REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Paxata, the pioneer in self-service data preparation for analytics, today is pleased to announce that Polaris, the leading nonprofit organization whose mission is to eradicate modern slavery, has been chosen the winner of the 2018 Best Practice Award in the BI and Analytics on a Limited Budget category by TDWI. All nominated solutions were evaluated by TDWI analysts and faculty, who selected the award winners based on business impact, maturity, innovation, and relevance in their field.
Polaris was praised by judges for using the Paxata Adaptive Information Platform to automatically transform the massive human trafficking-specific datasets and make them consistent and ready for analysis. Using Paxata’s self-service data prep solution, Polaris is quickly and easily transforming and reformatting the structured and unstructured confidential data obtained from the National Human Trafficking Hotline that Polaris operates. Then, their analytics team is able to exchange and combine it with data from their worldwide counterparts to try and pick up on cross-border trends and apply it for analytic purposes.
Polaris, which is dedicated to eliminating the multi-billion-dollar human trafficking industry that affects more than 25 million people around the world, began operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the federal government in 2007 on a 24/7 basis. Offering crisis response and support for all human trafficking situations throughout the United States and its territories, the nonprofit has identified and responded to over 40,000 cases of human trafficking since 2007 and has reported over 6,500 cases to law enforcement.
TDWI's Best Practices Awards program is designed to identify and honor companies and other organizations that have demonstrated best practices in developing, deploying, and maintaining solutions for business intelligence (BI), analytics, data warehousing and related data management areas. Paxata has enabled Polaris to reduce the time spent on data projects while allowing its small staff to massively increase capacity and provide more information to more people while maintaining one of the largest data sets on trafficking in the United States. The self-service data prep solution has also enabled Polaris to remove its reliance on labor-intensive and error-prone spreadsheets and has significantly reduced the number of requests made on their one on-staff developer which allows them to respond to threats faster.
“We’re honored to be recognized with Paxata for strategically leveraging technology and data to shed light on the true nature of human trafficking,” said Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris. “Without Paxata, manually analyzing our extensive datasets while maintaining strict confidentiality was a cumbersome and limiting process. Now we can move directly to our analysis work and to developing the most effective and targeted strategies possible to systemically disrupt the human trafficking networks that rob people of their lives and freedom.”
Paxata's data preparation solution helps Polaris work through new ways to transform data and enables analysts to transform and reshape data to accurately identify:
- Demographics of victims and traffickers.
- Recruitment and trafficking locations, routes, and networks.
- How people are recruited and what jobs they are offered.
- What forms of force, fraud, and coercion traffickers use to assert control.
- What intervention and prevention methods are likely to be most effective.
- How potential victims or others reach out for assistance.
“Human trafficking is believed to be the third-largest criminal activity in the world, according to the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security reports that industries around the world, including agriculture, hospitality, restaurant, domestic work, and prostitution, often take advantage of modern slavery,” said Piet Loubser, SVP and Global Head of Marketing, Paxata. “We are honored to be associated with this important issue and to help Polaris bring together multi-structured data from diverse sources, prepare it, and combine it with additional data to put it into context so they can help those inflicted by this horrible crime.”
About Paxata
At Paxata, we turn raw data into trustworthy information at the speed of thought. We provide an Adaptive Information Platform that enables business leaders and analysts with an enterprise-grade, self-service data preparation system for analytics, operations and regulatory requirements. Business analysts work within an intuitive, visual application to access, explore, shape, collaborate and publish data with clicks, not code, with complete governance and security. IT is able to support the scale of data volumes and variety, enterprise and cloud data sources, and business scenarios for immediate and repeatable data service needs. Built on Apache SparkTM and optimized to run in hybrid, multi-cloud environments, Paxata leverages automated artificial intelligence, elastic cloud architecture and distributed computing to deliver an immersive business consumer experience that automates the data-to-insight pipeline.
Paxata is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in New York, Ohio, Washington D.C., and Singapore. Visit www.paxata.com or engage with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube.