Changing the world of business software

Dear friends,

As most of you know, I have been fighting the good fight for the last 6 years to put an end to big software bullying when it comes to costly and crappy data warehouse and BI implementations.  It just seemed that every software that I supported initially just turned to crap once they got “too big”.  Or perhaps their wallets got too big.

In 2010, I decided to focus the efforts of my engineering team entirely on reporting and analytics.  Why?  Mostly because that is the most difficult and challenging piece of any type of IT systems.  It is also the most overlooked and underplanned piece.  Sure its easy to buy a CRM where you expect the sales reps to do all the data entry.  Its easy to add a few fields here and there or buy more data from data suppliers.  But for what?  So it sits in the database turning stale until the next implementation comes along of the new version of the software ?

If business managers actually put their heads down and try to figure out what they want to measure instead of what they can ask people to register, and if they put focus on their performance indicators instead on calculations can they do on Excel, you would see much simpler CRM, ERP and Financial systems out there.  Systems that would be easier to use.  Systems that end users would actually enjoy using because they can see the results immediately.  Systems that are portable, interactive, social and focused on the activities rather on what useless data.

For that to happen, you need to start at the end.  Build your dashboard or report and work backwards…

In 2013 we launched a full data and dashboard editor that is available to anyone with an internet browser – FOR FREE.   We have over 8000 users signed up and our servers have not stopped processing data and automatically publishing dashboards since September of that year.

Now a year later, after many lessons learned, client feedback, and extensive support sessions we are about to release Infinis 4, the next generation of ClicData.  We have built a brand new web site for it, we are expanding our support to French, Spanish and Portuguese users and expanding our server infrastructure to have data centres in America and in Europe.

We are making it so that people can connect to data stored in classic software such as MS CRM Dynamics, Salesforce and a bunch of databases, while at the same time making it easier to connect to cool marketing B2B apps such as SurveyMonkey, Smartsheet, Insightly and Agile CRM.  For those web and social marketeers out there, we also have connectors for Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter.

I love software.  More importantly, I love what it can do for people and how it can and should make things easier, more fun and practical.

I could try to tell you that with ClicData you will be more effective, that you will increase sales by 23.712%, or that you can optimize your sales teams tenfold.  I’ll leave those claims to the big software vendors…

But I can tell you that once data is connected to ClicData,  it will tell you the truth about how efficient you are, the sales for this month versus last month or against budget, or if your sales team is calling upon your customers the way you planned.

I can tell you that you can do this without spending a fortune and without even buying a single server.  Finally I can tell you that if we can’t do it, because we can’t connect to your specific data source or if we are missing a feature, I’ll do my very best to bring that feature as quickly as we can.

Happy Dashboarding!