There’s been no shortage of activity here at Indicee over the past few months and today we are celebrating the hard work. Today is launch day and we are really excited to show the world our first release of Indicee. I have blogged about our product over the past year for our beta users (feel free to go back and take a look) but I thought I would start fresh today with a summary of what Indicee is all about and what makes us different.

The Audacious Goal

Indicee’s goal is to help frustrated business users who are trying to combine data from different data sources just to get answers to some basic business questions. Data can be tricky and if you don’t have the IT experience or the budget needed to buy really expensive software the options are limited. Back in the 90’s some of the Indicee team were responsible for creating Crystal Reports and the goal was to get everyone including my mom using it. While Crystal Reports is an amazing tool it was really targeted at techie IT people and software developers. Does this sound like you? I didn’t think so! Here are a few assumptions I have about you, our typical user: you probably don’t understand databases that well, you don’t have a burning desire to spend the next 6 months mastering a technical reporting tool, you don’t have an army of IT people around you and you probably don’t have the budget to fork out $100K for traditional business intelligence software. Am I right? Comon’ now I can hear you yelling out loud all the way from my office in Vancouver! Indicee is different, we are not trying to recreate another reporting tool for this same set of users, instead we are focused on getting to the “masses” of business users in small and mid-size organizations. Simple, easy to use, low cost and self-serve is what we are all about.

I have provided a bit more insight into Indicee below. If you would rather not listen to me ramble on just check out our Indicee video for the highly summarized version.

Diggin’ for Data

One of the challenges of business intelligence 1.0 is how they access data. Most business systems have a complex database underneath the covers that an average business user would run screaming from and this is exactly where traditional BI tools access their data. Indicee is different…rather than trying to go where the data is complex we decided to get our data from a place that is accessible and easy to understand – the output reports of your typical business system. Sometimes they come out as Crystal Reports, Excel Spreadsheets or just plain old text files. Any business user can look at these and understand them. Indicee sits on top of the existing BI 1.0 infrastructure and re-uses the data and meta-data locked inside files like Crystal, Excel and others. Cool eh? (that’s Canadian by the way!).

When we started Indicee we made a conscious choice to target the most common packaged applications that sit inside company firewalls. Why? Because that is where 95% of all business data is kept today and the majority of this data can be accessed from either Crystal Reports files or Excel spreadsheets. Indicee users can easily access these data sources, combine them with other data (CSV, SaaS sources etc.) and upload without the need to directly access information locked up in corporate databases.

Getting up and running in Indicee is fast. Whether you are building from scratch or you want to use some of our pre-built QuickStarts we believe we have simplified the process of accessing, loading and consolidating data as compared to using manual tools like Excel or complex and expensive BI 1.0 products. If you are using popular applications like Microsoft Great Plains, Sage Accpac or Adagio we have QuickStarts that will get you up and running in less than 10 minutes. Our plan is to expand our QuickStart solutions over the coming months for the most common packaged and SaaS applications.

Ask Questions. Get Answers

For years I listened to users wonder “Why can’t I just ask a question and get an answer?” And no matter how simple conventional BI tools try to be, the bottom line is you need to understand fundamental BI “language” to get answers to your business questions.

To address this, we built a simple interface that allows users to ask business questions in plain English. Reports and visualizations are then produced on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud, eliminating hours of tedious cutting and pasting data from reports into spreadsheets.

Indicee allows users no matter how technical to interact with their data in a really simple way. To do this, we’ve eliminated a lot of the bells and whistles you’ll get in some BI tools. Our reports are about helping you make better business decisions, faster. So we’ve cut our features down to give our customers maximum value.

Share, Collaborate and Engage

In today’s workplaces, emailing massive PDF files, or complex Excel spreadsheets is quickly becoming old school. Today’s businesses are about collaboration in real time.

Empowering and enabling business users in organizations to access data and information provides collaborative decision-making, transparency and alignment. Indicee users can connect with each other and share data securely with colleagues or associates in an online community/social exchange. It’s all done in thin air, BI in the cloud. Where users can comment, provide feedback, upload new data – work collaboratively.

The Game Changer

It’s funny when I think about how far so many software applications have come since we first developed Crystal Reports back in 1991. Almost everything you want or need to do for your business you can do in the cloud. SaaS changed the game for all software companies. But desktop BI tools are still lagging.

We figured it was due time to develop a real SaaS reporting and analysis tool. So try out Indicee. Click on our getting started button to try it out. You can watch one of our videos or take our guided tour. We’ve created three easy ways for you to try our product out without any cost to you.

But most importantly we want to hear from you. We want your feedback. I know everyone says that. But hey we’re a start up so we REALLY mean it! Call us if you need help getting going. Or just want to give us your thoughts on the product. We’re all data geeks here (and a few marketing and HR people thrown in). And we love solving data-related problems.

Mark