• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, June 23, 2016

Cloud analytics Platform Keen IO this week launched a new offering it’s calling Native Analytics. The tool aims to enable customers to integrate Keen’s real-time analytics and advanced visualizations into their own products and services. Keen says you can think of it as an Amazon Web Services for analytics.

Keen’s Native Analytics is a kind of antidote to walled garden data warehouses, since it opens up its platform API and visualization library to all developers. 

Keen cites Bluecore, a customer experience platform used by New Egg, and Staples as early adopters of its Native Analytics tool. Bluecore’s customers get real-time dashboards and data on shopping cart abandonment rates and email recapture campaigns. The analytics could make a real difference to Bluecore by helping the company build visual analytics dashboards for a brand’s marketing team. Keen also says the offering reduces the time it takes to implement new data metrics and custom queries. The upshot is that marketers can experiment with new measurements, respond more quickly to trends, and use their incoming data more effectively.

Keen works a lot with publishers. Customers include Mic, AJ+, Quartz, O'Reilly Media, and Motley Fool. “As media companies continue to reinvent themselves, data science offers a competitive advantage to build a more engaged audience and more profitable business,” Will O’Brien, COO, Keen IO, told RTBlog.  

O’Brien said customers have used Keen’s technology to implement engagement tracking and hotspot page analysis to determine where best placement is for a native article, which article is going viral, and which ad is likely to make the most money at that time. The point is that this type of function enables publishers to compete on intelligence gleaned from data. Native Analytics, according to O’Brien, enables Keen’s customers to embed real-time visualizations and data into their internal tools and products.

Keen argues that off-the-shelf solutions aren’t flexible enough for the quickly changing needs of individual businesses that need a thorough understanding of their data. Also, he thinks there simply aren’t enough “data scientists” to satisfy the needs of every company that needs a solid data analytics program.