ThirdEye Data

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the IT portfolio manager for a privately-held supply company. We distribute and process tubular goods for the oil and gas industries.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed help with data development and management for our company.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

ThirdEye Data set up an analytics platform to create a digital replica of our organization which includes IT. This was in order to bring visibility to our current performance levels for all functions. They helped us set up the data and pipelines. In addition to that, they created at least one or two end-to-end use cases. This is so people can see the value and get excited about what’s possible on this new platform.

We’re keeping ourselves primarily limited to Microsoft Azure. Our teams worked together to complete this project. The backend pipeline set was completely theirs, but for areas where they needed business input, we worked together.

What is the team composition?

I worked directly with 7–8 people.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We discovered them through word of mouth. My friend knew of ThirdEye Data, and I did some exploring. I spoke to the owner, and we brought them to our office in the evaluation phase. They were aligned with the objectives of our company. It looked to me that they understood business outcomes are important for the success of the project. What’s more, they had more commitment to it than others.

We still have to be outcome-oriented, and that was one of the major differences — that they were committed to the business outcomes. ThirdEye Data is not a very large company, which was important for us. They’re based in Silicon Valley and possess more entrepreneur flavor in their operations. Those were some important factors in choosing them.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent between $200,000–$1,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in September 2019, and the work is still ongoing. We’re now stabilizing and expanding the platform.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

My company has been able to avoid some costs by creating this solution. We gauge the success of the project by understanding the business outcomes which we’ve received. So far, those have been positive overall.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been good at scheduling and meeting deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ThirdEye Data has been able to understand that this is a great platform to build on. Business leaders have also understood the value, and are the ones we need to drive forward.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There could’ve been an improvement in the consistency of the work process to better align with the objectives; Especially with what we did in those initial few months. Partners in organizations put in different resources and come out with different skillsets. It’d be helpful if ThirdEye Data understood our business better. It’s a big challenge though. If the people who are doing the execution understand the business better, we could minimize communication problems.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Engage and be upfront with ThirdEyeData in the early phases and work on syncing your minds. They’re usually available in our time zone and are flexible. Try to engage with them at a team level and remove communication barriers if possible.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

I’m the manager of enterprise data services for a media company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We initially had a SQL server business intelligence (BI) stack but found that we needed an enterprise data lake. After identifying the gaps in our team’s capabilities, we brought on ThirdEye Data to help us configure the data lake.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

We decided to leverage AWS as a data lake. Because we wanted to have a persistent cluster for computing, we started with Apache Spark and hybrid technology. The initial implementation included adjusting our data from various silos and databases into one central place. 

What is the team composition?  

They had a project manager and an architect on-site as well as 6–8 resources offshore. 

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I’d worked with them while at my previous job, and they’re well-known in the big data space. 

How much have you invested with them? 

We’ve spent about $100,000–$250,000 thus far. 

What is the status of this engagement? 

We started working together in April 2017, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

ThirdEye Data was able to get inside our tech environment and set up the data lake fairly quickly. The new enterprise data lake eliminates silos by centralizing our information, which has improved our data analysts’ productivity and reduced analysis time from months to weeks to sometimes days. 

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint? 

I’m very happy with their communication. If they encounter issues or foresee any issues, they bring them up ahead of time. We use a Scrum methodology. 

What did you find most impressive about them? 

Not only do they know which technology to leverage, but they also understand the strengths and weakness of the technology landscape and can manage change. 

Are there any areas they could improve? 

Their niche is Apache Hadoop-based enterprise data lakes, so if they can improve their skills as a company in cloud data warehouses, they would be able to build even better solutions.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a data science thought leader at a technology enterprise.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed guidance for the implementation of our project.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were building a security systems solution with one of our partners. Using IBM Watson Studio throughout the project, ThirdEye Data installed and set the code and solutions with Kubernetes.

What is the team composition?

