Intro to RAP

A Brief History of Rapid Analytics Platform® (RAP®)

The idea for the Rapid Analytics Platform, or RAP for short, was born close to 10 years ago from a need to provide ICE data engineers and scientists the tools necessary to innovate.  What this translated to was giving them access to all Mortgage Data & Analytics in a single environment where the data is managed and has compute resources available through a universal development interface.   This resulted in our first foray into the cloud and a search for the best developer tools and data services available to integrate with.  After many months of design and rapid prototyping, we developed the initial version of what we know as RAP Studio today, a data science “sandbox” to create the ICE data and analytics products of tomorrow. 

From Internal Tool to ICE Mortgage Data & Analytics Product 

Client collaboration and expert-level interactions have always been the lifeblood of the RAP Data Science team.  Through these engagements, we heard echoes of the same data and technology needs we were trying to solve for, being invested in by our clients, but often progressing at a much slower pace.   The reality was and still is, not every business is set up to manage and execute large scale technology initiatives, whereas at ICE, that’s sort of what we do.  The challenges of our customers are exacerbated by the fact that mortgage lenders, servicers, and investors license a ton of 3rd party data they must connect with their own data; often represented by a portfolio of mortgages, real estate, or mortgage-backed securities.   Realizing we could help solve this problem with our expertise and the platform we had just developed, we decided to offer it to our clients as an alternative way to access Mortgage Data & Analytics.   

A RAP Star is Born 

In 2019, we introduced RAP to the market and since then we have evolved it, while still focused on a singular mission; to ease the consumption of Mortgage Data & Analytics and elevate our client’s data science capability.  What we have learned over time is that every client is at a different stage of their data science journey and the technology is continuously changing, so we’ll constantly have to adapt so we’re maximizing value to the client and providing the best customer experience. 

Educational Content is Paramount to the Client Experience 

This need to constantly adapt made us realize a blog medium would be the perfect way to communicate and educate our clients on an array of topics. 

RAP Data Science Blog by Category 

More about RAP

The Rapid Analytics Platformis a cloud-based data exploration and decision science studio that accelerates the integration of ICE IDS & ICE Mortgage Technology data & analytics, thus facilitating customers in decreasing the lead time to generate insights from ICE data.

RAP is comprised of managed storage, compute, and a custom notebook IDE. RAP customers are generally financial analysts, data engineers and data scientists that generate code using SQL, Python, PySpark or SparkR.

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