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What is unique about Transpara's approach?

You can find all of the details about our pricing model and options at https://transpara.com/pricing. We offer multiple tiers of features, including Pro, Enterprise, and Enterprise ADI, and within each tier it's priced by the number of users who will access the system (named or concurrent users).

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To get an estimate for your particular situation, please contact our Support.

What licensing models do you support?

As our customers often remind us, what makes Transpara special isn't a list of features or functions, but rather how unique our approach is. Below are some of the core aspects of our approach that set us apart from other data visualization, analytics, dashboard, and alerting applications:

• It's a product, not a tool set: This means we go to great lengths to reduce the effort required to deploy, configure, maintain, upgrade, and support the software. With tools, you still have to build it. With Transpara, you just need to configure and personalize it. In fact, across our hundreds of enterprise customers, not a single one has a full-time person managing our software, even when rolled out globally across many sites. This is a radical and often underestimated benefit.

• No requirement to migrate or copy data: We believe you should leave data where it makes sense, and if an existing application provides great value it shouldn't be replaced. Many companies are going to great lengths (cost, time) to centralize all of their data and move it to the cloud before putting it to use. While we work with those environments too, most of our customers leave data in place, eliminate the huge centralization project, and get right to creating value.

• An obvious, modern user experience: Most of the tools in use at our customers require deep expertise and training to use, which limits who can use them and their ultimate benefit. Transpara takes most of its user interface design and patterns from consumer applications, which not only make for a more pleasant experience but eliminates the need for training and lets you put the application in front of more users.

• Context and cognitive load: Most applications visualize tons of data but require the users to interpret it, look around, and figure out on their own what needs their attention. Transpara believes software should do more of the work, so we prioritize alerts so the system can proactively tell you when something needs your attention and take you right to it. When visualizing data, we focus on highlighting KPIs with color, status, and meaning that can be filtered easily to focus on issues and promote exception-based thinking. We focus on reducing the cognitive load required by users so your team can make better decisions faster.

• Mobile-first: Long gone are the days where everyone is at their desk when things go wrong or opportunities are spotted. A core aspect of any real-time system is that your subject matter experts need access from anywhere to troubleshoot issues. With Transpara, every screen automatically works on any device and every feature is supported no matter what screen size. Oh, and we support huge screens too.

• Automation: Transpara eliminates tons of manual effort through automated configuration capabilities like our Remote Context Service (RCS) and the ability for the software to change on the fly based on changing conditions.

• Advanced analytics that are accessible: Transpara includes a powerful advanced calculation and analytics engine but also believes that not every user is a data scientist or python coder. This means that we provide analytics capabilities for every type of user, from simple math and drag and drop, to sophisticated features and integrations with advanced data science tools and AI/ML applications.

• Fast and lightweight: Say goodbye to spinning circles while you wait for data to load. The way Transpara's interfaces work, along with keeping metadata and data separated, results in a lighting-fast application that never slows down your systems or makes your users wait.

• Industrial strength scale and security: Transpara was born of industrial roots, so we're right at home monitoring and visualizing high-scale and frequently changing telco environments, nuclear power plants, mines, oil refineries, satellites, smart cities, and more. Even if you are only using it for slow-moving business data, you can benefit from the hundreds of industrial customers that battle-test it daily and have for years.

• Customer support and expertise: Transpara aims to be the Nordstrom or Zappos of software. We love interacting with customers personally and everyone you will speak with is a deep expert in not only our product but often many of the other systems it interfaces with (and we often help with those too). We often tell customers to skip combing through the docs and instead, just jump on a web meeting with us and we will help you with any feature or question. Our support motto is simple: “Call for any or no reason.”

Can I replace existing applications with Transpara?

You can, but that doesn't always mean you should. It boils down to value. As an example, we often get asked by customers if they can replace their BI tools with Transpara, and the answer is usually no (unless they're trying to incorrectly use these tools for use cases we're much better for). In most cases, we start by leveraging existing tools to provide immediate value and then you can decide over time to replace other applications or modernize (without impacting how to use Transpara).

Do you compete with Power BI, Tableau, etc?

In most cases, no. Most of our customers also have BI tools and use them in complementary ways, but they're very different:

• Different users: BI tools focus on analysts, report generators, and folks who work with more static data, while Transpara focuses on operations users like maintenance, safety, compliance, ops management, and others. BI tools also require deep training or data expertise to be useful.

• Different use cases: BI tools focus on investigating past events, deep analysis of static data sets, report generation, and what-if analysis, while Transpara focuses on data that's in motion, alerting, early warning and prediction, leading indicators, exception-based monitoring, and other operational use cases.

• Different data sources: There is often overlap and support for many by both applications, but BI tools really excel at relational and spreadsheet data, while Transpara excels at time-series, operational, industrial, and other moving data sources.

• Different approach: BI tools are just that: tools. This means that users leverage them to build applications, create visualizations manually, import and massage data, and generate static reports. Transpara is an application that's fed from live data sources and is configured by defining KPIs, a hierarchy of information, and other core system patterns. Visualizations are generated automatically and are updated in near real-time without the need to create everything from scratch. It's also a system and not a set of separate pages that may or may not be related.

Transpara can also interface and integrate with existing BI solutions, extracting even more value in the process.

Do you compete with engineering tools like Seeq, Trendminer, PI Vision, etc?

In most cases, no. These tools are focused on engineers and deep trend analysis, so they're often used along side of Transpara at our customers. While they and many other applications can put data on a screen and have many trending features, the users, use cases and approach are very different. Transpara is often used for a larger number of users, including management, field staff, and operations to surface issues that may them be investigated in great detail using Seeq and others.

PI Vision and other tools from large industrial vendors (AVEVA, Aspentech, GE, Honeywell, ABB, Rockwell, Yokogawa and others) are usually tied to a single data source provided by that vendor and are less of a focus for those companies. Transpara is data source agnostic, so we easily span all sources and can aggregate data without requiring migration.

Why can't I just build this type of system myself (DIY)?

You can, but there are many reasons not to:

• Focus: It puts you in the software business instead of your core business.

• Maturity: The Transpara platform was developed over many years by industry experts and professional developers and provides a level of automation, productization, and ease of use that's difficult to replicate with a custom project.

• Risk: When the original team leaves or changes jobs, the ability to maintain, support, and enhance the application also goes away. How many applications have died in this process.

• Cost: The cost of a custom application is the sole burden of the customer, as opposed to a productized software company where you share that burden with the entire customer base.

• Community: Often overlooked but equally critical is the global customer base of Transpara. Anyone who buys and uses our software benefits from the hundreds of customers that use it every day, battle-test it, submit support and feature requests to make it better, and create new and better use cases. Every improvement benefits all of the customers.

• Support and expertise: Transpara is staffed by a team of experts who can provide support deployment assistance, configuration help, troubleshooting, and more — an especially valuable asset for organizations that don't have extensive in-house IT.