iView™ Platform

In 2005, InsideView™ saw an opportunity to build a great Business Search & intelligence application for sales people. What a difference three years, a dozen partners, and over a hundred customers can make.  Not only did we build that application, we developed a powerful, extensible platform in the process. Did our engineers have too much time on their hands? No, it was more like a little foresight, experience and a pretty decent espresso machine.

So what are the main ingredients of our Business Intelligence & Search platform?  Hint:  There are three of them. Borrowing a page from the software engineering playbook, we applied the age old Model-View-Controller design pattern to the original problem we set out to solve – information overload for sales people.  We quickly realized that while we were solving this problem specifically for sales people, we could go a long way in solving it for all business professionals. And so our humble application became a full-fledged platform with three separate, abstracted layers:  data, analysis, and application.

Data Layer
Before you can know what you know, someone (or something) else needs to know it first.  For the average sales rep, that someone or something could be any of the dozens of information sources that cover the companies, executives, events, key insights, and relationships involved in closing new business.

InsideView casts a wide net, aggregating both structured and unstructured data sources, paid subscription and free content, mass media and social media outlets, editorially-controlled and user-contributed data, traditional people directories and social networks, etc.  The InsideView data layer was designed to be flexible and extensible, allowing the platform to integrate virtually any type of content or data provider.

As data continues to become commoditized, we believe that information wants to be free but it doesn’t necessarily want to be found.  The InsideView platform addresses this challenge of finding all potentially relevant information – so that you don’t have to.

Analysis Layer
Now that InsideView knows what there is to know (Data layer), how can it determine what it is that you need to know? While aggregation is a huge time saver and ensures reasonably complete information, it does not help you find the right information at the right time. Sales reps spend countless hours sifting through information that is irrelevant to their business, either because it’s the wrong information or it’s the wrong time.

InsideView continuously monitors and analyzes the thousands of data sources aggregated within the data layer.  Automated smart Agents identify compelling business events and key company insights, map personal and company connections, and match similar entities (E.g. companies, executives, news articles.)  The InsideView analysis layer is powerful and flexible, allowing users to customize their own smart Agents as well as personalize their company watch lists, alerts and connections.

Bringing all available information together in one place is helpful but alone it is not enough to significantly impact productivity. The InsideView platform provides the kind of intelligent analysis required to surface just those key insights, events, and relationships that move a deal forward – and avoid distracting sales reps with anything more.

Application Layer
Now what about where you know it (i.e. where you are presented with that information?)  Making information truly actionable is just as much about how and where you present it as it is about the actual information.  Give a busy sales rep the perfect information in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong (or no) context, and you may as well not give them the information at all.

The InsideView application layer is extensible, allowing for more rapid development of new applications by InsideView and partners developers (via both mash-ups or APIs), which leverage the existing Data and Analysis layers.

The promise of Business Search & Intelligence is delivering the right information, at the right time, in the right place.  The InsideView platform provides a sound architecture and flexible integration frame work for partners to leverage Business Search & Intelligence within existing applications or create brand new applications.