indicee: Leveraging the Cloud To Mashup Data and Answer Questions

Written by Alex Williams / November 10, 2009 3:48 PM / 4 Comments

In their demo video, indicee refers to "accounting's ERP black box," a not so subtle remark about the challenges facing the average business user when trying to draw knowledge from a traditional enterprise technology such as ERP software.

indicee is one of a growing number of companies that has developed methods for providing a layer of usability to existing enterprise technologies to draw intelligence. indicee uses the power of the cloud to allow the business user to do their own data mining and subsequent collaboration.

In the past few weeks we have written posts about companies offering services that allow for more flexibility in editing spreadsheets and collaborating to draw knowledge.

These include companies such as:

CubeTree, which has a feature for adding comments to a spreadsheet and other documents.
DocVerse, which installs a plug-in so multiple users may make updates to a document, add comments and sync changes that have been made while a user is offline.
Socialtext, which has developed SocialCalc, a spreadsheet application that provides the ability for users to collaborate across a number of spreadsheets.

The indicee approach is a bit different. It provides the ability to create mashup environments so users can make reports faster without having to cut and paste information, deal with software they do not really understand or wait in line for an expert to do the heavy lifting. It handles multiple types of data and integrates with the leading ERP applications.

Here's indicee's amusing demo showing how the application works:

The indicee service uses the computational power of the cloud to quickly provide the information the user needs.

Ahh - this is where the true power lies with cloud computing. In this regard, indicee reminds us of how data mining is becoming far more accessible than ever before. We expect this is a trend we will see more of in the coming months as more and more tasks get handled by business users without the need for IT to do the work.

indicee charges on a per user basis. They offer a 30-day free trial. A single sharing license is $69 per month and goes up from there based on storage capacity and the number of users.

Comments

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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.

Posted by: jeu | November 10, 2009 9:55 PM

Hi Jeu,

This is the exact same comment that you left on the Tech Crunch article http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/04/indicee-raises-6-million-for-cloud-based-business-intelligence-reporting-tool/.

I've reposed my response from there below. If you still have questions about our product, I'd be more than happy discuss with you as user feedback is always appreciated.

Mark Cunningham
CEO Indicee
http://www.indicee.com

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.indicee.com/indicee-launch/

Posted by: Mark | November 11, 2009 2:48 PM

@jeu I don't get it. Excel is a pain for BI, I've poked around Indicee too and I could not disagree with you more. We're definitely going to be taking a deeper look at Indicee.

It relates data extremely well and the value of being able to munge data from multiple sources and add to it over time is extremely compelling.

Our IT guys would never let us connect an Excel front end direct to the database, not too mention the data we need to report on is in multiple databases. Those databases tend to be 'normalized' in a way that makes creating any meaningful business entities out of impossible for anything but the DB guys.

I've not checked out Good Data. But I'm curious to know what you feel is lacking from these new services? They seem pretty compelling to me.

Posted by: Kev | November 13, 2009 2:32 PM