ThirdEye Data

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner and CEO of Laiout Inc, an AI-powered design platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed a company that works on AI to generate an idea for us in the architectural space, create a proof of concept, and help us review a patent application.

What was the scope of their involvement?

ThirdEye Data helped us implement generative adversarial network (GAN) models and set up Cloud computing through Google to run our data sets. They more or less made proprietary software for us that ended up being web-based so we could deploy.

We started the project by providing them with a project brief detailing what we needed out of the engagement. They then provided us with a proposal that covered what we needed to do. 

Aside from that, we had a patent attorney prepare our patent application, and ThirdEye Data was kind enough to go over it, review it, and make some suggestions on how to change some of the language. In that case, they went beyond what they were contractually required to do.

What is the team composition?

My main point of contact was Dj (Founder & Google), but I also worked with five other people from ThirdEye Data.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I found ThirdEye Data through Clutch.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent somewhere between $50,000–$60,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from February 2019–October 2019.

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

ThirdEye Data delivered a system that did what they said it could, and we were able to package that into a patent application. We haven't been awarded the patent yet, but it's undoubtedly a functioning system. 

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

ThirdEye Data performed well in terms of project management. We primarily communicate through email, Google Meet, and Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ThirdEye Data was one of the firms that could do this work. I could also tell that this wasn't just another project for them — they took the project in stride and had fun with it, and we appreciated that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It was sometimes challenging to communicate certain concepts with each other, and that was partially because they were in a different industry than us.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a director of product engineering for a data company. I have a group with a number of core permanent engineers, but we’ve also utilized a variable cloud of personnel and contract services over the course of our current project.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

Our customer is a very large advertising agency, and we’d built a system for them that was designed to process billions of input records and convert those into models of consumers. Our engineer and CTO had built the basic framework for this system on Scala in Spark on the AWS cloud. Our customer then wanted to build some superstructure on top of that.

Rather than building up permanent staff specifically for this customer’s needs, I leveraged contract resources of various kinds to complement our abilities.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We needed a lot of competent programmers who could produce Scala code with the framework we’d built in a professional and disciplined way. We delivered around 60,000 lines of Scala code for this project. Most of that happened between 2021 and Q1 of 2022.

I reached out to DJ (Founder & CEO) at the start of the process and outlined the requirements for the kinds of individuals that we needed. They supplied two resources in somewhat different capacities. We rolled off people from that effort in March, but we began a second phase, and Third Eye provided another engineer with a slightly different skill set to support this phase as well.

What is the team composition?

I’m working with three engineers for this project. The exact makeup has changed as the project has evolved, however.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

I’d personally worked with DJ a number of years ago at a previous company and had a positive experience with them. I’ve worked with 5–6 other vendors over the course of the past year, and ThirdEye’s resources have worked well with these other outside contractors. They also possessed the hard-to-fit technical chops that I required for this project.

We’ve been working together on this project since June 2021.

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

We had to make sure that their level of engineering quality met a certain level; they couldn’t just throw warm bodies in our seats. They met this level of professional maturity, as well as the extensive deadlines we set. We all worked together with our other vendors as a team of around 14 to successfully deliver this project. Their work led me to re-up our contract and add another individual for this second, ongoing phase of the project.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

I’ve also been able to describe very particular skillset profiles, including both hard and soft skills, and ThirdEye has been able to deliver on those needs. They’re much better than other agencies in this regard, which helps us avoid spending money on interviewing candidates that ultimately aren’t good fits.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very easy to work with. DJ is particularly accommodating. They’re also highly transparent in their pricing and overhead; I don’t have to go through complicated negotiations with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s very clear what they have and what you’ll get.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO at a value-added resale company that also has a product development division, an innovation division, a cybersecurity division, and a lab. We primarily support various government agencies along with other commercial customers across the US.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We faced a very complex problem around providing cybersecurity support for healthcare organizations. We couldn’t find any products that could solve those issues, so we thought to spin up an engineering organization that would help us meet those requirements — either by building our own product or identifying technology that could solve our needs.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

ThirdEye Data assigned several engineers to augment our existing team as we developed our cybersecurity product. They were responsible for building our core microservices-based platform along with most of the polyglot storage systems. These systems were essentially built for purpose, meaning that instead of using a monolithic data store, we leveraged data stores based on the requirement or use case being deployed.

