Like any good CANADIAN Business Intelligence (BI) company, we were lounging around yesterday by the pool drinking margaritas and watching our web stats on our iPhones when suddenly we noticed some extra traffic coming from a blog site we had never seen before. Turns out that Jerome Pineau, a Business Intelligence blogger, took Indicee for a test drive and decided to write about his experience. Based on what I can gather, Jerome has been spending time looking at Software as a Service (SaaS) Business Intelligence companies and doing brief write-ups on his experience with each one. Sounds like a more interesting project than evaluating old school BI companies. You can check out Jerome’s complete blog here: Mind your own business [intelligence] Part II
Apparently Jerome had a favorable experience with Indicee and here is what he had to say:
“Since my last post about that market, I emailed with Gooddata’s CEO and Founder Roman Stanek who was kind enough to put up with my questioning back & forth emails. He suggested several other names I might be interested in exploring so I set out to do just that. In the process, I discovered Indicee who totally blew me away. They have a clean, fast, operational UX. Not only was I able to upload data immediately, but they were nice enough to kick up my account size so I could push up more data. Next, I have to say their customer support response time is just awesome. For me, Mr. instant gratification, this says a lot about a company. And finally, believe it or not, you can ask questions of the data in English! This has been one of my “dreams” for a long time and I had actually envioned the same kind of interface Outlook has to setup mail rules, but theirs is even cooler. As you probe the data, they show you what the question is like _IN ENGLISH_—Nirvana. Their stuff just works. These Canadians can write software I tell you!”
It is always great to get good feedback about our product but what was more interesting, and more satisfying to me, is Jerome’s experience reflects our vision for Indicee.. There are a few “between the lines” points that I believe Jerome is touching on that I wanted to highlight with respect to Indicee.
Self-Serve
Our vision for Indicee is to drive a low-touch or no-touch self-serve process for business users to get up and running quickly with their data. We have spent lots of time creating a point and click user experience that enables users to load data from Crystal Reports, Excel and CSV (and more to come) in a way that does not require an army of consultants or weeks of analysis, design and implementation. Our experience with thousands of customers and years in the trenches tells us that a big challenge to business user adoption of BI is how hard it has been to get data out of a production system and into a BI system. We want to break down these barriers and I am happy to see that Jerome’s experience demonstrated we are moving in the right direction.
The second area of self-serve comes with querying data. Our goal is to simplify the user experience down to a point where “talking” to your data is more like typing something into Google. Wouldn’t it be cool if people could just ask questions and get answers? I have heard that for years from business users …mostly after spending 5 days teaching them how to use a database-reporting tool. We created a question interface that simplifies and shelters the user from the traditional complexity of data. One of the more subtle but powerful aspects of our question interface is how it interacts with the underlying datamart that gets created when you load data. We not only suck in data but the meta-data as well. This allows us to surface up a friendly, domain specific set of terms and phrases into the question interface. “Show Gross Margin % for each Product Segment by Quarter” uses terms that are domain specific and very familiar to the business user because they have already seen these terms in canned reports in the various systems they work with. If a user were to try to dig this data from a raw database…well we are back to BI 1.0.
Bottom line…we don’t want our users to call our sales people. We want them to use our software! I should point out that we don’t have any sales people so we are already short-circuiting this old school process. ☺
Industrial Strength and Ease of Use are NOT mutually exclusive
If you read some of the comments on Jerome’s post, there is an implication that serious BI can only be done well using the old school model. In other words, if you are using a self-serve model, you’d better focus on easy problems.. I am good with our competition thinking that about Indicee. If they are reading this then I am going to let the cat out of the bag. To date we have spent the majority of our time on our back-end data engine architecture. We have built our product using data warehousing best practices that will scale for large volumes of data and users across multiple systems. But we also put a point and click user interface on top of this infrastructure that will enable a whole new set of users to work with data in a way that has previously been impossible. You can make something easy to use AND powerful.
The other point is I believe you can provide a self-serve application that is powerful without the need for a traditional sales process. There seems to be this strange connection between enterprise software and sales processes. The traditional thinking is if a company is doing big, serious stuff then they need to put an army on the job – sales people, consultants etc. I don’t think that is true. We believe that software should be easy to learn about, easy to try, easy to buy and easy to use regardless of whether you are from a big or small company. If you are from a multi-billion dollar business my guess is that you don’t want the sales person hounding you anymore than the person from the small company does. We want to reverse the sales process and put YOU in control. After you have used the product for a while and you want to talk with someone then give us a call. I am sure we will have some telesales sales people by then!
Software in the Cloud is a SERVICE
Jerome mentions our “…customer support time is just awesome.” The cool part about SaaS is that we “own” the whole stack. Meaning we own the entire experience of what we provide as a service. This is so different from the traditional software model. It means that us SaaS guys have to make our products actually work otherwise the easy to try and easy to buy will become easy to cancel. Our people really become an extension of the service stack. If we have a really simple, easy to use self-serve product with a 4-day response time from our people then a major component of our stack is breaking down. And the last I checked the people part of the stack is kinda like the foundation in the house.
