Acunu, the pioneer in real-time Casandra-based streaming data analysis, has announced Acunu Analytics 5.0, which provides end-users with direct access to all its features as well as analytics dashboards on virtually any desktop or mobile device.

Unlike other self-service BI tools like QlikView, which does not support Cassandra databases, or Tableau, which only provides one-off extracts of data, Acunu Analytics 5.0 provides business users with direct access to high-velosity data streams such as clickstreams in near real-time, combined with historical data in Cassandra. This can allow users for instance to measure the impact of app upgrades on a population of users as soon as the new version is rolled out or measure the impact of a new marketing campaign on a test market within hours or days. And they can compare real-time data to historic data to discover trends and respond before the competition.

Again unlike other self-service analytics systems, which put large amounts of processing and data on end-user devices, Acunu runs on a server cluster. Users can access it via Web browsers including Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox. That allows users to access analysis from virtually any end-user device, including most tablets and smartphones as well as desktops and laptops.

It also allows analysts to develop dashboards or data visualizations that update in real time and push them out to large populations of either internal or external end-users, said CTO Tim Moreton. For instance cab hailing service provider Hailo uses Acunu to analyze passenger volumes by neighborhood in cities and shares that interactive map with all the cab drivers using its service. Hailo also uses Acunu to analyze response by both cabbies and their customers to upgrades to its apps in real time, allowing it to customize the apps to user needs faster.

Acunu 5.0 supports drag-and-drop query creation, allowing users to add analytics functions, the fields they want to apply those functions to, the constraints, groupings, etc., and to specify the visualizations they want to use easily, without programming knowledge.

It automatically infers the schema from a sample of events from a new data source and allows users either to accept the inferred structure or manually edit it.

It automatically creates aggregates to deliver rapid resonse for queries even on very high data volumes, by maintaining OLAP cubes on ingest.

It supports custom plug-in “ingesters” to connect easily to new data sources.

Current subscribers to Acunu Analytics can upgrade to 5.0 for free.

Plusses and Minuses

Compared to competitors such as Tableau and Roambi, the big plus for Acunu obviously is its ability to analyze data streams in real time, combined with its support for self-service analytics. This opens up numerous use cases that other self-service analytics systems cannot support. To accomplish this, however, it has to run on a server cluster with access to the data streams rather than on end-user devices, whyich means that update speed is dependent on the speed of the user’s network connection.

Its networked, browser-based access allows it to support virtual any end-user device, while its competition is limited to the devices their software runs on. However, this also can create issues for mobile users, who may not have high-speed Internet access in all locations. It means that mobile users will need to access it through cellular services in many locations, which can be a problem given that many tablets do not have cellular radios and that cellular data service can be expensive. Also Web browsers generally do not support multi-touch control. As a result, users should expect to do their analytic and dashboard development on desktop or laptop devices and use mobile devices mainly for consumption of the analytics or simple data entry, such as calling a cab in the Hailo example.