With the constant evolution of technology, entrepreneurs are realizing that they need to become more data-driven to stay competitive.
Impactful decision-making without data on hand is getting complicated by the day; thus, deeming it important to have a data-driven game plan if you want to be successful in today’s market.
Whether you’re running a small or large business or looking for new opportunities in the market, understanding analytics is critical. This is where business intelligence solutions come into play.
Business intelligence solutions have become a critical need for entrepreneurs. They are just as important as having the right product and marketing strategies if you want to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace.
The idea behind BI is that by analyzing data collected from multiple sources, you can make more informed decisions about how best to grow your company and develop products that consumers will love; however, many entrepreneurs don’t know where they should start when it comes to choosing the right BI solutions.
Pertaining to this, we at Insights Success came up with this edition – The 10 Best Business Intelligence Solution Providers 2021. Through this edition we bring into spotlight, exceptional companies that strive to deliver the best BI solutions and truly empower your business.
Featuring on the cover of this edition is one such prominent player in the BI solutions niche – ClicData, a next generation platform for Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, and Analytics.
Thousands of businesses around the world use ClicData to connect their data from hundreds of systems and databases, create data flows to match and cleanse data and to perform analysis and produce dashboards.
ClicData is a 100% cloud-based platform, available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, with an intuitive browser driven design and no installation required. Its innovative architecture can provision private data warehouses in 7 countries within minutes of creating an account and manages all security, backup, and maintenance of the data.
The platform optimizes data in vertical and in-memory so that its ready for analytics. By amalgamating the connectivity, loading, transformation, data warehouse, visualization, and publication all in one platform, ClicData provides all the necessary functions for any type of business, allowing for smarter and faster decisions while maintaining a single point of truth.
In addition, for those users requiring more advanced functionality, the company provides direct access to the data for advanced statistics and Machine Learning using Python, R, and many others via its API or Dedicated Database offering.
With the base platform, customers can also take advantage of other features such as:
- Alerts: Monitor key indicators and be alerted to when they cross thresholds by receiving a dashboard or an email.
- White Label: If customers are providing ClicData’s platform to their clients they can make it their own by enabling the White Label feature and use their own colors, logos, and URLs.
- Data Stream: Push data out to third party systems with our Data Stream module. Not everything is about visualization. Sometimes is just about pushing small and large data volumes from one side to another.
- Security: Ensure that dashboards and data is secured by teams, roles, and users. Included in the platform is an extensive security management system.
- Embedded Visualization: Our dashboards can easily be embedded into any web site, portal, or application simply by adding a link.
- Mobile: Our free to use Android and iOS mobile apps can be used to access any dashboard or dashboards in seconds.
- Low-Code Data Entry: Instead of embedding visualization in dashboards, embed data forms in dashboards. Enter data and immediately see the impact on your KPIs.
All the above advantages and more are changing how ClicData’s customers work by creating more advanced and interactive reporting and analytics. “Traditional tools, typically split into ETL/ELT and Data Visualization, Editor and Viewer, Client and Server are not able to achieve the same through their number of interfaces and scripts. And this is the real key impact to ClicData’s customers,” says Telmo Silva, the founder and CEO of ClicData.
Exemplary Expertise
Telmo Silva—through his role as the CEO and founder of ClicData—has been pivotal in driving the company towards zeniths of success along with the Co-founder, and Director of Sales (Europe), Hélène Clary.
Telmo, having experienced the pains in small and large companies of implementing local, regional, and global data centric systems, mostly in retail and pharmaceutical, saw an opportunity to tackle this problem that even after 25 years, ‘BI’ vendors were still not able to solve.
“The challenge of implementing efficient, simple, and rapid Business Intelligence solutions complete with a Data Warehouse was apparent. After years of implementing different types of enterprise solutions and observing that the end-user would still go back to spreadsheet exports was a clear sign that the solution is not just pretty charts and expensive servers,” Telmo expressed.
