Sparkline: Data Driven Business Decisions Powered by Technology and Analytics

Embarking on a journey always requires a great deal of planning and preparation. Be it a travel plan or the journey towards building a successful organization, one can’t reach completion without relying on carefully extracted and well analyzed data. Every business house trying to meet its sales targets and provide customer-driven products and services, and yet maintain flexibility in their operations can’t drive the business without collecting necessary data at all time. Data enables key decision makers to develop stronger prepositions based on robust insights. Choosing the right technology to collect and analyze data that supports critical decision making process has become cardinal to today’s technology-driven business landscape. However, shifts in technology and regulatory changes present new opportunities as well as challenges to organizations globally. To deal with such challenges, companies often enlist the expertise of BI and analytics experts.
Sparkline, a specialist in harnessing technology to collect relevant data that can provide necessary foresights to aid in decision making is one such organization.

Sparkline’s expertise in empowering organizations with prudent decision making skills in analytics and technology allows businesses to reach their desired targets more accurately. Vinoaj (Vinny) Vijeyakumaar, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Sparkline, says, “We make data simple, insightful & actionable and bring businesses closer to their consumers by revealing their wants, needs & desires in real time, across all platforms.” Founded in 2013, the young organization has already built a strong clientele which includes names such as AirAsia, Google, DiGi, Fairmont, Reebonz, IKEA and Malaysian Airlines among others.

Forging Partnership,Leveraging Experience
Partnership and experience are pivotal for a young organization to attain success. Sparkline’s business model, strategy, approach, growth and across-the-board success validate the industry experience and strong partnership between Aleetza Senn and Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar.

Prior to Sparkline, Vinny worked at Google in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. During his tenure, he helped Google’s largest advertisers leverage Google technologies to improve efficiency and better connect with their customers. Much of his work focused on Google Analytics. In 2008, Vinny was transferred to Singapore to manage Google Analytics for the SEA region, where he was instrumental in growing the understanding and adoption of analytics among some of the region’s largest advertisers.

At the same time, Aleetza was managing Google’s largest customers in the region, mostly Fortune 500 companies, helping them to develop digital strategy across their business segments, with a key focus on digital marketing in search, display, video, social, and mobile. She was Google’s sixth employee in the Asia Pacific, and as part of her job, established several Google offices in the region. In fact, she took the initiative to be the only person to volunteer in the launch of YouTube in APAC and was the first YouTube employee in the region.

During their tenure at Google, the duo identified customers’ dilemma about using analytics for business. AleetzaSenn, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, adds, “We saw a niche in the market to start a company which simplified data, aggregated it, made it accessible and most importantly actionable.” Leveraging their prior industry experience the duo thus founded Sparkline.

Technology and Tool Agnostic Solutions
Sudden information outburst is a major concern for the businesses today. In spite of deploying advanced tools to gather corporate data, enterprises still find these tools hardly, if ever, connect copious amount of data stored in departmental silos. Moreover, businesses often stumble while keeping pace with technological advancements, and tools go obsolete soon. Obviously, they need smarter solution.

Sparkline understands this problem and therefore, its solutions are tool agnostic; it believes that it’s not the tool or the features that help businesses grow, rather it’s the ability of the business to understand what it needs to help get a job done.

The company handpicks suitable technologies from Adobe and Google, and the most efficient tools such as Lotame or Optimizely available in the market. By adopting a straightforward approach to digital analytics, Sparkline ensures that customers get business value and maximize their returns with deep product knowledge and training. The company follows a practical, simple and 100 percent transparent strategy in its processes. This helps technology providers retain business and invest time defining deal structures that answers real business needs, and just not sell more units.

The Singapore headquartered firm uses its Proprietary Framework to engage businesses across data spectrum.From Objectives to Data Architecture, tools and analysis, Sparkline enables companies to make their digital activity business relevant, and help unearth actionable customer behaviors. Aleetza states, “Sparkline is committed to elevating our value additions beyond just the technical aspects of data collection and measurement; we thrive to provide strategic business know-how.” This approach gives companies better insights about their customers and equips them with the knowledge they need to increase operational efficiency and profitability.

Astute Business Solutions for the Enterprises:
With today’s data explosion companies find themselves in a lurch to analyze and utilize this data to power business decisions. This is a difficult passage, as it needs thorough planning, execution and reflection. Digital data is generated in real time and in huge quantities, so the decisions need to be made quicker and businesses need to be flexible enough to align easily. Sparkline founders believed that by providing comprehensive services to customers in more effective and relevant ways, they could enhance the profit margin and drive innovation. So, the company started out by providing consulting services covering analytics technology and infrastructure to optimize technology investments.

Sparkline guides companies in taking the leap to a data-centric framework. Sparkline’s consultancy service analyses data in a consolidated way to drive action-ability, audits businesses to consolidate the tool stack, makes data more accurate and places governance for regular checking of tags as well as training, mentoring and support to make the business structurally self-sufficient. Aleetzaadds, “Sparkline looks closely at the human aspects of data, their demands, needs and desires of potential customers, and focuses on small, digestible changes and mostly in iterations that brings easy wins first.”

The company believes in quick and nimble insights that customers can easily digest and take action with the budgets and resources they already have rather than getting into deep retrospective analysis at the very onset. “We help clients focus on simple, actionable and iterative models to keep them current and move forward in increments, rather than suggesting sweeping, large changes,” reiterates Vinny. The company takes care of the complete delivery cycle: discovery, audit, implementation, insights, test and iterate the solution to meet the scale. Sparkline offers consultancy across the digital spectrum for large corporate customers. It uses its own auditing technology to design data architecture and ensures data accuracy in the process. It also consolidates tool-sets to create a streamlined, bespoke infrastructure. The company uses its unique measurement framework to consolidate several thousand possible metrics into a few hundred core metrics that dramatically reduce data overload and help businesses focus on simplified data set. Through proper training and mentorship, and use of tools from company’s product suite, it creates more nimble, test-and-iterate decision making model to keep up with the real time nature of the data.

Making Data more Actionable and Accessible
Sparkline has a strong partnership with Adobe and Google. It extensively uses Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, Optimizely, Marketshare, Hootsuite and many other technologies to supports its clients. The company has a multi-cultural team of experts providing digital analytics support to customers in 11 languages spanning across eight market verticals. It regularly partners with Google and Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) to facilitate the Squared Data Programme, a Data Analytics training programme and internship for Singapore graduates.

Sparkline’s analysts and integrators are Google Analytics Certified and Adobe Analytics Trained, qualifications that empower them to design sophisticated and more relevant digital experiences. Sparkline further plans to democratize digital data, to make data driven decision-making accessible to everyone. In February, Sparkline launched a training program, followed by a complete product suite in March that will allow it to train businesses on decision making. With its mission to harness the power of analytics to drive business decisions, Sparkline plans to convert more than 75 percent of the world’s data into digital form by 2020.“We don't want to be the smartest people in the room, but the most relevant one. We believe in driving results through creative and practical suggestions that bear immediate impact,” Vinny concludes