Business intelligence is a service that is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee’s cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data.
Indicee also just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures and Yaletown Ventures. Indicee’s technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and others and automatically builds reports and analysis for this data in the cloud. Users can ask business questions in plain English, which Indicee then responds with reports and visualizations that are produced from on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud.
Indicee users also share data securely with colleagues or associates in an online community/social exchange. The software was recently released to beta testers, including Mary Kay Cosmetics, Alco Ventures and Sage Software.
The beauty of Indicee is that it can draw data from a variety of reports and applications and mash it up to be shared with others easily. Indicee was co-founded by Mark Cunningham, who also developed Crystal Reports, which was acquired by Seagate in 2006. Indicee faces competition from others in the business intelligence space, including SAP BusinessObjects and Good Data.
A cool BI saas solution! $6 million funding in the tough time will speed up the company to grow mature.
great to see another tech startup in vancouver, i wish more sales rep i work with knew about this.
Congrats Indicee. This looks like a very valuable product and a nice raise in hard times.
The introducing video is verycool but the product is extremely limited at the moment.
I’ve tried this one and also Good Data and they currently both so poor that I don’t see any chance for them (even for free).
Excel is still lightyears ahead of those.
Guys please try harder, for BI on demand there’s sure a market out there but we need good stuff.
Let me explain my criticism : instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (a poor one), reuse the opensource BI engines around, build a very, really very sexy and usable UI , and add some serious collaboration stuff to get people excited.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the feedback on Indicee. I would love to get more detailed feedback from you to see how it aligns with all of our existing user’s feedback and our roadmap.
We are big believers in making this stuff simple and easy and we are constantly working on where to focus our time and energy. It really comes down to priorities in a start-up. User feedback is a big driver and our early beta users really told us where to focus for this first release.
Our video does a good job of articulating the use case that we are solving and we believe this is the core pain that most users who are manually cobbling data together are facing. More specifically we believe this is a major problem for business users in small and mid-size companies who don’t have any type of BI solution available, lack technical skills, have limited IT resources and a tight budget. Most of these users end up managing by gut feel or manually running the gauntlet in spreadsheets to pull their data together. Spreadsheets are awesome tools but they struggle when it comes to doing repetitive data loading and consolidation. It is a very manual process. Where Indicee is unique is how we access the data (i.e. existing Crystal Reports, Excel files and CSVs files) and how we make that data available. Our system allows users to create a cloud-based datamart that can be incrementally added to daily, weekly or monthly. This allows users to trend the data over time, do time-based comparisons and enables users to interact with the data in a more dynamic way than traditional production reporting. We feel this is different than what you can do in spreadsheets or other SaaS BI apps. Things like fancy visualization and nifty collaboration is definitely on our roadmap but what we heard was that neither were the core pain right now. If the user can’t get the data in easily and repeat the process in a few clicks all of the other features were not very useful.
We are moving into the next phase of the product and your feedback might prove to be really valuable if I get a bit more detail. You can find me via any of the contact links on our website. I am all ears.
Feel free to read my various blogs over on Indicee.com for more info. I posted a summary blog today but there are a bunch of others that offer some insight into what we are doing and our approach.
http://www.indi...indicee-launch/
Mark Cunningham
CEO Indicee
http://www.indicee.com
So it seems like all of the stuff that they are flaunting that it can do can all be done with a pivottable in Excel.
I guess it doesn’t have the cloud stuff yet. And maybe this will work better at the enterprise level.
Still, a PivotTable with a database connection can do everything they were asking in as few of clicks.
As an Excel whiz i was skeptical at first, but comparisons to pivot tables are missing the point. Pivot tables don’t make data coherent – they require coherent data. (”a database connection” to what – a magic table that reconciles your multiple systems?)
Most business folks hack up temporary data coherence with Excel – repeatedly and not well. Their view of their business data is only as good as their VLookup skills. (And most of ‘em don’t use Pivot Tables – too complex)
Indicee handles the data-coherence part, and you can train it for your particular data mess. Yeah, the UI is simple, but as Google showed, simple/fast/iterative trumps complex-but-difficult.
Have you tried out Injoos Teamware. I would reckon that they have the most comprehensive integrated collaboration platform. With their latest release they have added a new twist to track and execute projects “the social way”. Checkout their Blog http://injoos.c...ith-release-35/
Seems like a lot of companies are trying to tackle the problem of easier, more accessible business intelligence. Differentiation appears to be coming in whether they are offering true analytics versus reporting and dashboarding. Web based collaboration, flexible data sources, aggregating or mashing up data seem to be common goals. This seems to hit the mark. Co-founders background with Crystal Reports is certainly a plus.
this ‘product’ is another tricky consulting company that does not have neither market nor customers – just using BS to get investors onboard and …succeeded. good for employees – complete BS from technology perspective. Take consultant and he/she gets more ROI to mixing MS products and produce the reports. Cloud computing is another BS for this product – cloud computing means scaling… it is not a start up neither…having business for more than 10 years and not having customers????