What problems is Knowi solving and how is that benefiting you?
As a leader in the company, I needed a solution that enabled business users in every department to do their own exploratory data analysis. But as the leader of Business Intelligence, I needed tooling that provided advanced data visualization and analytics for the technical specialists on my team. I didn't think we could satisfy a diverse user base using a single BI tool, and as such, I wasn't expecting one to. However, I was surprised to discover Knowi serves both technical and non-technical users strikingly well without being a compromise to either.
For example, users who aren't interested in learning SQL have two options. One, they can submit queries in a normal sentence structure, which Knowi interprets via NLP. Second, they can use the drag & drop query builder. Even I use it often (despite my software engineering background) simply because it's faster and easier to do certain things using the visual builder than it is to write code to do the same. For example, it's easier to use the UI to trend aggregates (count, average, mean, etc.) on a time series. One does that a lot in BI. Even so, it is easy to flip back and forth between the visual builder and raw SQL within the same query. What's more, the drag & drop query builder puts a tiny info icon on each field which displays an instant hover showing you the min, max, mean, standard deviation, the # of missing records (if any), and also the cardinality of each field. So basically, Knowi teaches you a ton about your data even before you've finished querying it.
For more technical users, Knowi lets you use SQL extensively, even in places you wouldn't think possible. For instance, let's say you've made some visualizations on a dashboard when you notice you'd like to make a refinement. There's no need to go all the way back to the database, query, or settings; you can just inject SQL into the widget to quickly make the change. This is one of Knowi's many "power" features that don't stand in the way of nominal use. Another is alerting. Most solutions give you basic threshold alerting, and so does Knowi. But Knowi also makes it trivial to set up anomaly alerting based on standard deviation. I haven't seen another vendor provide alerts based on standard deviation. If anyone were going to, I would have thought Elasticsearch/Kibana might, but no, not unless you specifically imbue Elastic with some sort of custom one-off javascript. Even then, it's a maybe. In Knowi, it's just 2-clicks.
Over the past 4.5 months since buying Knowi, we've onboarded 46 Users, written 179 Queries, made 415 Visualizations, and 88 Dashboards. Two divisions now have a Weekly Business Review (WBR) where Directors/VPs review their metrics. Also, the entire company does a Monthly Business Review (MBR). Presenting directly from Knowi saves hours of prep time. Moreover, being able to explore drill-downs live sparks richer data-inspired discussions. These reviews result in decisions and actions. In all, it would be fair to say we are now able to steer our business through Knowi. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