We kept the solution decoupled and have made sure that the solution was cloud-agnostic so that it could run on basically any cloud platform. Our work is predominantly based on Java.

What is the team composition? 

Over the last two years, the team has grown to about 15–20 people in different capacities. There were two data scientists, 10–12 full stack developers, and experts for various technologies that we wanted to leverage. The product manager runs all of our scrums, and there’s a documentation specialist, as well.

The team scales up depending on our needs. For example, we’ve recently gotten more into data analysis and management. They’ve made it easy for us to add on additional resources with the right expertise and seniority. 

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

After a lot of research, we reached out to numerous teams within the US. We then narrowed down the list of candidates based on the agency's understanding of our technical problem and if they had the right domain skills to solve it. 

ThirdEye Data had a broad range of skills at the price point that we were looking for. They were readily available, too. We knew we wanted to start small and nimble so as not to blow up our budget, but we also wanted to have access to their senior team members as our relationship grew. Their team was willing to provide both the tech skills and a depth of expertise to the table that matched the goals on hand. 

Finally, I was excited to see that they had past experience in many similar projects. They’d demonstrated some projects from Microsoft worked on a lot of international projects. That allowed us to get good references from their past customers.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them between January 2018–August 2019. We knew that we wanted to eventually keep the development in-house because our product would be reviewed by a lot of government and civilian agencies. We hired more in-house developers, and they transferred over the development to us. Now, we only leverage ThirdEye Data when needed.

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

We were running at breakneck speed. Actually, our scope changed from one thing to five add-ons as we went through our prototyping phase. As soon as that first phase ended, we used the product as a foundation for additional use cases. The final result was getting five core components built onto our platform at a fairly fast pace. Our target was 12 months, and we ended up completing the platform in 13–14 months. That’s a great success measure of success.

I’d also commend their innovative thinking around some of our core processes (e.g., automation, JavaScript components, frontend development). Toward the latter part of the project, I was really impressed with their machine learning and AI algorithms. The situation really required a lot of back-and-forth to get deep insights — it wasn’t even a coding problem at that point.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

We could’ve done a better job managing the project. With the scope increasing, it became difficult to manage the multiple streams of work. They didn’t end up adding on more project managers, but we should’ve hired another manager internally to better manage expectations. That would’ve helped us keep track of dependent teams and control the cost. 

As for our tools, we used Aha! to prioritize our road map and set up our sprints. We leveraged Atlassian Suite to manage our code, Jira tickets, and automation.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ThirdEye Data was always willing to go above and beyond the initial ask. Whenever we struggled with anything, their team would do a lot of research and come up with their own thought process. They’d actually break up into two camps to test out ideas: one camp would try one approach while the other tried something else. They were very excited about this “horse race” so to speak, which showed that they were really invested in what we were trying to do. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Collectively, we should’ve taken a step back and spent some time thinking about how to manage our project more effectively. It started off fairly nimble, but things got complicated once we got into tens of thousands of lines of code. That might be something that we look at more internally.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a candid thought leadership conversation with their team. They’re not a headhunting company that fills seats; these are people who bring a lot of domain expertise to the table. Their team understands business and technology principles just as much as they understand your goals and desired outcomes. 

Beyond that, if you plan to own the code, then you have to own the knowledge as well. Knowledge sharing needs to be baked into the process. That’s why having those high-level conversations with ThirdEye Data made the end product that much better. 
 

Please describe your company and your position there.

Triadd Software are a software development company specializing in Digital Records Management. I was the acting CTO at the time of development and deployment.

For what projects/services did your company hire ThirdEye Data, and what were your goals?

To create a companion mobile application which leveraged OCR and could integrate with our existing application.

How did you select ThirdEye Data and what were the deciding factors?

