Reporting Tools at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing Expo - I received an email letting me know about a new company, Indicee, that will be publicly launching within the next few weeks.

The Indicee story includes a few key elements: a notable team, an innovative product and impressive financing. Indicee is a new arrival on a very competitive landscape but is filling a void left by most BI and reporting software available – allowing users and businesses to avoid the pain of dealing with spreadsheets and mashing data to create reports.

• Indicee provides the quickest and most effective way to create and share reports. Users with no IT expertise can combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee’s innovative cloud-based service.
• The Indicee vision is 20 years in the making. Indicee Co-founder, Mark Cunningham was part of the team that developed Crystal Reports, which grew to become the dominant product in its category. Today, Crystal Reports from SAP’s Business Objects division is the tool of choice for software developers, IT professionals and business intelligence consultants worldwide. Indicee’s vision is to bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” – the Holy Grail that the team was striving for when they first launched Crystal Reports in 1991.
• The track record and reputation of the Indicee founding team paired with the product concept and market opportunity has enabled the company to attract the financing required to fuel growth. Indicee recently completed a $6M initial VC financing, bringing the total raised since inception to more than $8M. Indicee’s angel investors include the original founders of Crystal Decisions. Indicee’s VC investors are Yaletown Venture Partners of Vancouver and Granite Ventures of San Francisco.
• There are three key aspects that make Indicee unique:
• How Indicee accesses data. The near-ubiquity of reporting infrastructure, such as Crystal Reports, provides a virtually untapped and readily-accessible source of data and meta-data that, with Indicee, can be accessed by end users, combined with other data (Excel, CSV, SaaS sources etc.) and uploaded to the cloud without the need to directly access information locked up in corporate databases.
• How Indicee enable users to query data. For years Indicee founders listened to users wonder “Why can’t I just ask a question and get an answer?”. To address this, they built a dead-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 “canned“ reports into spreadsheets.
• How Indicee engages people.  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.
• Indicee was founded by Mark Cunningham –16 years of entrepreneurial and technology experience previously Founder/CEO of Symmetrics, founder Crystal Decisions acquired by Seagate in 1996, and Fred Tummonds – 11 years of high tech industry experience previously at Business Objects where he was Vice President responsible for Enterprise Reporting.
• In early 2009 a beta version of Indicee software was released for commercial use, attracting both large and mid-sized businesses and partners including Mary Kay Cosmetics, Alco Ventures and Sage Software and others.

Check them out at http://indicee.com