ClearStory Data Announces First Interactive and Collaborative Data Storytelling Solution

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Oct 15, 2014) - O'Reilly Strata + Hadoop World -- ClearStory Data, the company that's bringing Data Intelligence to everyone, today announced the addition of interactive and Collaborative StoryBoards™, to its data intelligence solution. ClearStory enables fast, disparate data harmonization powered by Spark technology, deep exploration of data and in-context user collaboration to speed data-driven decisions. With today's unveiling of interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards at the 2014 Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York, organizations can empower all key business stakeholders to engage in rich, interactive storytelling on the latest insights, allowing more users to interact and collaborate and make decisions in context.

ClearStory Data also released recent proprietary research of companies across all industries that revealed:

• 74% of organizations want to blend data from more than four disparate data sources.
• 61% spend most of their time wrangling data so they can get to a point of visual analysis.
• 70% want insights to be revealed faster versus taking days or weeks.
• 76% resort to communication via email attachments.
• 64% resort to spreadsheets when it comes to sharing insights with business users.

Interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards™ presents insights like scenes in a movie. It gives line of business users direct access to living insights where all key stakeholders can collaborate on observations. Every scene or 'living analysis' contains interactive narratives so observations are explained in context. The intuitive experience speeds consumption of insights and therefore speeds action. All views in a StoryBoard maintain in context as data updates and users can further explore them based on their roles and permissions to ensure the right people get to the right insights.

ClearStory's Interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards™ features:

• Interactive Views from one or more 'Data Stories' to deliver a complete and holistic storyline around the situation being analyzed.
• Interactive Narratives for each insight to explain the observations in context.
• In-Context Collaboration so decision makers see the right context around the insights to make decisions.
• Deep exploration of the data-driven storyline so key observers can further conduct analysis via more data or more questioning.

"At Rumble Entertainment, our mobile and online games are played by millions of people around the world. We depend on deep daily, interactive insights within our teams and our partner network," said Greg Richardson, Chief Executive Officer of Rumble Entertainment. "With ClearStory, we want to leverage the new StoryBoard capabilities so data can become more understandable in-context without a loss or delay in sharing key insights. ClearStory has the potential to handle large data volumes while supporting interactive, fast delivery of insights across a wide base of globally distributed users and that's exciting for us."

"The importance of communicating the story from the data and analytics is critical to help organizations not just discover but understand the situation and opportunity," said Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer of Ventana Research. "ClearStory Data continues to innovate in providing the right level of interactivity and narratives to collaborate and explore the full potential through its StoryBoards which is the foundation for how business can focus to optimize and achieve the best possible outcomes."

"Accessibility to more data helps build and enrich a data-driven story and that's the benefit of harnessing data; however, the problem with more information is the unintended assumptions that are made or the lack of context that can lead to the wrong conclusions," said Sharmila Mulligan, CEO and founder of ClearStory Data. "ClearStory's introduction of interactive and Collaborative StoryBoards is to ensure data is used to tell a storyline with context, interactivity, and stakeholder collaboration so the right conclusions are reached much faster. With more data sources being converged in a single analysis the storyline, context and collaborative decisions in context are essential. The last generation of rigid dashboarding simply was not built to address today's data complexity and speed of decision making."

About ClearStory Data
A Gartner Cool Vendor in Big Data for 2014, ClearStory Data is bringing next-generation Data Intelligence to everyone in order to accelerate the way businesses get answers across any number of data sources. By dramatically simplifying data access to internal and external sources, harmonizing disparate data on-the-fly, and enabling fast, collaborative exploration, ClearStory Data's end-to-end solution includes an integrated platform and incredibly simple user application. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DAG Ventures, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). To keep up with how the world is becoming more Data Intelligent, visit www.clearstorydata.com and follow us on Twitter @ClearStoryData.