I recently had a chance to chat with Mark Cunningham, CEO of Indicee, a Vancouver based startup and new member to SIIA. Read my interview below for some interesting insights into the Business Analytics space.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA. Tell me a bit about Indicee and what differentiates you from other BI vendors.

Mark: Indicee is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) platform. The Indicee app allows business users to bring data together from multiple sources to answer critical business questions. The platform allows partners to easily add reporting and analytics to their own applications and services.

Much of what makes us different comes from our experience. I was a founding member of Crystal Services back in the 1990s, and many of the Indicee team were instrumental in making the products from Crystal and Business Objects so successful.

Our mission today is to make BI simpler, more effective and affordable for any size of organization. For years, the BI industry has been dominated by on-premise tools that are prohibitively complex and beyond the budget of all but the biggest enterprises. We want to change that. With decades of experience, we understand the pain and frustration caused by trying to implement and maintain these monolithic solutions. We built the Indicee platform to address the challenges posed by traditional BI and replace them with something agile and user-friendly, but just as powerful.

Rhianna: Part of what you have done is to design the company around partnering. Why is building a partner ecosystem so important to your overall goals? And, what makes an attractive partner for Indicee?

Mark: Our success at Crystal was based on creating the leading OEM reporting tool in the market. Partnering is in our DNA. The difference today, is the number of ways in which we can set up partnerships. Cloud is now our channel and the partner ecosystem consists of resellers, application partners and solution providers, not just OEM opportunities.

We designed the Indicee platform with partners in mind from the start, so we’re able to offer a dedicated acquisition program and a more comprehensive API than other cloud BI vendors. This allows ISVs to embed white-labelled reporting directly into their applications, or use Indicee as a side-by-side value-added analytics service.

Building a healthy partner ecosystem is an important way to extend our market reach, more quickly than we can achieve through marketing efforts alone. There is also a great demand for embedded analytics right now. The nature of cloud computing means that many ISVs have user data locked within their apps. As more customers try to access this data, the pressure is on vendors to deliver in-app reports and analytics, even when they have no BI expertise. That’s where the Indicee partner program can help.

An attractive partner is any organization that recognizes the value of analytics for their customers, and the opportunity for a new revenue source. Indicee works best when implemented by industry experts who can combine their marketplace expertise with world-class reporting.

Rhianna: What are some of the biggest hurdles companies face when building or adopting BI systems or solutions?

Mark: For companies implementing traditional enterprise BI tools, the adoption hurdles are high and numerous. That’s why penetration rates for BI have been stuck at an underwhelming 20% for over a decade. The sheer complexity of the software means that these large-scale implementation projects tend to last months, sometimes years, usually cost a small fortune and have to be owned by the IT department, even when complete. This creates a permanent IT bottleneck and prevents BI ever coming into the hands of the business users who need it. We advocate a better way: projects that start small and scale, tools that are accessible to tech-savvy business users, and agile solutions that are affordable for any organization.

As for ISVs considering in-app analytics, it rarely makes commercial sense to build a BI solution in-house. It requires a highly specialized skillset, and due to the inherent complexity of data, is a very lengthy undertaking. But until recently, the alternatives weren’t ideal either. The product guys had a choice between open source tools, which need a great deal of customization and ongoing maintenance, or traditional, on-premise tools, which require an army of developers to set up, and are completely at odds with SaaS pricing models, development cycles and ethos. Tools like Indicee provide a third option: easily embedded, flexible and cloud-based analytics.

Rhianna: There is so much talk out there around analytics, BI, and Big Data. How do you see the BI landscape changing in the next year?

Mark: We believe that the future for BI is the cloud. However, simply putting the current, on-premise solutions in the cloud wont’ solve any of the typical BI problems. So, while the mega-vendors tiptoe towards the cloud with the same old toolkit, the dedicated cloud vendors are evolving a new breed of agile, inexpensive apps. This is causing a shift away from the traditionally complex, static solutions, towards more embedded analytics, specific solution apps and standalone BI that starts small and scales to other parts of the business. As a result, BI is going to become increasingly consumerized and accessible to small and mid-sized businesses.

BI vendors, like ourselves, also have to keep pace with the increasing size and scale of data in general. We believe that so-called “Big Data” will only start making sense when we can combine slow-changing, legacy data with the new, high-volume data. We have big plans for this element of data handling, but we’ll have to come back and tell you more about that later in the year…

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.