Before executives can decide on a new supply agreement or inventory change, they have to view the relevant business records, which is easier said than done in a large company where data is spread across multiple systems. Aera Technology has taken it upon itself to remedy the situation.

The Mountain View, California-based firm entered the business intelligence market today spending the past decade selling supply chain management software under the name FusionOps. Aera’s new vision is supported by a $50 million investment from New Enterprise Associates. Its competitive efforts will be spearheaded by Silicon Valley veteran Frederic Laluyaux, who is coming aboard as chief executive after spending five years at Anaplan Inc., a software as a service startup expected to go public this year.

Aera has carried over the data aggregation algorithms in the FusionOps product family to a new cloud-based business intelligence platform. The service can combine information from a company’s internal systems, automatically remove formatting inconsistencies and make the combined whole accessible in the form of sleek visualizations.

The graphs are available in a central dashboard that also features a resident artificial intelligence. According to Aera, the virtual assistant is designed to help decision-makers dig into the information on the screen. Its behavior can be customized using so-called skills, feature bundles that apply the underlying machine learning algorithms to specific areas.

The platform features more than half a dozen such skills on launch. Users that deploy the Supply Chain Overview Skill, for example, can ask Aera to surface information such as how much their company spends on shipping and have the bot identify opportunities for improvement. It’s also capable of carrying out certain optimizations that are automatically applied to the relevant systems.

Meanwhile, companies whose needs are not fully met by the readymade skills can build their own using a workbench built into the platform. The offering essentially combines capabilities from the world of data visualization software and chatbots, an approach that could go a long way towards setting Aera apart in the highly competitive business intelligence segment.

Other players are also working to build artificial intelligence capabilities into their tools. Tableau Software Inc., for instance, recently introduced a recommendation engine that can observe how data is utilized at a firm and offer usage suggestions to analysts working to visualize it.

Image: Aera