Kyvos Insights: Unleashing speed, scale, and agility in data analysis

The Power of Kyvos Insight’s Architecture

The world of BI and Machine Learning is evolving quickly, partly due to the impact of Generative AI, but that’s not the only innovation in town. Kyvos Insights has emerged as a trailblazer. Kyvos began life as OLAP acceleration technology (Kyvos means cube in Greek) but has since broadened its capability dramatically to become a semantic performance layer, which can power a wide variety of BI products and AI applications. It sits in front of a fascinating array of data sources and data engines – and it even offers its own BI at the front end and a storage solution for aggregate caching.

The easiest way to appreciate its comprehensive capability is to take a tour of its enterprise-ready scalable software stack. So let’s do that.

The diagram below, taken from a Kyvos Insights slide deck, depicts the full Kyvos analytics stack from front to back and including, on the side, Data Governance and Identity Management components. All the Kyvos components are marked in orange.

The Kyvos Stack

The Kyvos Data Store

Beginning with the cache layer, we have the Kyvos data store. This is a managed caching layer that pulls data from any on-premises or cloud data source, including streaming sources and OLTP systems as well as all varieties of data lakes and powerful data warehouses such as Teradata and Snowflake. In other words, it can draw data from anywhere.

If you’re wondering why Kyvos places itself in front of even powerful data warehouses, the answer is simple. The speed at which it delivers data outperforms such engines. The data store is a scalable, columnar storage system optimized for analytics workloads. It operates by ingesting data from various sources, processing and transforming it into a columnar format, and storing it within a distributed architecture. It can handle large datasets, and it scales horizontally to support extremely large data volumes.

The Kyvos Semantic Performance Layer

The Kyvos Semantic Performance layer can be regarded as the secret sauce of the platform. It is a powerful abstraction layer that sits between the data storage and analytics applications. It works by creating a semantic model of the data, mapping complex data relationships and hierarchies into a simplified, business-and-analytics-friendly framework.

This layer enables fast and efficient querying, aggregation, and analysis of large datasets by creating AI-powered smart aggregates and intelligent caching. It also optimizes query performance through advanced indexing, caching, and data partitioning techniques.

It is highly capable, supporting advanced ad hoc analytics, self-service features and data science applications. It can handle complex data models, large datasets, and high concurrency, making it ideal for enterprise-scale analytics deployments.

The Kyvos Connectors

Kyvos offers connectivity with all popular BI tools via SQL, DAX and MDX connectors. The platform has certified and released named connectors from Tableau, Power BI and MicroStrategy.  For AI initiatives, Kyvos provides LangChain connectivity that makes it the trusted, fast, unified data source for downstream applications.

The Kyvos BI Tools

Aside from its broad support of BI, AI and ML products and capabilities, Kyvos offers three BI Tools of its own: Kyvos Excel Add-In, Kyvos Viz and Kyvos BI.

Kyvos Excel Add-in

Kyvos Excel Add-in connects Microsoft Excel to large datasets, enabling high-performance analytics at scale within the familiar Excel environment. It provides direct data access, leverages OLAP technology for fast query performance, and integrates Excel formulas with large datasets. Beyond native Excel (which can connect directly with Kyvos), Add-in users have access to advanced BI capabilities so they can create interactive dashboards and visualizations within Excel.

Kyvos Viz

Kyvos Viz is a self-serve data visualization tool that empowers business users to create interactive, web-based ad hoc dashboards and visualizations. Its range of visualization options includes charts, tables, and maps. The tool also supports interactive drill-down and filtering capabilities, and seamless collaboration features to share dashboards.

Kyvos BI

Kyvos BI is a web-based full-service reporting tool for creating pixel-perfect, template-based reports from large datasets. Its drag-and-drop interface eliminates coding, while real-time data connections provide up-to-date insights. Its scalable architecture enables distributing 1000s of reports daily and supports multiple delivery channels like Email, FTP, etc., in different formats  (e.g., PDF, Excel, or CSV).

Governance and Security

Referring to the diagram, the only component we have yet to discuss is Kyvos AuthK. This is a robust authentication and authorization module, providing advanced security features for managing user access, permissions, and data governance. Its broad capability stems from the versatility of the Kyvos Semantic Performance Layer.

Single sign-on is supported with SSO systems delivering seamless user authentication. Roles can be assigned to users and groups, controlling access to data, reports, and features. Data masking and encryption (both at rest and in motion) are part of this. An auditing and logging capability keeps track of all activity.

Scalability and Performance

Kyvos delivers exceptional scalability and performance. It handles massive datasets and different varieties of complex analytics workloads with ease. Kyvos scales horizontally to support petabyte-scale data volumes, while ensuring fast query performance and real-time insights. Its AI-powered smart aggregation technology optimizes data processing, reducing latency and enabling sub-second query responses.

Kyvos’ intelligent caching, data compression, and parallel processing capabilities deliver excellent performance. As a result, users can analyze vast amounts of data, create complex reports, and visualize insights at unprecedented speeds.

The Benefits

Kyvos Insights’ platform offers a variety of benefits. In general, we observe the following:

1. Performance: This is, in our view, the standout benefit that the platform delivers. It is lightning fast and thus can deliver faster “time to insight” and improved productivity for AI and BI applications, It is worth noting that there can be applications that would otherwise be impossible without Kyvos’ performance.
2. Enhanced collaboration: Kyvos’ unified semantic approach in concert with its web-based platform and secure sharing features facilitate collaboration among stakeholders, promoting data-driven discussions and alignment and possibly a broader use of BI and AI.
3. Cost Reduction: Kyvos builds AI-powered smart aggregates once upfront and doesn’t push down queries to compute-cost-heavy data sources. This delivers significant savings as users do not spend compute credits for every query. It also automates much of the backend so that IT/Data Engineering teams can focus on higher-value work than maintaining aggregate tables or coding SQL queries.
4. Data Governance and Security: Kyvos has data governance and security engineered into AuthK and the Semantic Performance Layer providing a fully comprehensive capability.
5. Ease Of Use: Users will notice the performance acceleration while continuing to use their preferred front-end, while designers can build new models without any coding. In addition to all the standard self-service features, Kyvos also allows conversational interactions with data. Its Copilot understands user intent and goes beyond simply answering queries to delivering enriched data conversations with rich context and higher accuracy.

In Summary

Kyvos Insights is a game-changer in the data analytics industry, offering a scalable, high-performance platform that empowers organizations to unlock insights and drive decision-making. With its innovative platform architecture and intuitive front-end components, Kyvos provides a comprehensive solution for all aspects of AI and BI. We recommend that organizations with sophisticated AI and BI needs, especially large organizations, take a look.