DATABASEUSA
HARNESSING BIG DATA FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
It’s not surprising, when Monica Messer, VP-Business Development and Co-founder at DatabaseUSA, describes the U.S. Department of Commerce as a ‘data reservoir’ that holds more data than any other government agency on the face of the planet. Standing at 20 terabytes of incoming data per day that spans demographic information from the Census Bureau, and economic data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to export data from the International Trade Administration, the agency today sits on top of a huge opportunity that’s yet to be unleashed. Monica knows the reason: “Only a small percentage of this massive data is easily accessible to the public-facing federal agencies to generate benefits and economic value.” Tackling these challenges, DatabaseUSA is paving the way for organizations to execute their data dependent missions with real-time access to big data.
“Often, the complexity, depth, and disparity of data that the Federal, State, and Local government agencies require is not usually collected or managed by a single data provider,” says Monica. DatabaseUSA is able to successfully respond to complex Request For Proposal (RFPs) with its Big Data as a Platform solution with thousands of real-time data sources. DatabaseUSA helps clients overcome this challenge by giving them access to a variety of data sets and provides various solutions to consume data through the company’s APIs, web services, and a very nimble ‘Big Data-as-a-Service’ (BDaaS) platform. “At DatabaseUSA, we have brought together Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Data-as-a-Service to massively up-scale the amount of data involved, and leverage the opportunities offered by BdaaS. We allow customers to plug their data directly into our SSIS and Spark/Map-Reduce workflows to standardize, de-dupe and enhance their data. Our API solutions offer the ability to search our diverse data offerings in a variety of ways. From bulk loads of simple queries to complex geo-spatial searches, our services will scale as needed. as you do so you never have to worry about outgrowing capacity or connectivity”, elaborates Monica.
Using Data as Bedrock
DatabaseUSA is creating an ecosystem of innovation by using data as bedrock. The company has developed a strong foothold in the government sector by exhibiting unparalleled ability to provide access to data to be used for research and analytics, through their BDaaS solutions.
One of the most licensed web services of DatabaseUSA by government agencies is its AtoZDatabases.com, which is an electronic business information subscription service. It is a premier business and people reference, and research database with the flexibility to choose from hundreds of geographic and demographic selections for business and residential data sets. It allows agencies to identify businesses that are newly established and also the ones that are not functioning anymore. Agencies can study business commerce by industry, size of business, years in business and even have immediate access to executive names, titles, phone numbers and email addresses for top executives. The residential database provides access to 220 million residents within 160 million U.S. households. The data can be selected by geography, age, income, and home value, political affiliation, behavioral data, lifestyle data, and donor data and the reports are made available for display, print, and download in full as well as selected components in PDF and Excel. The product can be licensed for annual unlimited access and is priced by user or size of agency. It facilitates bulk download of records, proving to be a preferred tool for carrying out economic development, tax and revenue, emergency preparedness, law enforcement, trade, as well as solving legal and compliance issues. The DatabaseUSAgov.com website describes case studies and shows examples of the services.
“Most of our government contracts use more than one of our BDaaS products and subscribe to varying number of seats based on the application,” says Monica. One customer, a federal agency, uses two services within its BDaaS platform to research complaints. The client has gained a license for 1,000 lawyers to access DatabaseUSA’s investigative tool, LPpolice.com — a comprehensive database for law enforcement and government agencies. This tool offers instant access into thousands of pubic sector and private sector databases to help investigators instantly find subjects, fugitives, witnesses, relatives, neighbors, associates, and common residency by searching Social Security Numbers or name. In addition to this product, the client could access seven other databases within the AtoZDatabases.com subscription service where they can search for people across the entire set of business and residential databases. The engagement with DatabaseUSA has allowed the agency to research corporate affiliations, in addition to basic demographic and firmographic data. The LPpolice product is also used for background checks and skip-tracing by both government and commercial clients.
Another federal agency uses DatabaseUSA’s platform to quickly identify and notify businesses and residents of their activities planned for local area. In seconds they can enter and address and select a radius distance and download the complete list of businesses and residences that need to be notified. By providing access to business, residential, and other specialty databases, DatabaseUSA is enabling the agency to mitigate significant risks to human health and environment. The accurate information within AtoZdatabases.com helps the agency to work closely with all parts of society—communities, businesses, individuals—to plan, research, and notify the local communities.
E-commence leading in real-time streaming analytics – benefits to government?
While the market for data and analytics services is booming, organizations specializing in modeling and analytics are facing challenges to offer meaningful insights in real-time. DatabaseUSA has an instant verification and append service that allows organizations to tap information and produce data analytics, all in real-time. Clients can pass any identifiable information via an API call—email, phone, address, Social Security Number, name and zip—and DatabaseUSA immediately returns all information on the concerned person or business. This service is gaining traction among e-commerce clients that strive to optimize a shopper’s online experience. Another product benefitting the e-commerce landscape is DatabaseUSA’s Customer Acquisition or Cloning model that not only allows a client to understand their existing clients, but also show ways to find additional prospects that are similar. The company offers critical data elements, like revenue, Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for a business, household income, and perhaps number of children, for consumers and generate meaningful insights.
In addition to providing access to disparate data sources with advanced technology to search, interpret, and analyze data, we are seeing organizations begin to take advantage of the ability to produce ‘streaming analytics’,” she adds. Streaming analytics allow organizations to address issues and opportunities in real-time—providing new opportunities to respond and engage. The potential here is that organizations can leverage the power of real-time streaming analytics to become more agile, gain a better understanding of their constituents’ need and provide enhanced interaction experience. In the future, the availability of data and real-time analytics are expected to help businesses, and government agencies identify new sources of revenue, save costs, and provide a more personal experience for users—driving loyalty and engagement.
Extending Partnerships along with Services
DatabaseUSA also licenses its data assets to partners that provide solutions for analytics and decision support in government, non-profits, and business. At DatabaseUSA, thought leaders have long recognized that the complexity of the data analytics will require organizations to partner with data providers, and more often with data analytics providers. We have a strong team of data scientists to partner with customers and partners, not just in supplying data sets, but also in consulting and guiding their implementation of analytics processes. With over 500 demographic and geographic data elements available in its databases and valued employees with several years of experience, DatabaseUSA strategically works with each customer’s unique needs to provide them a customized solution based on data that are most important to their client’s position in the market.
>Monica concludes by expressing “DatabaseUSA started with a mission to help its customers receive the most comprehensive quality data solutions, and will continue towards the same by combining its proprietary business and consumer data with real time data from specialty sources.”
Website: databaseusagov.com
Headquarters: Omaha, NE
Management: Monica Messer, Co-founder and VP-Business Development, Government & Non-Profit Sector
Description: Working towards enabling organizations to achieve their data dependent missions with real-time access to Big Data
Quote 1: “In DatabaseUSA, we have brought PaaS, SaaS, and DaaS all together to massively up-scale the amount of data involved, and leverage the opportunities offered by BDaaS”
Quote 2: “Most of our government contracts use more than one of our BDaaS products and subscribe to varying number of seats based on the application”
Quote 3: “DatabaseUSA’s Big Data focus includes data about U.S. Businesses, People, Residences, and Properties. See DatabaseUSAgov.com