Aera Technology ready to disrupt the market

The recent IT Press Tour offered to the press crew the opportunity to meet and visit Aera Technology, led by Frederic Laluyaux for a few quarters now.

Under his leadership, the company, named in the past FusionOps made a real shuffle, renamed Aera Technology, new directions and new funding of $50M. We all remember what Frederic did at Anaplan taking the rein of the company in 2012 with a few dozens employees and leaving almost 4 years later in a very different position with more than 500 hundreds people, coming from a confidential player to a market leader with 4 VC rounds for a total of $220M under his tenure. Wow a real success that fueled Anaplan to be introduced a few days ago to the NYSE. Efforts and strategy put in place by Frederic have paid off.

Aera Technology plays in a different segment but have some similarities with Anaplan: the company exists before Frederic arrived, it's pretty small, confidential with strong technology.

The main idea of the company is top optimize and boost enterprise's business processes by considering cognitive automation. This approach addresses these business challenges with a different angle with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data modeling expertise and business optimization knowledge.

The effect or value proposition is a self-driving enterprise service able to suggest business directions and tactics, becoming a trusted advisor for the executive team. In term of steps, the Aera cycle is based of 4 key permanent functions critical for the accuracy of recommendation:

1. Understand phase with crawlers navigating the environment and swallowing tons of data,
2. Recommend phase with suggestions for financial improvement and operational gains,
3. Predict phase is crucial, it is a real-time data service leveraging AI and ML to deliver key precise informations to sustain and improve the business.
4. Act phase is related to the execution of the decisions.

Beyond the traditional interaction, the human-machine interface is also a key piece of the solution with a similar experience like Siri, Goole or Alexa voice control. Let's start with "Aera? ..."

A good example of Aera is given by Merck KGaA healthcare division. The company runs the solution to improve significantly the supply chain process with better predictions, real time visibility and reduction of supply shortages. The team will expand the perimeter of Aera from 100 to 5000 products following the pilot phase. Merck understands the competitive advantage provided by Aera, it reminds the early days of SAP and ERPs when early adopters increased their gap with followers.

The core element is the Aera Cognitive Operating System aka Aera COS which groups the 3 bottom layers on the architecture diagram above: Crawlers, Data Processing Engine (DPE) and Cognitive Data Layer (CDL). The solution built by Aera uses Apache Hadoop and Spark, Redis, we heard also Exasol, all running on AWS. The next key component is the Aera Cognitive WorkBench (CWB) which provides new methods to make decisions on/with data and delivers real-time recommendations to improve the business line. It clearly accelerates decisions and visibility is highly improved. Again it's difficult to control what it's not well measured so imagine for predictions...

Fueled by AI, the CWB allows the decision maker to add a new dimension of thinking aligned with the speed of changes by competition, customers and market demands.

Aera belongs to a small group of players that leverage enterprises and market data to boost business thanks to its unique cognitive approach fueled by AI, ML and specific advanced algorithms. Something is happening with Area.