Those challenges inspired him to create a platform where you can connect external data and centralize it and provide immediate access to it. “The concept was more ambitious, as instead of defining data models and catalogues pre-emptively, we built fixed data flow interfaces between systems and scripting or modelling to describe data flows in different tools. Doing it all in one platform that is aware of changes to the data, that does not pre-aggregate metrics based on pre-defined sets by the editors or developers, and that has all the tools required to notify users when data changes by immediately changing downstream views and dashboards, was the outcome we achieved.”
“Maintaining the data lineage and being smarter by knowing where the data comes from and where it goes is part of the solution. The other part is how to make it available within seconds or minutes and how to scale across the world and across all types of data and connectors,” Telmo adds.
As excerpts from his professional journey, sharing valuable pieces of advice to entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the BI solutions market, Telmo says, “Do not be afraid of the status quo. Companies will always look for simpler, better, and faster alternatives to the heavy duty, 20-year-old players such as Tableau and PowerBI, Talend and even older Informatica, Business Objects and Cognos. A new age of workers and mindset will look for more intelligent solutions not traditional solutions. So, if the concept is sound and volume, security, and performance are part of the offer, then don’t worry about the others that are there today.”
As for Hélène, she is a seasoned Marketing and Sales professional with more than 20 years of experience. She has worked for pharmaceutical organizations as Brand Manager and Product Managers before she co-founded and took over ClicData’s global business development and growth strategy.
Overcoming Adversities
Talking about the initial challenges that he and his team faced during the pandemic and how they managed to sustain operations while ensuring employee safety, Telmo says, “At ClicData, we work with our customers remotely, and some of our teams were already working from home even before the pandemic, so from a logistical point of view, the impact was kept to a minimum. However, many members of our team do still want the social context of an ‘office’ and that presented a problem not only because of different rules by office regions (United States, Canada, France, India) but also because of the ever-changing rules.”
“As such, during the lockdown period, we strongly encouraged our people to work from home, we purchased additional equipment whenever needed, we started doing Monday Morning Messages, where Telmo would broadcast top of mind topics going on with the company or simply just share thoughts on what was going on plus tips on doing some work better or new tools or even what is in store for the releases,” says the team.
Opinions that Matter
We asked Telmo for his opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the BI solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future, to which he said, “AI and Machine Learning have a place in the industry from a consumer perspective specifically for those companies that have a chance of using it in a dynamic way. Today’s challenge with ML/Advanced Statistics is that it remains a very topic-oriented subject, requiring a developer with strong statistical skills to continuously build and prove or disprove models.”
“In data, segmentation, trending, and prediction are used to forecast and make assumptions as to the future but often we see that customers do not validate the outcome of the models, months or years after they were produced and used for decision making. Much like the rest of BI, ML needs to be embedded in the data management and analysis process in a tighter way and can’t be the series of ‘one-offs’ that it is today,” he adds.
Towards a More Intelligent Future
Sharing his vision on scaling ClicData’s operations and offerings in 2021, Telmo says, “We are planning to add more functionalities such as a report designer, an insights data playground, Data Flow, a simple way to manage your data processing, more visualization, more low-code screen data entry and more automation, and customization. Building a great product is our priority.”
“We are now concentrating our operations where our Professional Services team is closer to our commercial teams to better assist customers by ensuring they are picking us for the right reasons and that we can solve their business problems faster.”
“We are expanding into India and Latin America, where a product such as ours is ideal both from a cost perspective but a functional and regional data protection perspective,” concludes Telmo.
Exhibiting Excellence
“ClicData has provided us with a solution that not only extracts and combines the data from various sources, but it allows us to automatically distribute our daily and weekly reports without any interaction. So now we know that the 9 AM report is accurate as of 9 AM.” – From Gary Brandon, Sharps Bedrooms
“HubSpot’s reporting tool felt short in data consistency and segmentation. So, we started looking for a solution that could give us the flexibility that we needed to build more advanced reports. We engaged with ClicData to pull and aggregate our data from HubSpot together with time-sliced data. We now have a single point of reference that the sales and leadership team can use to look at lead contribution and lead attribution.” – from Meyer Prinsloo, CMO at essensys
“We implemented ClicData ourselves and it went smoothly, we uploaded data quickly and built our first dashboards in less than an hour for us and our customers.” – From Damien Lafourcade, Marketing 1BY1
