The context and purpose behind this series: “The 17 Companies Reshaping the Landscape of Enterprise AI“.
Who They Are
When RapidMinder was founded in 2007, it was clear that they were on to something. And, that something paid off when they received a $16 million investment in 2016.
At the core of RapidMiner is artificial intelligence built on an open and extensible data science platform to empower the enterprise. This foundation is serving them well and bolsters their key areas of focus called “The RapidMiner Way“.
- Transformational business impact
- Upskill your organization
- Depth for data scientists simplified for everyone else
- Easy to trust, tune & explain
- Future-proof innovation, portability & extensibility
With headquarters in Boston, MA, and locations in London and Germany, RapidMiner is making a huge difference for many organizations, universities, and users. Under the leadership of CEO Peter Lee, the impact they are making is clear with numbers like this:
- 700,000+ global users
- 40,000+ organizations
- 4,000+ universities
- 350+ enterprise clients
- 100+ extensions
We have a very unique platform where you can move from the data science part – prototyping and validation – to business value which is operationalization. This is where you take those predictive insights and embed them downstream into human or automated intervention
Peter Lee | CEO, RapidMiner
SOURCE: https://youtu.be/BpHXz_yVGMk
What They Do
The RapidMiner solution is showcased as a “fully transparent, end-to-end platform” targeted for unique roles. The platform has three key products called Studio, Go, and Notebooks.
RapidMiner Studio
Studio is a comprehensive data science platform with visual workflow design and full automation for the:
Data
Engineer
Accelerate connectivity to enterprise data
Business
Analyst
Easily use automated machine learning
RapidMiner Go
Go is an “AutoML built for everyone”. Get non-coding business experts involved in data science projects to provide critical context and help drive results faster for:
Domain
Expert
Ensure business alignment
Data
Scientist
Amplify productivity & collaboration
RapidMiner Notebooks
Notebooks is a collaborative tool to bring inspiration between coders and non-coders and to enhance productivity and streamline governance.
CAO
Operationalize competitive advantage across teams
CIO
Scale prescriptive analytics across the enterprise
RapidMiner AI Hub
The AI Hub from RapidMiner brings together the Studio, Go, and Notebooks capabilities under one roof. This approach brings AI to people, process, and value.
- Make data science a team sport: Empower people of all skills to collaborate and create AI solutions.
- Turn AI into business impact: Operationalize models and integrate AI anywhere to transform your business.
- Ensure enterprise-grade security and compliance: Integrate with enterprise regulations, policies and technology.
- Deploy, scale and operate with ease: Trust a modern platform architecture that performs reliably
Most Unique / Impactful Application
Something that RapidMiner emphasizes quite a bit is their ability to provide depth for data scientists, but also provide simplified tools for everyone else.
This level of depth and simplicity fuels one of their products called RapidMiner Turbo Prep. They describe this tool as a way to “blend, wrangle, and cleanse data with intuitive data prep that’s fun to use“.
Intuitive Data Prep
Work directly with data in a fast, fun, and interactive data prep experience.
Explore & Visualize
Interactively explore data to evaluate its health, completeness, and quality
Cleanse
Radically simplify data cleansing for machine learning
Who They Have Impacted
Getting somewhere on time is something we all take for granted when traveling by air. We don’t give a second thought to the behind-the-scenes work to make sure all things are running on time – until there is a delay.
To combat this, predictive information is needed to help mitigate issues and plan appropriately, and this is what Lufthansa wanted to do better. In a nutshell, they needed to increase operational profitability through better flight arrival time predictions.
In collaboration with Lufthansa Industry Solutions, RapidMiner worked on a solution to predict arrival times.
The Need
A delayed arrival may impact catering service, the flow of flight crews between aircraft, gate availability, connecting flights for passengers, and more. This can add up to significant costs for Lufthansa, especially in cases where a passenger misses a connecting flight.
We wanted to predict the actual arrival time of a flight to within a 5 minute window, at the very moment the plane took off. This would typically give the Lufthansa operations team enough time to make any necessary adjustments at the arrival destination to minimize passenger inconvenience and costs for Lufthansa.
Dr. Stanislaw Schmal | Analytics Project Manager for Lufthansa Industry Solutions
The Result
The solution that Lufthansa Industry Solutions developed puts RapidMiner in a central role but it is not used in a vacuum. The team’s technology ecosystem includes Hadoop, Oracle, and Teradata for data storage, and they still use R and Python for some of their work.
This resulted in cost benefits for Lufthansa in the tens of millions.
Dr. Schmal noted, “We have been able to show the business how much our work has reduced costs. Not only can we show it for each time period, but also cumulatively since the time our models went to work. It creates a compelling case for the value of applying data science to this problem.”
