Rapid Insight Inc., a data analytics tool provider, announced the launch of a new integration tool that enables users to visually map where data is originating and where it's being applied. The solution, called Veera, is built upon an earlier Rapid Insight product, Data Integration 2.0, and is intended to help users overcome common barriers to data access, ad-hoc analysis, and report generation.

Michael Laracy, Rapid Insight's founder and CEO, tells 5 Minute Briefing that Veera was inspired by a need consistently seen among customers employing data mining and predictive analytics. "For most companies out in the marketplace, the pain point is data. What Veera brings to the table is it allows a user to work with data coming from multiple sources. You can be working with an Oracle database, SQL Server database, spreadsheets, text files, SAS or SPSS files. Veera lets you integrate all the data together, clean it up, aggregate it, create reports, create analytic data sets, and create data marts."

Powered by Rapid Insight's Dataflo3G technology, Veera's drag-and-drop analytic process builder enables users to produce reports and create analytic datasets by merging, aggregating, cleansing, and transforming data from formats as disparate as Oracle, MySQL, Excel, Access, SQL Server, and text. The tool is intended for non-technical business users, Laracy adds.

Veera is designed to run from a desktop computer, "and lets people create a visual picture of their process," Laracy continues. "In other words if I'm pointing at a couple of tables from an Oracle database, and merging that with some spreadsheets, some text files, and maybe even a SQL Server database, I can create a visual mapping of what I'm doing to the data. I can see exactly where all the data is coming from, what's being done to the data, through to where the data is being put, as far as a report, or a data set or a data mart."

For more details, go here.