ThirdEye can quickly envision the end goal and have a team who work tirelessly to ensure the dream becomes real. The flexibility demonstrated when accommodating changes was a breath of fresh air, and the overall delivery including project management was exemplary,

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Xamarin, .NET, Classic ASP/ASP.NET, OCR library & API integration

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had a team of 5 developers working with us, and they were all amazing, each brought a unique perspective to the engagement which enabled us to build a well-rounded application which resonated with all of our customers.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The work ThirdEye helped deliver was instrumental in ensuring our company delivered against our promise to our customers and released the next version of our industry leading software.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Weekly updates, weekly meetings (sometime two meetings per week) which was fantastic. Round the clock team availability (ThirdEye and our own staff) which meant we were able to operate in a wider development window across two primary time zones.

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

Their capability to deliver was second to none. ThirdEye brought a wealth of experience both technology and business consulting, which enabled us to identify missing or inadequate feature designs early in development.

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

The engagement went very well and we consider ThirdEye a valued and trusted technology partner for us.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a software company for monitoring solutions.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We wanted to build an AI or machine learning module for our product in order to analyze the data we were collecting. We wanted to use this module to detect anomalies and carry out predictive analysis based on the outcomes of the model.

We have a monitoring platform where we collect data from endpoints and technologies to measure performance, availability, and SLA. We are alerted when something is wrong or there are issues with any elements in the technology stack.

What was the scope of their involvement?

ThirdEye Data began to define and build a layer of the AI or machine learning-based analytics to take care of all the integration with the product. Instead of defining thresholds, the model would automatically learn the normal behavior and would be able to indicate when something was abnormal.

What is the team composition?

There were 4–5 people, including a project manager.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We were introduced to them through one of our investors who used to work with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from October 2018–December 2020.

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

We had two projects. The first project was not successful. We gave it another chance. The second project was supposed to end in October or November 2020, but at some point, we came to the conclusion that they wouldn’t be able to deliver what we were looking for. The project was never completed, at least not to our satisfaction. 

They did some work in some aspects but there were lots of things that weren’t completed as we defined in the scope of work for the project. I never got what I paid for. There were deliverables, but they didn’t comply with what was agreed upon from the start.

The first project was in 2018, and it ended after a few months. It wasn’t even usable. It was our first AI project, so we didn’t have lots of knowledge or experience. We hoped that they’d be able to do it, but we didn’t get anything from them for almost a year. 

In 2020, we engaged them again around April, but this time, we tried to be very accurate with the statement of work (SOW) and the objectives of the project. We gave very clear and specific use cases. We had too much back and forth about the same issues that we were facing. 

How was project management handled?

At some point, their project manager left and they replaced him. They continued to try to resolve the issues we had, but we kept having the same issues. They just didn’t know how to solve them. 

ThirdEye Data said they wouldn’t take responsibility for the project even though they were responsible for it. We had planned a third phase, but they said they didn’t want to continue. 

We communicated with the owner, and they had access to our Jira and our systems. They became part of our R&D in some ways. They were responsive when we needed them, but the results weren’t good.

Is there anything that the vendor did well or that you would consider a strength?

They have great engineers, but the owner doesn’t take responsibility for the commitment. Individually, they have good people. When you’re employed by someone who is telling you that you need to do something in 20 hours, but you need 80 hours, obviously, the delivery isn’t going to be good.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When they get into a project, they need to know that they for sure can complete it. If they need more time and more people, they should take responsibility and do it rather than terminate a project in the middle and leave the customer stuck with something that’s not fully done. 

Now that we’re trying to fix what they did, I know that they made some incredibly wrong decisions in their design and way of doing things. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I wouldn’t recommend anyone to work with them. I was very disappointed. The biggest problem was that they didn’t take responsibility, and once we paid them, that was it. If you're going to work with them, make a very clear SOW, and don’t pay anything before you get the work.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re developing an AR technology for use in the retail space. I’m a market analyst, focusing on the latest technology in AR head-mounted displays. 

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

They were helping us collecting a large amount of voice audio data for us to train an AI program to develop voice activation and voice-related features for the program. We didn’t have the resources in-house to collect audio data from a large number of voices, so we called on them.

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, we met to talk about the requirements for the participants in the data set. We needed a wide variety of voices, in terms of age and ethnicity. After developing an understanding of our needs for the data set, they set up a website with a recording system that allowed for participants to sign up.

They took charge of vetting candidates to make sure they were of the correct age range and ethnicities we specified. If selected, the participant could then record the script on their own. 

