Data Services

As I previously mentioned, I have been thinking lately about what RateAcuity is as a company.  Turns out the answer is simple.  We are a data business.  Period.  So, what does that mean?  We are defined as much by what we are not as what we are.  We are not a SaaS (Software as a Service) business.  We are not an analytics company.  We are even different from DaaS (Data as a Service) business to some extent. 

As a data company, our mission is to provide our customers with the highest quality data available.  We do not provide software to go along with the data.  We don’t provide any analysis or predictions as to how the data might change into the future.  We just provide details of current and past electric utility rates and make access to that information easy for our customers.

While we do have a user interface available on our website to view the RateAcuity data, the interface is not our product.  It is simply a tool to allow our customers access to the data in a format that can be easily read by a person.  Additionally, data is available through our RateAcuity API that enables our customers to pull electric rate data from the RateAcuity database whenever needed.  Using the RateAcuity API allows customers to extract selected data, transform it to integrate with its systems, and then load the data to its own data storage.   The data can then be consumed using any preferred programming language. 

Some customer systems may use the data as a starting point to perform its own analysis and make future predictions or provide a fancy user interface for its end users to view electric utility rates; although we are interested in what our customers do with the RateAcuity data and strive to help them implement use of the data in any way we can, ultimately how a customer uses the data is not at the heart of what RateAcuity does.  Our customer is generally not the end use consumer of the data – our customer is usually a software company that uses the RateAcuity data to help answer questions about electric utility rates for its end users.

Because the data is our product, the accuracy of the data provided to our customers is of the utmost importance.  The data must also be timely, but our opinion is that data that is timely but inaccurate really doesn’t do our customers much good.  “The insights that a business can extract out of data are only as good as the data itself.  Poor data can lead to difficulties in extracting accurate insights and ultimately poor decision-making.”  https://www.talend.com/resources/definitive-guide-data-integration/

I will take a deeper dive into data quality in a future post.  In the meantime, do you know of any other true data companies?  We are rare, and always like to learn about companies with similar traits.

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