We founded Indicee after years of watching the BI industry move from the accessible desktop reporting we created with Crystal, once the world’s leading reporting tool, to today’s expensive, complex & monolithic enterprise BI solutions that rarely reach the business users who pay for them. Indicee’s vision has always been two-fold:

  • Solve the BI adoption problem by delivering a new type of BI interface that empowers today’s business users to answer their own questions and share the answers widely with the business.
  • Change the economics of deploying and supporting BI solutions by moving away from complex BI infrastructure like data warehouses, ETL and query languages that lead to massive technical teams and long-term waterfall type BI projects.

Indicee’s initial product releases focused on the first part of our vision. We rolled out a new type of cloud-based report authoring tool that made it easy for users to create and share reports by importing data and using a question based interface instead of complex query builders. We then added equally usable data import and modeling tools that empowered business analysts to turn their data into BI models against which business users could create and share reports.Those releases saw thousands of end users, from data analysts to business users, using Indicee to manipulate and report on all types of data. Late last year, we started work on making the second part of our vision a reality. We took everything we learned at Crystal and Business Objects and applied it to what we believe the next generation BI platform should be when delivered from the cloud – it should:

  • enable agility by allowing BI projects to be rolled out in smaller successes, solving one problem at a time.
  • allow additional data sources and reports to be added quickly as needed without breaking complex warehouses and ETL scripts common in today’s BI solutions.
  • empower the people that know the business, analysts and business users, to deliver the answers they need without an army of technical consultants and BI project managers turning the effort into an enterprise-wide, multi-year exercise that never delivers on the promise.
  • allow business users to easily share results and collaborate with each other, promoting transparency and more effective decision making.
  • allow developers to extend and add new capabilities to Indicee instead of waiting for us.
  • allow other online services and software companies to take advantage of all of this and deliver it as part of their products quickly.

In January of this year we rolled out the first version of our BI platform, as a beta program. We asked a number of customers and partners to help us by implementing custom BI projects, integrating the platform with their applications and using it to solve some aggressive BI problems they had been struggling with.

Today our next generation Indicee Cloud BI Platform went live and it is really the beginning of redefining Business Intelligence in the cloud.

Drop by our new website and check out what the platform can do for you. We’d be happy to give you a tour as well.

If you are a software developer, ISV, solutions developer or anything remotely close to someone that may want to embed reporting into your web app then check out the whitepaper on embedding Cloud BI we did with Jeff Kaplan from THINKStrategies or ping us and we’ll give you a tour.

Lastly, over the coming weeks we are going to put together a series of blog posts that take a “deep dive” into the Indicee Platform capabilities, strengths and benefits.

Stay tuned…

Mark

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