EXPLAINER
Palta Brain: a brand new platform for portfolio companies
Image credits: Unsplash
Palta Brain is a data collection, processing and analytics platform built to create a competitive advantage and streamline knowledge and best practices sharing between companies within the Palta portfolio. The basic idea is to make a flexible, reliable, and scalable system to connect a mobile app via SDK quickly, integrate required 3rd-party data sources and create a set of standard reports for the product, marketing, growth, and other teams. In addition, the Palta Brain team plans to expand the platform with valuable additional services, such as data quarantine (quality), A/B testing, LTV prediction, billing, etc.
CIO at Palta
We discussed with Alexei Zhurba, CIO at Palta, how product teams would benefit from the platform.
How did the idea of creating your own platform come about?
We got an important insight while working with our products: although each product is unique, they work with very similar data. The tech stack varies, but products generally do similar solutions to collect, process, and analyse data, calculate and monitor metrics, build dashboards and reports, and provide personalised service for their customers.
Working with big data always leads to the same questions: Is it stored reliably and securely? What about data quality? Are the metrics calculated accurately? That's why we decided to create our data platform. The original idea was to collect the data, prepare it for analytics, bring in an analyst team, and help product teams create dashboards. Still, almost from the beginning, we realised that such a platform could have a broader application: products could use this data to conduct experiments and tests, integrate with 3rd-party marketing and common solutions, etc.
Health, wellbeing, fitness data is similar to oil in the 19th-20th centuries: everyone knows about oil for fuel, but another usage has yet to be explored. We are still to find many ways to empower our products with proper data, let them share experience and collaborate around Palta Brain.
Working with big data always leads to the same questions: Is it stored reliably and securely? What about data quality? Are the metrics calculated accurately? That's why we decided to create our data platform. The original idea was to collect the data, prepare it for analytics, bring in an analyst team, and help product teams create dashboards. Still, almost from the beginning, we realised that such a platform could have a broader application: products could use this data to conduct experiments and tests, integrate with 3rd-party marketing and common solutions, etc.
Health, wellbeing, fitness data is similar to oil in the 19th-20th centuries: everyone knows about oil for fuel, but another usage has yet to be explored. We are still to find many ways to empower our products with proper data, let them share experience and collaborate around Palta Brain.
What is the meaning of Palta Brain?
Our brains obtain and process data coming from our sensory organs all the time. Processing, making conscious or unconscious conclusions and interacting with the outside world - that is all our brain does. The platform will become such a brain for our ecosystem.
Who is working on the platform, and at what stage is the project now?
Since the beginning of 2021, we have been gathering a team with experience in building data platforms: architects, data engineers, software developers, and BI experts. These are people with solid industrial backgrounds and vast experience, allowing them to quickly iterate to find the best solutions.
At the moment, product teams are gradually migrating to the platform. To get things done properly, we work closely with each migrating team to ensure its requirements are met, historical data are migrated, and people get all necessary training and help.
There will be no point in time when we stop doing new things. In the next few months, we plan to migrate all of our products, finish establishing key processes, like data governance, and then focus on adding value by creating and integrating services that remove the burden and support product growth.
At the moment, product teams are gradually migrating to the platform. To get things done properly, we work closely with each migrating team to ensure its requirements are met, historical data are migrated, and people get all necessary training and help.
There will be no point in time when we stop doing new things. In the next few months, we plan to migrate all of our products, finish establishing key processes, like data governance, and then focus on adding value by creating and integrating services that remove the burden and support product growth.
What value does Palta Brain bring to portfolio companies?
The data platform itself is of great value. Moreover, we see a lot of potential synergy between products. It's not only about sharing knowledge and experience but more practical ways of helping each other by cross-promoting, enriching data and creating added value customer scenarios.
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