Quietly going about its business appears to be paying off for Acumen BI, named yesterday as data platform vendor Qlik’s Asia Pacific solution provider of the year.
With offices in Auckland, Wellington and Brisbane, Acumen Consulting began life and continues to deliver ERP and web services, working with Microsoft Dynamics among others. However, it is the data, analytics and artificial intelligence expertise of its business intelligence unit that is increasingly attracting attention.
A scan by Reseller News showed Acumen BI delivering services to Capital & Coast DHB, the Tertiary Education Commission, Police, Fire and Emergency NZ and the NZ Transport Agency among its blue-chip government clients.
The New Zealand Police’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), for instance tapped Acumen BI as part of its service delivery transformation project.
Acumen BI was tasked to provide improved tools for prioritisation, database integration and analysis of financial intelligence. The goal was to assist with anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism by enhancing the Police’s ability to identify previously unknown targets and trends.
Helping organisations make the most of their data was Acumen BI’s mission, said Daniel Gargiulo, Acumen BI’s practice leader.
Gargiulo first encountered Qlik in the UK. Before returning to New Zealand and joining Acumen BI in 2013, he ran his own analytics practice and worked as a senior information analyst at one of the UK’s largest National Health Service trusts.
He realised the technology could change the lives of the people he was working with by empowering them to use and understand data directly themselves with an analyst helping to make sure data was presented correctly.
Qlik made that easy, Gargiulo said. “Qlik is a leader in data literacy, how to read, analyse and understand it,” he told Reseller News.
With around 25 permanent staff, Acumen BI’s mission was to help clients get value from their data, especially during a time when there was a huge shortage of skilled people.
Considering the number and calibre of Qlik partners across the Asia Pacific region, which included China, Gargiulo said he was happy the firm had been recognised.
The key was Acumen BI’s “huge” focus on its customers and their outcomes, he added, but it was also about how the firm engaged with and built a strong relationship with Qlik.
In most engagements, Acumen BI was helping clients to extract and access data from operational systems, to transform it and make it usable and then to deliver insights through devices such as dashboards. Finally, a machine learning layer could be added to further automate and scale analysis and insight delivery.
While Qlik was a huge part of the puzzle, Acument BI was also a partner of cloud data warehouse vendor Snowflake and cloud-based machine learning and AI vendor DataRobot.
“That combination of Qlik, Snowflake and DataRobot is very powerful,” Gargiulo said.