Frédéric Robert, Consulting Director in charge of the Data Advisory Business Line, shares his experience with Tale of Data.
APGAR is an independent consulting and services company founded in 2013. The group, a pure player in the fields of data management, analytics and AI, supports companies of all sizes and in all business sectors that place their data at the heart of their strategy.
Nearly 200 employees work within the company in France and internationally across 12 locations (France, Lebanon, Portugal, Spain, UK, USA, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia), Apgar offers a wide range of services, from consulting to implementation and training, from the provision of preconfigured solutions to the support of platforms in production at its customers sites, with the conviction that it is possible to reconcile data exploitation with ethics and social responsibility.
APGAR has been identified three times by Gartner as one of the world's top 18 data management players in its "MDM Market Guide 2024".
APGAR is constantly seeking new solutions, and places innovation at the heart of its strategy in order to position its service and consulting offerings with differentiating value for its customers. There are a number of obvious facts:
1/ For many years, data quality was forgotten, with companies thinking that with the arrival of Big Data, the Cloud and AI, they would escape this task.
2/ The major software publishers, having worked hard to ensure that this functionality was integrated into the other components of their Data Platforms, the latter became inoperative patchworks.
3/ As the world of data became increasingly self-service, companies wanted to give their business teams real access to their data. The ability to manipulate and control this data enables them to create their own reports and share quality data.
It's clear that today - especially with the growing awareness of AI and Machine Learning - data quality management is once again of prime importance, even if, in most cases, it remains largely underestimated.
"It's not AI that will miraculously correct the data.It's by doing the groundwork, working with the business to ensure quality, and checking that companies realize they need it to get their use cases out the door", explains Frédéric Robert, Consulting Director in charge of the Data Advisory Business Line.
"I was very interested in Tale of Data 4 years ago, because we were looking for an offer around data preparation, quality and management. Its positioning around data is a little different, very Franco-French, and we like working with this human-scale ecosystem. We wanted to equip our customers with pragmatic, practical solutions that were a long way from the big players on the market.
The technical aspect depends on whether you're a pure player or not. If you are, the editor builds his solution around the desired objective, i.e. data preparation.
"It's not like all the other players who have an accumulation of technological bricks they've bought out, some of which are outdated. In the case of Tale of Data, there's a vision, the tool is new, built from the latest technological bricks," explains Mr. Robert.
"We're confronted with a lack of awareness when it comes to data recovery or re-quality. When the time comes to validate, test and load the data to be transferred, we realize that companies haven't budgeted enough time or resources, and have decided to use Excel on their own at the last minute. Clearly, a solution like Tale of Data helps us to be very pragmatic, and to provide a much more malleable, high-performance tool than an Excel file. I wouldn't say they've come in as 'saviors', but rather as a bit of a last-minute solution to make life easier for our customers and consultants," he continues.
In fact, the solution is pragmatic, simple to use and easy to learn. The screens are designed to provide the services expected of the solution. There's also an awareness of the solution's "replayability".
"With Tale of Data, we know how to version a data pipe, we know how to say why we made an evolution, we know how to reuse it on another perimeter, in another country for example, or with other volumetrics, by making the right adaptations. There's this capacity for proof. It's part of industrialization, and that's an important thing in the world of data platforms.
APGAR also notes that organizations that used to have competence centers with central teams to manage all their data are moving away from this model. They are working more and more in "federated" mode, with data relays in business departments who know their data and processes.
"Businesses just need to be acculturated to data tools, and it's easier to train them than to do everything centrally," explains Mr. Robert.
One of Tale of Data's strengths lies in the quality of the end-to-end solution, the fact that it saves teams the trouble of redoing things, and enables them to share knowledge more effectively to achieve better results.
"With Tale of Data, as with a cake recipe, you can prepare, monitor and transform data from end to end, in a pragmatic, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn way. As such, we can draw inspiration from it, or even reuse part of the recipe to make something else (sustainability), which represents an economic factor and a time-saver".
With the emergence of AI, Machine Learning and generative AI, we are witnessing a market expectation, since employees have had access to these tools on a personal basis.
"It's becoming very important for all data platform solutions to be augmented. With this notion, there's the co-pilot aspect. We support the user so that he or she can auto-complete, easily copy data without making mistakes, and receive the right alert messages. Tale of Data also automates data management processes. There's a lot of demand for monitoring and predictive data management solutions," says Mr Robert.
To find out more about these prospects and how Tale of Data integrates generative AI to revolutionize data quality, don't miss our editorial: "Generative AI to optimize data quality: Tale of Data's innovative approach".
In the future, the partnership with Tale of Data is clearly taking shape
"We believe in the solution, in the business model, in the fact that it brings value to the market, that it is differentiating and fits well with our values" concludes Mr Robert.