Pyramid Analytics’ 2021 in Review
At Pyramid, we are all about the future. Trying to understand, anticipate, and plan for what’s around the corner is a big part of what we’re trying every day to achieve. First and foremost for our customers, but also for our growing company.
The future is bright. But now is a great time, as many around the world mark the start of a new year, to look back at the year that was.
First, I must extend my sincere gratitude to the many people who come together every day to make Pyramid a reality. I work with an amazing (and growing) team of smart, innovative, fun, and creative people.
Together we serve customers across the world who are ahead of the curve in adopting data-driven decision-making and doing so with great success. And I am continuously energized by our amazing partners and investors who have caught the vision and believe in what we are doing. Thank you all—our successes are yours to share.
My favorite moment of 2021
Before I tell you more about Pyramid’s year, I want to share an inspiring moment that hasn’t left my mind. I was recently in London to spend a few days with other Pyramid leaders, and I remembered that one of our amazing long-time clients—the global retailer Liberty—had a storefront nearby. On a whim, I stopped in, met the store manager, and … soon discovered he is a daily Pyramid user. He had wonderful things to say about the platform and how he uses it to be more successful in his work.
As a CEO and co-founder, I don’t often get to see the direct impacts our work brings to bear on the people who use Pyramid every day. In this moment—for me, a truly “magical” moment—I was able to glimpse just how powerful the right data can be in the hands of Pyramid customers. It’s why we do what we do.
You can read more about my memorable encounter here.
It was a cherished moment during a year that was difficult in many ways. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Many people are missing loved ones. Business operations continue to evolve. And yet, we saw and experienced victories, both large and small, and glimmers of the great things on the horizon.
Our team has much to celebrate. I would like to share a few of the things we’re most proud of from 2021.
Platform milestones and enhancements
If you want to know what makes us tick, here’s a good place to start: we are builders. Our model is R&D-driven—that is, we are constantly at work building and evolving the Pyramid platform into something better, more sophisticated, and more useful to our customers. (Unlike many in our industry, we refuse to market and sell outdated software.)
30 percent of our team is focused on R&D. That team grew by 100 percent just this year.
So, what did we build?
Pyramid 2020.20
In November, we released Pyramid 2020.20. Our goal was to deliver intuitive, smart capabilities in a platform designed to maximize performance and (crucially) adoption. Some of the highlights include:
- Intuitive features that bring the power of AI-enabled machine learning and analytics to all decision-makers.
- New performance and security features increase the productivity of remote workers with even faster data access and query times.
- Customized data governance and compliance settings that scale to tens of thousands of users and protect enterprise data.
- A contextual, natural language Explain feature that uses AI to support human exploration and experimentation to achieve deeper insights.
- Significant enhancements to our PYRANA direct query engine that accesses data where it is stored and delivers answers at speeds in-memory database queries cannot while eliminating the security risks of downloading data to desktops.
We are proud to say that more than 80 percent of the new features and functionality we added in 2021 came from customer feedback. Our customers are the real heroes of the story: every day, the amazing people who use the platform find new and valuable use cases and applications for Pyramid. Their feedback is invaluable as we continue to build.
The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform
In September, Gartner published a report titled Decision Intelligence Is the Near Future of Decision Making. It’s just one of many recent pieces of research outlining an emerging analytics category called decision intelligence. Two defining characteristics of decision intelligence are that it’s for all—all people, all data, all analytics needs—and it incorporates the key functional areas of data prep, data science, and data analytics.
The fact is, we have been building a decision intelligence platform all along, well before the term existed. With the release of Pyramid 2020.20, it’s clear that our platform and industry research arrived at the same place at the same time.
If 2021 taught us anything, it’s this: traditional business intelligence is broken. And self-service tools are only adding to the chaos. Legacy tools that were designed decades ago don’t scale to support today’s decision needs. The future, we believe, is decision intelligence and the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform.
It’s a new name for the work we’ve been doing since day 1. And we are not done yet: be on the lookout in early 2022 for some exciting updates to how our brand looks and feels.
Pyramid Learning Hub
In conjunction with Pyramid 2020.20, we announced the Pyramid Learning Hub, a self-service training and education system for Pyramid users. The Learning Hub launched with a library of eLearning courses, project information, and other industry resources. We are also hosting expert-led training sessions and launched our Pyramid Innovators program, a place for the Pyramid community to come together to collaborate, pool knowledge, and build connections.
Praise from the analyst community
We put a lot of stock in what top industry analysts—Gartner, Dresner, BARC, and others— have to say about Pyramid. We consider them a truly unbiased and well-informed source of feedback, a hard-to-find and invaluable resource for a software provider.
Here are some of the analyst rankings we received in 2021:
- Recognized in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for 8th-Straight Year
- #1 in Dresner Advisory’s Wisdom of Crowds® Analytical Platforms Market Study
- 40 Top Rankings (1st place) and 87 Leading Positions (top 22-33% or top 2 products) in 6 peer groups in BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey 22
- Received the Dresner Advisory Services’ WOC® Business Intelligence Market Study Industry Excellence Award for the 7th-straight year
- Voted Best International Vendor by the attendees of The Channel Co.’s Midsize Enterprise Summit
- And more! See additional complimentary reports, rankings, and commentary here
No longer “small but mighty”
We used to say our team was “small but mighty.” We did some amazing work with a relatively small, talented, and hard-working group of people. That’s not true anymore.
2021 was a year of growth for our company. (In fact, our overall headcount grew by 250 percent in 2021.) Pyramid’s amazing customers and the powerful platform we deliver to them are one-of-a-kind. Our growing stature in the industry means we are attracting some of the most sophisticated and talented people in the world who want to help us get where we’re going.
I am thrilled to say that new additions to leadership, as well as new hires across the company, make me more confident than ever that we have the people—the team—we need to reach our goals for 2022 and beyond.
With that, I will turn my attention back to the future, and all the exciting things we have on the horizon. I wish you all the best in the coming year.
Say hello to Decision Intelligence
If you would like to learn more about the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Solution, or if you would like to speak to one of our experts about your analytics challenges and initiatives, simply request a demo today.
