Delivering Agile BI Very Effectively to Our Customers
This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webcast hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence Today." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.
When we see the changes that are happening from an infrastructure standpoint and taking advantage of a lot of the generational changes that are happening with hardware and software and networking capabilities, this capability of delivering agile BI very effectively to our customers is something that we are very excited about.
There are many factors that help us to make this thing really successful. So from a technology perspective, we are working on latest BI technology. We are including latest BI technology. Data warehouse and business intelligence projects typically tend to be very complex projects with a long time to get deployed and so on. So our interest was to get it as short as possible to make a real good experience, make sure that the software is productively deploy as quickly as possible.
Sometimes we’ll help a prospect with a proof of concept, and they’ll tell us, “Don’t remove it. We would like to take it into production,” Especially the midsize companies who are thinking about replacement of a database because the database load was too high. And then we brought in our data mashup engine. It’s a complex task to replace a database. But with this agile data access engine and with our data grid cache technology, you may have a benefit in performance.
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Proof of Concepts and Time to Market
Proof of concepts in how we can get customers very actively involved with the solution is an important aspect of the time to market. And when we have seen our customers work with the solution, be able to get up and running in a few weeks, perhaps a month, that has radically changed their ability to understand what’s possible.
And so some of the examples that we have been seeing in the past were customers have gone ahead and they have used this BI solution in a way where they were up and running within six weeks. And in that time frame of having that the software and the solution up and running immediately, end-users gravitate towards solutions that work in that time to value. And certainly, that’s when it’s exciting about the overall offering of StyleBI.
We have seen that excitement in our customers’ eyes but also just the end-users in how they have been able to adopt a BI solution that really gets them real insight around data and real insight around how they run their business better and being able to make good data driven decisions in their organizations. We see also the customers who already deployed our BI solution, now asking for more licenses because they are making use of StyleBI in more and more areas.
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A Customer's Business Intelligence Journey
Now let’s hear from a StyleBI user, Mollie MacKenzie.
Mollie MacKenzie:
Our business intelligence journey actually started a bit, I would say, last year, and we established a relationship with InetSoft, and we started having quarterly sessions. We were looking at where InetSoft was going strategically with BI, where we were going strategically with BI. And we decided that we are going to work together to deploy those self-service BI capabilities quicker and also provide some feedback to InetSoft in where they were going with their products. As a result of one of our meetings in October, we said, “We have got to stop talking about StyleBI, and we have got to start actually doing something with it.” So we committed to putting resources from both of our teams, sit down and actually get a fully functioning prototype available for us to demonstrate.
The prototype phase was both exciting and revealing. We began by identifying a high-impact use case—our operations dashboard for regional performance metrics. This dashboard had previously relied on static reports and manual data pulls, which were time-consuming and prone to errors. With StyleBI, we saw an opportunity to automate the data flow, introduce real-time updates, and empower regional managers to explore the data themselves.
Our joint team worked intensively over the course of six weeks. InetSoft provided technical guidance on data mashup techniques and semantic modeling, while our internal analysts focused on defining KPIs and user experience requirements. One of the most impressive aspects of StyleBI was its flexibility in connecting to multiple data sources—our ERP system, CRM platform, and even some legacy spreadsheets. We were able to create virtual data models that unified these sources without altering the original databases.
By mid-December, we had a working prototype that included interactive charts, drill-down capabilities, and role-based views. Regional managers could now log in, filter by geography, and instantly see performance trends, inventory levels, and customer feedback scores. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. One manager said, “This is the first time I’ve felt like I truly own my data.”
Beyond the dashboard itself, the process sparked a cultural shift. Teams that had previously relied on IT for reporting began to explore StyleBI’s self-service features. The drag-and-drop designer and intuitive interface lowered the barrier to entry, and soon we had marketing, finance, and HR departments requesting their own dashboards. We realized that StyleBI wasn’t just a tool—it was a catalyst for data democratization.
In our January session with InetSoft, we shared our results and discussed next steps. We agreed to expand the deployment to include predictive analytics and writeback capabilities. This would allow users not only to view data but also to input forecasts and operational adjustments directly into the dashboards. InetSoft was receptive to our feedback and even incorporated some of our suggestions into their product roadmap.
Today, we’re rolling out StyleBI across the organization. We’ve established a BI governance team to ensure consistency and quality, and we’re training power users to become internal champions. The partnership with InetSoft continues to evolve, and we’re proud to be part of shaping the future of their platform. What started as a strategic conversation has become a transformative journey—one that’s redefining how we think about data, decision-making, and collaboration.
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