The team would check the audio for quality and share the files with our team. We’d offer feedback, and our teams would work together until the audio files met our standard for quality and content. Once the files were acceptable, they saved all relevant data and shipped it to us. 

What is the team composition?

Early on, there were about 6–8 teammates on the project. Later, we were able to automate some tasks, so the team was reduced to 3–4 people.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

We found them on Clutch and selected them based on the information we found there. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $24,000 on their work.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project lasted from June–December 2020. While we finished up this project, we plan on engaging them for similar work in the near future.

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

They were able to deliver about 3,000 audio recordings, and the audio generally was what we were looking for. It took a few iterative cycles to work out some issues with some of the audio files, but they were quick to respond and correct all problems. It wasn’t a perfect journey, but they did a great of making sure we were happy at the end of the day. Our company was scaling rapidly at this time as well, so there could’ve been some miscommunications on our part.  

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They developed their own project management system through a website service. We started using a mixture of Google tools and Confluence, but that ended up not being sufficient for our project. In response, they created their own website management service where we could manage the entire project and deliverables. They built that from scratch. 

We communicated through weekly calls with the CEO and key players, where I received information on progress and got answers to my questions.   

What did you find most impressive about them?

This was a fast-paced project, and they were always willing to adapt strategy and the contract to make sure we were happy at the end of the day. It was a very productive and healthy engagement. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

They had some employee churn, and newly-onboarded employees took some time to ramp up to speed. This meant that some tasks weren’t completed on schedule and the quality of some work was sub-standard. Whenever we noticed this, they were prompt about correcting the issue. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They’re willing to communicate regularly and often, which really helped the project be successful.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CTO of the Brave Thinking Institute. We do personal development coach training, and also advise on how to improve one’s business and life.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We wanted to create analysis reporting for our company.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We wanted to create a way to synthesize data so that we could calculate the profitability of each event we host. They put together a complete overview of what resources we would need, timelines, systems, and other things so that we could implement the system.

This was part of the first phase of their work. We used this information to decide our budgets for the coming year. Because of COVID-19, we haven’t been able to pursue actual implementation. 

What is the team composition?

Aparajeeta (Co-Founder & Chief Delivery Officer) was our main contact. She had a larger team supporting her. Most of the direct interaction was with her, but we also had conversations with Dj (Founder & CEO) during the process.

How did you come to work with ThirdEye Data?

One of my team members found ThirdEye through an online search, I believe. We narrowed it down to two or three companies, but ThirdEye was the only one able to give us the confidence that they really could do this. They really understood what we were trying to achieve. 

How much have you invested in them?

We spent around $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2019, and we put the project on pause in March 2020. 

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

Their work made team members more aware of the importance of data and how it can make a difference for our company. We saw a shift in the culture of the company, and of people being more aware of keeping track of data and reporting on data.

How did ThirdEye Data perform from a project management standpoint?

They did really well. They kept pushing it forward and they were very aware of our deadline. They were good at making contact with us and our company is very good at that well, so it was really the meeting of two minds and it really went well.

We are 100% a virtual company. Now we have 75 staff members, and they are all working virtually. Therefore, we had all of our meetings via Zoom. We used Basecamp and Microsoft Teams which they provided.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They understand data and have the ability to understand how we use data. They were able to understand that getting the data out of the system was just the first stage. It is a very important stage, but it is what comes after that, that is really important.

Other companies we spoke to were focused on data but not necessarily on what comes after, or were talking about what comes after but didn’t reassure us when it came to the data itself. With ThirdEye, I felt we got the whole package.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think so. All the way through we had a really iterative process. If we misunderstood each other, there were a couple of conversations where everything was resolved, and we moved forward. There were no issues at all. We were brilliant in sorting out issues. It is one of the smoother projects I have worked on.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Really listen to what ThirdEye has to say. Where the majority of people miss out is that they don’t understand the linkage between what data is and how you interpret the data and what you can use it for, and I think that is one of the aspects where I think ThirdEye really shines.

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.

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

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

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.

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.

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

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

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.

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.

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.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

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

What challenge were you trying to address with ThirdEye Data?

We needed guidance for the implementation of our project.

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.

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.