capability to manage all data sources, centrally irrespective of their location.

This causes a reduction in the total ownership cost across IT infrastructure, data management and labor. It reduces time taken to draw insights from data from weeks to just a few minutes.

Who can use it: Data analysts, analytic executives, IT leaders, data scientists, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: Azure, AWS, BBI, Dell EMC, DATUM, Ixtel, IBM, Pivotal, Cloudera Certified, Aime, esgyn.

19 EasyMorph

What it is: EasyMorph is one of the best automation and data transformation tool for non-technical users.

What it offers: EasyMorph enables easy automation and transformation of complex data and other routine tasks. It does not need any complex coding or programming knowledge. It gives 100% visual designing with enhanced productivity.

How it’s different: This data transformation tool is created for swift and robust preparation of impressive visual data. It provides complex data analysis and reports in an aesthetically pleasing manner without the need for coding.

It automates the whole daily schedule process and gives more time for interesting and comprehensive data exploration and analytics.

Who can use it: Data analysts, IT leaders, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: CDS Global, AIG:Big Data Platforms, Du Emirates Telecommunication, Global Airline.

20 UNIFI

What it is: Unifi is self-service data discovery and preparation software that offers a unified data interface for enterprise users.

What it offers: Unifi helps remove the barriers encountered in silos of operational data. It also makes information accessibility easy and quick across the whole enterprise.

How it’s different: Unifi uses machine learning with advanced artificial intelligence technology and cloud optimization. Based on its AI, it gives predictions about what the business users wish to visualize. It then natively joins the resulting data with the BI tool for swift and precise results.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, IT leaders, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: Big Incites, Cloudera, Flywheel Data, MapR, Platfora, Qlik, Tableau Software, and zData Inc.

21 Amazon Web Services

What it is: Amazon Web Services is a well-known and widely used platform for data preparation. It is IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) solution with easy to begin features.

What it offers: Amazon Web Services offer a highly customizable platform with plenty of options for Amazon Cloud Services as well as third-party integrations. Different APIs are also available. It provides support for a wide range of Windows as well as Linux servers with less upfront costs.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, IT leaders, business analysts, and business owners.

Industries it caters to: It caters to nearly all industries including finance, marketing, business, consulting, technology, health and many others.

22 Hitachi Vantara

What it is: Hitachi Vantara is a data preparation platform which makes data integration, blending, preparation and analysis an easy and simple task. It can perform all these functions for data gathered from any environment and at any scale. It delivers invaluable data insights without delays.

What it offers: Hitachi Vandara extracts optimal data value using a dynamic pipeline of data. It removes complexity and delays in IT operations. It enables adoption of big data technologies which seamlessly integrate into your pre-existing technological infrastructure.

How it’s different: This data preparation platform organizes and manages both structured and unstructured big data. It creates interactive data analysis, visual reports and dashboards for innovative data-driven results.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, IT leaders, business analysts, and business owners.

Prominent Clients: BMW Group, Broadcom, Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence, Nasdaq, Marketo, ThinkOn, M & S, Vontobel, COOP, Zenimax media.

23 Talend

What it is: Talend is an intuitive data preparation tool which combines self-service and data curation. It integrates data to speed up data utilization across organizations.

What it offers: Talend uses advanced machine-based learning and sampling to quickly identify errors in data. It applies transformations to any data size exported from any source into any target destination in a matter of minutes not hours.

How it’s different: With Talend, data can be prepared as a team which accelerates the time to develop insights. The data can be shared across team members in batch and bulk with live integrations.

This allows businesses to develop reliable data source on-premises, on the cloud or as a hybrid solution.

Who can use it: Data analysts, data scientists, IT leaders, business analysts, and business owners.

Industries it caters to: IT, sales and marketing, finance, HR, risk and compliance, and operations.