I never worked directly with them on a project. I had many project managers that worked with them.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I met ThirdEye Data at a conference and worked with them at my previous organization. I chose them for this project based on that successful partnership.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2011 and the partnership is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The team successfully built and implemented a cybersecurity product for my partner. That partner noted ThirdEye Data’s instrumental work on their blog and in a keynote speech at a major conference.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

The team works hard and delivers.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ThirdEye Data is reliable, focusing primarily on AI, data science, and big data. The team’s focus, skill set, and breadth of expertise distinguish them. Services range form full-stack microservice Kubernetes virtualization to implementing third-party data science models.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could focus a little bit more on the data science automation aspects.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of technology at a company that manufactures hardware and software related to medical cannabis use. We have software that’s designed to help people manage chronic pain.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We had a machine learning project that we wanted to get going to see if we could use it as a basis for some of the later machine learning projects that we’d like to do as part of our software platform offering.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Part of what our software does is helping chronic pain sufferers to input their current medications. Since medication names are often difficult, we wanted to skip that process of typing out the name. We wanted to help users automatically determine what kind of medication and dosage they’re using based on a photograph of their medication, which is uploaded to our servers. Then, we’d come back with an informed guess for what that medication is.

We knew the project would involve machine learning. ThirdEye Data put together a proposal that suggested a couple of different approaches, and we narrowed it down to one of them. We decided to go with TensorFlow, along with some optical character recognition (OCR) libraries and some Fuzzy Matching strips behind the scenes that could take an approximation of what someone had typed or from a photograph of an actual pharmaceutical label.

Sometimes the OCR isn’t 100% perfect, and so the Fuzzy Matching lets us take something that had either been typed or had been taken from an image and cross checks it against our list of 5,000 known medications for pain.

We’re currently working with them on a different project.

What is the team composition?

There were six or seven team members involved, including a project manager.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I wasn’t involved in selecting ThirdEye Data. We had a couple of conversations, and they walked us through some of the projects that they had done in the past that were similar to what we were looking to do. They put together a proposal for us, and we decided to go ahead with that pilot project.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $25,000 for this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in February 2018, and the work lasted a month.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

One of the main outcomes of this project is that we realized the large amounts of data that we would need to successfully run future machine learning projects. There’s a public pill dataset composed of images, and ThirdEye Data did a great job of multiplying those images to do the machine learning training.

To productize something like that, we would need many more images. In terms of our direction, the project let us know what we would need to do to make something like that successful in a consumer-facing product.

However, we’ve taken pieces of the technology they developed and deployed it into our product, especially the Fuzzy Matching stuff that they did.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

We had weekly or biweekly meetings to run through the project’s status. Their communication was fantastic, and documentation and the code delivery were top notch. We were able to selectively take parts of what they had done and deploy it with other teams without any issues.

Furthermore, the quality of their work was terrific. Any time there were any issues or new lessons that had come out of what they’d done, we could easily recalibrate what we were doing.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The speed at which they completed the work was impressive, and their cost was good in terms of value.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can't name anything.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a product manager at Innova Systems. We focus on applications for the Department of Defense, primarily for the Navy. We have five products that support squadron readiness, aircrew readiness, aircraft carrier personnel readiness, and a learning management system that supports the aviation squadrons and their tactical postgraduate training.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed to develop a scheduling and deployment tool that was easy to modify to roll out a new version of our application to aviation squadrons.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were updating an application called Sharp to its newest version, which has a dramatic change in the architecture, technology stack, and functionality, and needed a scheduling tool. Based on deployment schedules of squadrons and timing of their readiness schedules, we knew that we would have to spread the deployment out to over 200 units across a roughly 12–18 month period.

We had to take into account each squadrons' readiness profiles, which is a cyclical process of getting ready for deployment, deploying, remaining in the search capability, resting for a while, and then repeating the whole thing. Where they are in this cycle either makes the squadron easily attainable or means that we have to hold the deployment until they’re past the critical phases deployments and search periods.

We also had to take into account where the squadrons were located. While some of them are in high concentration areas, about a quarter of the units are geographically dispersed overseas or around the country.

