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April 27, 2017 | Tom Ballard

Company’s name combines its focus – predictive, prescriptive, interactive and analytic

Prilytics LLCBy Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA

“I’m fine with keeping it small,” Jeff Meredith of Prilytics LLC says about his start-up where he is the only full-time employee, backed-up by a handful of others who work part-time as needed.

“I do it all . . . selling, consulting and the actual work,” he adds. “I like going in, understanding the business, and helping solve their problem.”

Housed in the University of Tennessee Business Incubator off Neyland Drive, Prilytics is another of the small data analytics and business intelligence (BI) companies that are emerging locally to help companies understand and act on their data.

The start-up’s unique name is a combination of three key letters and most of the letters from the word analytics.

“P and R stand for predictive and prescriptive, and I stands for interactive,” Meredith explains. Combine those three letters with “lytics,” and you have an unusual but descriptive company name. The words that the three letters represent also describe the Founder’s philosophy and follow a data analytics solution of “Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive.” The descriptor was first coined by IBM, although Meredith says the concepts have been around for years.

“We’re helping our clients understand their data and seek answers to questions they had not thought of,” Meredith explains, adding that he describes what Prilytics does as a “platform as a service provider.”

But it’s much more than just understanding; it’s also taking action.

“Analytics starts with reports which are insights into data, descriptive data” Meredith says. “Dashboards created from descriptive data and algorithms lead to predictions. We help our clients move from predictive to prescriptive, which goes beyond predicting future outcomes by also suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the implications of each decision option.”

The East Tennessee native’s background is sales and marketing, but he started taking classes while selling training during the day for a local company.

“I did everything I could to learn,” Meredith says.

Like many individuals in information technology (IT), he started developing webpages and went from there to other areas like SharePoint. For 13 years, Meredith worked for a local IT services company. It was during that time that he got hooked on analytics and BI.

“I spent two years at Y-12 (National Security Complex) where I got to work on projects involved in data warehousing and dashboarding,” Meredith says. “I decided I wanted to get more involved in dashboards and data management.”

Meredith founded Prilytics less than a year ago. One of his favorite tools is Power BI, a Microsoft product that is a competitor to Tableau.

As far as his progress thus far, Meredith says he’s getting a lot of referrals from others.

“I want to lay a solid foundation and get revenue in,” he says. That will determine how large Prilytics might grow.


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