Indicee and Excel
I often get asked how we position ourselves with respect to applications that live in the office suite (i.e. Excel or Access). After years of developing Business Intelligence (BI) tools and applications this topic comes up continuously. The simple answer is that we are really a complementary application.
At Indicee our goal is to enable business users, which include analysts, managers and other information consumers, to make better and smarter decisions. When we started building the Indicee product, our focus was not to build another BI tool like we did when we created Crystal Reports. Instead we focused on building an environment of collaboration and community around data and information. If you look at most Web 2.0 productivity type applications like Basecamp you will see collaboration at the heart of what they are doing. Indicee is taking a similar approach and the decision to move BI into the “cloud” was very strategic for this reason. Giving a business user the ability to easily access, consolidate, analyze, share and collaborate on information from inside and outside the firewall becomes a powerful story. This moves well beyond a user’s ability to put together a spreadsheet full of data that can be emailed around. The implications of creating a network of users, from both inside your company and cross company, that can share, discuss, debate and compare data and information really creates a new paradigm for BI.
In the short term, Indicee is providing a lot of value to our early adopters by eliminating much of the complexity and time that they were devoting to the creation of complex “spreadmarts” (see TDWI report on Spreadmarts). If you really dig into these spreadmarts you will find that they are just data stores put together with hours of manual effort. The typical business user is already pulling their hair out by the time they get to the point of using the really valuable features in Excel.
Indicee will reduce or eliminate the painful process of manually accessing and consolidating data. The application can then surface up the data in a friendly way using a word based “question” interface that enables the users to quickly reveal interesting and informative insights based on the mashed up data. Users can share and collaborate around this information or take the next step of pushing the information to various external tools and applications. Pushing data back into Excel and Adobe PDF is already integrated into the product, but we see many interesting ways to push information through Email, Blogs, RSS feeds and Facebook.
Pushing data back into Excel makes sense for many business users because they are interested in doing things like forecasts or what-if type analysis, which is really where Excel shines. In fact we see an opportunity to more tightly integrate with both Excel and Google Spreadsheets right inside the Indicee application. I can give you more details on this in the future.
Our long-term vision is to focus on the big picture value proposition of what Indicee offers to our users. This is the ability to easily mash up data from any source like Excel, Access, packaged applications (ERP, CRM), SaaS applications (Google, Netsuite, Salesforce.com), data aggregators and other public data sources to enable user generated content creation that can be shared, collaborated on, published and pushed anywhere both inside and outside the firewall will turn traditional BI on its head. Combine this with the message of collaboration, access-from-anywhere and zero-footprint brings an extremely compelling value proposition to business users.
At the end of the day when I do my own BI work I use both Excel and Indicee. They both fit into my daily workflow and each has their strengths. My goal as a business user is to be more productive and the more tools and applications I have to enable that the better. I envision Indicee working along side countless applications just like Excel to create a new, collaborative BI world.>
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