One of the biggest challenges for companies today is the inability to see what is really happening at any given moment. Manifest Insights is an exciting new Startup from Portland that develops powerful dashboards that visualize today’s on-premise and off-premise data in a flash. We caught up with CEO Dan Blaisdell to learn more.
insideHPC: Let’s start in the beginning. Who is Manifest Insights and who do you help?
Dan Blaisdell: We are a data consulting and visualization company. We help companies gather together data from all the different sources wherever it may be and bring it together in an easy-to-use and powerful dashboard, where they can slice and dice and view the data.
insideHPC: Help me out with what ‘dashboard’ means in this context. Is this like a single pane of glass where it can see everything that’s going on within the company?
Dan Blaisdell: Yeah, it’s a high level snapshot. It could be all of your typical data visualizations – your column charts, line charts, pie charts, hidden apps – but it can also be a very powerful data analytics tool, where you can slice and dice, filter your data, and export your data. So it’s that combination of really an easy-to-use high level dashboard and very powerful deep dive analytics.
insideHPC: We’re here at OSCON with a lot of small companies like yours. What would you say is your key strength that you want to communicate to your customers?
Dan Blaisdell: I would say our key strength is how adaptable our solution is. If the data is in your local sequel database or if it’s in some cloud third-party data source like New Relic or Google Analytics, we’re going to be able to take that data and we’re going to bring it together. We’ve got developers who are ready to be able to tackle those different types of challenges versus someone who’s saying, “No we only support these three data source and that’s it.”
We are going to be able to take the data from all different sources. We’re going to be able to work with it however you need to use it. You could be a product and software company yourself and we could add analytics to your offering so that your cloud offering as a service would be able to have analytics branded and labeled to look exactly the way you want it, or you can just be a company that’s doing marketing and manufacturing that wants to be able to dissect and analyze your own data for your internal management. We’re going to be able to adapt to either of those conditions. We’re going to be able to style it the way you want and we’re going to be able to do it quickly.
insideHPC: That is fascinating. Can you use data that’s either on-premise or in the cloud or both at the same time?
Dan Blaisdell: Yeah, absolutely. Really, there’s no restrictions on where the data may be, because any data that isn’t in a very typical format, we’re going to be able to write custom code that’s going to help bring that data in. We’re not going to shut off that data source just because it’s a little bit more difficult to access. That’s part of our consulting side. We’re not just a product; we’re also data consultants.
insideHPC: I was going to ask you about that. Being a small company and doing the consulting, would you consider your agility and your ability to deploy this stuff quickly as a strength?
Dan Blaisdell: Absolutely. For many companies, they’ve looked at doing this internally and they’re looking at six months to a year to be able to hire their own staff. Most of these companies are busy. They’re working on their own products, their own services. They don’t really have the expertise in-house. They’re looking at hiring staff and paying them from six months to a year to be able to develop their own in-house solution that only they can use versus something that we can do in probably a matter of weeks. We can wrangle their data, bring it together, and bring it to market for them as something that they can use internally for their company.