We went to ThirdEye with this information and asked how they would build the schedule and scheduling tool. The tool they built enables us to modify the inputs to the scheduling tool based on travel arrangements and squadron accessibility and readiness.

What is the team composition?

At its peak, we had a team of five or six people dispersed through the U.S. and India. We worked most frequently with our project manager but had at least weekly communication with the whole team.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We were working with a third party on several initiatives, including the scheduling and deployment. That company worked closely with ThirdEye and offered their services to evaluate possibilities and ultimately build the scheduling tool.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from September 2017 through December 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The project was so focused that it didn’t have a company-wide impact; there weren’t any metrics that we were tracking. However, we have modified the tool for separate efforts and it has helped increase our efficiency in scheduling and deployments.

There were some bugs in the initial product, but once we identified them, the owner immediately took the product back. They worked on it in their own time, and a few weeks later they delivered a better product.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very engaged. I spoke with the project manager once or twice a week on top of our weekly team meetings. We coordinated convenient times for the entire team to get together, and they had very active participation.

With as geographically dispersed as the team was, they were extremely accommodating of my time and the time difference. For example, if we were to have meetings at 9:00 am our time, the team members in India would be speaking with us at what was midnight for them. They were incredibly responsive.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Since this was a unique project, we don’t have experience with other firms similar to ThirdEye so I can’t compare them in that way. However, I will say that they were engaged in working with us to find a solution, and I was impressed by the quality of their deliverables.

Are there any areas they could improve?

About halfway through the project, we had to significantly shift the project’s direction. I definitely carry some of that responsibility because I think I could have done a better job clarifying the requirements. However, I think the situation could have been improved if they had thoroughly documented and reviewed the requirements on their end to make sure that everybody understood what was intended.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior product marketing manager for a software and cloud services provider.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed a larger development team to improve our software prototyping efforts.  

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

ThirdEye Data creates field assets for our technical sales staff to ramp up on the latest services and technology, use those resources to build appealing products, and confidently pitch the product’s capabilities in addition to the broader ecosystem integration. They develop prototypes for our entire business intelligence portfolio, including cloud data integration software, modern data warehousing, and intelligent analytics and data preparation platforms. Features include advanced visualizations and data surfacing. The field assets are used for technical demonstrations, presentations, and solution accelerators.

What is the team composition?

Although we have an assigned project manager, their CEO occasionally steps in to facilitate those duties. We also have direct contact with their development lead.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We discovered them through an internal reference.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $350,000--$400,000 over the last three years.

What is the status of this engagement?

They worked on this project from April 2017—September 2017, but they’ve been our preferred vendor for three years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Their work impacts 20% of our field personnel, which in turn enables our entire company with worldwide readiness.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

Their level of availability and responsiveness is excellent. Having access to the lead developer minimizes miscommunication and ensures that they're meeting delivery deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to operate end-to-end across our entire stack is impressive. They understand our business goals and move quickly to deliver practical solutions.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Although ThirdEye Data is well known within our industry, they aren’t as visible in our broader commerce space. They should take advantage of our partner programs to expand their business.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a multi-lateral bank. Our primary function is to lend money to governments to implement projects both on social and infrastructure projects. I’m responsible for a group who manages innovation and supports the VP sectors within the institution.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and had an internal project that required us to analyze and find experts within the institution. We were using AI to search the information based on the curriculum of the employees, the type of work they had done in the past, and papers that have been published in order to identify specific skillsets that we need for some project engagements.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

A lot of our staff implement projects in their regions, meaning there's a lot of documentation regarding what they’ve done as well as information on our website. One of the challenges, when we were looking to start a new project, was to find people that have done a project like this in the past. ThirdEye searched and crawled those different project completion reports to find that information, using IBM technology. They used the Watson technology and Web Explorer, for instance, for the search capability.

They crawled this information and apply some of the methodologies, ontologies, metadata, and natural language to understand what the documents were all about. All those components gave us a rating in terms of the team leads and its ability to successfully commit the projects.

