In a recent blog post I gave you Indicee’s elevator pitch: we’re a fully-functional cloud-based BI solution provider offering both standalone applications and easy integration into other SaaS platforms. Four attributes that distinguish us from other BI solution providers are that our platform is agile, powerful, in the cloud, and extensible. Some of our competitors have some of these attributes, but I truly believe that nobody offers the combination of all four of them that Indicee does.
Today I’m going to talk about what I mean by agility. There’s a big movement around Agile Business Intelligence out in the field where practitioners live every day. The intent is good and driven by customers who are tired of failed BI projects. The problem is that BI software gets in the way.
I wrote earlier that:
“Indicee is agile. Our cloud-based approach allows partners to quickly embed our reporting and analytics service inside their application. It allows them to do it without hiring BI and data warehousing experts.”
Here’s why:
Most BI solutions use separate technologies for ETL, Warehousing, query building and execution. These technologies may have been acquired over years and have rarely been well integrated. This creates a chain of tools that move your source data into reportable data and reports that resemble a waterfall. A data warehouse is a great example. Bringing in new data or even modifying some existing data will cause changes to the ETL scripts and more importantly changes to the queries and reports. This is why BI projects become so large and often cost as much to change as they did to implement in the first place. You need to get everything right the first time. This is the opposite of agility!
Indicee is different. We’ve built a Cloud BI stack–from the report and query builder down to the data import tools and APIs–that all know about each other and work together. Changes to the data and model are recognized by the query engine which adapts how it retrieves the data. So there is no need to re-build the query and the reports. This is what allows us to add new data incrementally and plug it into an existing model without disrupting all of the existing reports that people are using.
At Indicee we believe that you should be able to start with “a little BI” and grow incrementally from there – no “all or nothing” BI projects and certainly no repeating of the entire planning and design exercise every time you want to make a change.
Skeptical? Now, it’s not all magic, and some human intervention is necessary to build models and generate reports. But in our experience, Indicee is literally orders of magnitude easier to get up and running than traditional BI. We have customers who have integrated Indicee into their applications and produced useful business reports in as little as an afternoon.
We’ll show you an example next, then move on to the other things that make Indicee different.
