Farmington Hills Firm Growing With BI
FARMINGTON HILLS -- A business intelligence company that has grown at a 35-40 percent per year clip the past two years is predicting another great year with new clients.
DataFactZ had 90 new hires companywide in 2011, including 20 new jobs created in Michigan. It now has more than 375 employees across the globe and an impressive client portfolio that includes brands such as Walt Disney, Discovery, Meijer and Amway.
DataFactZ was established in 2002 by Krishna Kallakuri and three partners, Sridhar Kodati, Ravi Vallem and Venkat Gone, all of whom are still with the company. Kallakuri, who has a bachelor's degree in engineering in electronics and communications, while his partners manage administration and human relations, marketing and finance.
In essence, DataFactZ -- a brand name of Reliable Software Resources Inc. -- helps companies make sense of the mega-mountains of data generated by modern business management software.
"Most of the mid-market and Fortune 500 companies struggle with data consolidation," Kallakuri said. "There is data everywhere, coming in from ERP systems or point of sale systems or inventory systems. Our typical engagement, the biggest goal is to consolidate all of these data sources into a single data warehouse. So we speak to the business, interact with business users, and understand their requirements, what kind of reporting they need every day."
The result is some kind of reporting system -- maybe a dashboard, maybe something else.
Most of DataFactZ's employees work at client sites on custom projects, but the company also offers an "offsite center" in Farmington Hills to control costs.
That allows DataFactZ to cut project costs -- admittedly not as low as offshoring an IT project, but still substantially.
"We don't match the offshore price but we fall somewhere in between -- clients can get a quality project for less and get more mileage out of a dollar," Kallakuri said. "I see many outsourcing projects fail because of a lack of communications and lack of understanding and problems with different time zones. We have people who can communicate extremely well who are in the same time zones as the client."
Kallakuri said the latest growth opportunity for the company is to make sense of the heaps of data created by companies' interactions with customers on social media.
"Facebook, Twitter, people are interacting at a personal level and also follow many products," Kallakuri said. "We can bring in all that data from social media platforms and add meaning to the data. If my users release a new promotion we can tell them how many liked it, how many did not like it, and why they did not like it. We look for patterns and trends in all that unstructured data."
More at www.datafactz.com.