They then created a frontend application that allows to search for people using natural language. You can identify someone who has worked in a specific country, in a specific sector, with X amount of years’ experience. It identifies very specific things, which is where the natural language, the machine learning, and the AI came into place.

What is the team composition?

They had a team of five. There’s a data architect, the project manager, and people that were specialized in machine learning and data modeling.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We found them through IBM as we use a lot of IBM technology here at the bank. ThirdEye also partners directly with them.

How much have you invested with them?

$40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from October 2015 until January 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Before we actually implemented or acquired the tools that are required, we decided to do a proof of concept with them to test the technology. That was very successful because we were really able to see the results.

They had to do some Python coding as well as use IBM technologies, in order to complement the solution. That was an element of surprise and a good learning experience. We knew that the technology wasn’t fully ready to do what we wanted it to do, but they found a solution by incorporating some extra code.

As a result of that, we're scaling up now with more funding for the project. We have been approved for this year to scale up. We’re going to incorporate additional sources of information to have more robust and better results in terms of how to identify some talents, specialists, and expertise within the institution.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They provided us with a full technical architecture to show all the components and how they would interconnect or interact. We had weekly check-ins to review the progress and adjusting some things.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have the ability to come up with additional solutions. They’re not just focused on one technology stack, but are very well versed in other technologies. They were very familiar with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Cloud, and IBM Cloud. They had the expertise and developers that could jump in with Python and Java.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’d be helpful if they had somebody local to us. However, the fact they weren't did not impact the project. The cost of travel increases the cost, but other than that, they did a fabulous job.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It’s important to have a very experienced project manager as that made a lot of difference. We engaged directly with the owner of the company and he was very interested because of the type of institution that we are. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have had the same success had he not been involved, but he was very experienced and knew the different types of technology. If you could engage him in any project, that will be helpful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO of an AI and analytics products and services company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We were developing our AI platform and needed to figure out how to design and build the data stack for that.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They developed the platform from scratch. We worked on Google Cloud and used some Microsoft data technologies which they were very knowledgeable about. They were able to bring in help when it was needed. We were not only working with them, but receiving a lot of support from those partners as well.

What is the team composition?

There was a project manager, but I'm unsure of the size of the team on their end.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We were referred to them. After speaking to them, we really liked that they were working on the cutting edge of all the technologies we wanted to look at.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent between $200,000–$300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them between March and September in 2015.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The platform that they helped us build has now been implemented at a number of Fortune 2000 companies. As part of the implementation, we go through very thorough technology reviews with these companies and always hear very good things regarding the architecture, the technology, and the design.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed well—I haven’t heard any issues and no one has come back and complained about anything. We're on a Google platform and we used all the Google tools.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There were two things that distinguished them. Their founder was very good at understanding what we needed to do and then translating that, from a technology perspective, into what needed to get done. I found that to be outstanding and of the reasons we worked with them. I also liked their flexible working style as they fit into how we work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should be out there talking to people more. They do very good work, but they should be doing more of that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They are on the cutting edge of technology. If you need a solution, particularly if you don't have any ideas, they're a fantastic partner to have.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work as a senior category manager at a software marketplace. We sell enterprise software as a part of a larger enterprise store or digital channel. My responsibilities include developing go-to markets for the top third-party products sold through our company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We hired ThirdEye Data to develop our latest customer-ready solution. As part of the go-to-market process, we produce content for various stages of the customer journey. We wanted to build a solution that provides users with opportunities to gain experience implementing solutions via our marketplace. Our solution teaches clients in similar situations how to migrate to the cloud, implement devices, and use machine learning to create what we term a “real data pipeline.”

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

A critical part of our workflow involves combining multiple marketplace solutions. For our engagement with ThirdEye Data, we used a storage solution from SoftNet and a TIBCO Spotfire analytical R server. To locate movement between on-premises and cloud, the team used AppUnity. Our open-source product is MySQL, and data is warehoused in the cloud via Amazon Redshift. The team used a Kony mobile application development product and secured the entire solution with Trend Micro Deep Security.

Rather than the programming languages in use, we focused on integrating multiple solutions and connecting the dots. Instead of using a single product for each discrete task, we used a combination of tools to build a real data pipeline. This task aimed to enable the organization to act upon external factors like public data sets, in this case. ThirdEye Data was also responsible for coordinating our combined solutions with different providers.

What is the team composition?

I’ve interacted directly with ThirdEye Data’s executive leadership. Early on in the cycle, a dedicated project manager became our main point of contact. They assigned us at least two developers and a documentation and manual writing specialist.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I’d worked with ThirdEye data previously while I was with a different company. One of my employees there had found them during that time. Although I’d held a different position there, it had still been related to product management.

For this project, we hoped to expand areas of our business that we’d already been working on. My background is focused on big data. When the time came to produce this new solution, ThirdEye immediately came to mind. I hired them to partner with my current company.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $100,000–$200,000 on ThirdEye Data’s services.

What is the status of this engagement?

This project ran between July–December 2016. Building the entire solution took approximately 5-6 months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re just starting the campaigns ThirdEye Data helped us build products for this month, so I don’t have metrics to share yet. Our internal company stakeholders have expressed interest in extending this solution to other categories. Users who have tried it so far are happy with how it works. The architects who’ve reviewed it affirmed that it provided many useful details and had been created at the right level.

Essentially, our new product has become a call-to-action for a few of our campaigns at specific customer interaction stages. At this point, we’ve published the solution ThirdEye Data helped us build on our website and presented it at an annual conference. I tried to embed our new product into existing portals that promote comparable solutions, but it’s so sophisticated that those systems couldn’t accommodate it. Instead, I created independent placeholders that could adequately map to previous work we’d done. We’re currently planning additional delivery mechanisms.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

I was impressed by how well the team communicated with us throughout our engagement. They offered a notable level of availability, as well. The team is very agile and rapidly formulated useful ideas. Whenever we made requests, they quickly internalized our feedback to provide the best workable solution. We’ve had a good experience working with ThirdEye Data.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ThirdEye Data has demonstrably learned a great deal throughout their tenure as a development agency. They’ve has aggregated a substantial knowledge base from their numerous past projects. I most appreciated their expertise pertinent to building real data pipelines and creating chatbots. They’ve deftly narrowed their focus to certain technology spaces. In line with my preferences, they’d already completed comparable projects, rather this being their first endeavor of its kind.

ThirdEye Data’s high-level technical experience is a key differentiator from comparable agencies. Furthermore, this factor was also a critical reason I couldn’t have hired any other vendor. Had I done so, I would’ve had to validate that said team had successfully completed multiple client implementations. It was easy to affirm ThirdEye Data’s value proposition for our company in terms of solutions and documentation.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Since I had a very open dialogue with ThirdEye Data, I felt comfortable requesting a more complex technical writing approach. Their solution was fantastic and their documentation was thorough, but I had specific marketing goals in mind that required improved content.

Per my recommendation, they hired external technical writers to revamp that material. This observation is most relevant for future clients who plan to use ThirdEye Data’s assets for technical marketing content. It may not be required for a standard technical implementation.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the Co-Founder, CTO of a hospitality & leisure company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

AI agent for travel planning and booking.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire ThirdEye Data to accomplish?

• AI based Travel Planning Services

SOLUTION

How did you find ThirdEye Data?

Referral

Why did you select ThirdEye Data over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from ThirdEye Data were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

ThirdEye assisted our engineering team in developing and integrating various travel-based API.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Developing the MVP Frontend
• Built backend APIs
• Cloud deployment infrastructure

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

• ThirdEye was well planned, punctual, and executed with utmost professionalism.
• They responded to our needs in a reasonable time and provided good service.

What was your primary form of communication with ThirdEye Data?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

• They thrive on customer satisfaction.
• They were able to scale the size of the team based on our requirements.
• They were understanding and flexible with our requirements.

Are there any areas for improvement or something ThirdEye Data could have done differently?

None