What's Our Secret Sauce?

$15 dollars. That is how much money I would have if I had a nickel each time someone asked me what is ClicData’s “Secret Sauce”. In fact, at times I started to joke around and answered that it was a kind of “Marinara mixed with peppers and extra garlic” which mostly never got laughs. Many are looking for the secret sauce because they want a quick win, the fast track to success, the winning lottery ticket. At ClicData we don’t have ONE secret sauce.

We have 7!

100% Cloud

You may hear our competitors spend their customer’s money on advertising that they are cloud only to find out that you are about to install a 120 MB file on your Windows machine that you had to buy or install Bootcamp because Macbook Pro’s don’t run Windows apps. Think I am joking? Look into PowerBI, Tableau, Qlikview and pretty much all of them that claim are Cloud when in fact they are at best hybrid cloud-based software. Yes – we are truly cloud. Yes, it is your basic sauce, like a Hollandaise sauce that seems simple but it takes a lot of work. I mean, after all, there are many different browsers out there, with different versions running on different devices and screen sizes. It takes a lot of work to make it all compatible.

Data Privacy and Security

HIPPA, GDPR, FEDRAMP, ISO, SOC, and WTH are all real acronyms except for the last one which stands for What The Heck! The other ones are just some of the acronyms of different organizations, certifications, and processes that we work hard to hard to satisfy and implement. Most importantly, data is our business. We need to make sure that all aspect of access to your data is protected. This includes the data for your company as well as the data that we use in our application. One of the key aspects of data regulations is that the servers and storage where your data resides and is processed must physically reside in a region or country. We are the only BI SaaS Cloud Platform that provides – automatically – the choice of 7 major countries/regions for your data.

All In One

What do you really need for your dashboards? Pretty charts? Interaction? Animation? Ability to embed them in web sites or applications? We got that. But we also got everything you need before you get to the pretty chart phase. We have connectors to hundreds of systems and databases, we store your data in a world-class Microsoft SQL Server database, we have a full-fledged ETL tool that allows managing your data in hundreds of ways, we have the ability to keep historical snapshots, secure permission by users/teams, build dashboards online that cross data sets, embed or automatically publish dashboards, export to PowerPoint, Excel, PDF and more. We can also create alerts that automatically send you an email or a notification when something in your data happens, we have an API so that you can build your own applications, we have a Data API that allows you to report on real-time metrics. Yes. We also have pretty charts. In fact, we have over 50 visualization widgets that include charts of all types and shapes, tables, indicators, sliders, knobs, and buttons. You can also customize how each one of them looks and interacts. But that is not a secret sauce, however, the way we put it all together is special. Much like an Italian Béchamel sauce, this is truly the core of ClicData. Data Visualization tools do not have the data in the same application. In fact, most data visualization tools connect directly to different databases and hence rely completely on what has already been done. But sometimes the source of data is just not good enough to be visualized. It needs to be closely connected so that we can make faster changes to the data and data models and then automated. This is truly one of ClicData’s most special sauce.

Our Expert Support Team

Much like a Mujdei sauce, our support team is second to none – sharp, spicy, smart and very helpful. They are experts in ClicData yes. But they have been exposed to many data and reporting requirements across many industries and departments. They have seen it all. And what they haven’t seen they learn very quickly. Dashboards Made Easy is what we try to do, but not everyone has the same understanding of their data and what they need. Our team helps our customers take full advantage of our platform by getting them started on day one and after that, be ready to further assist via our In-App Chat where you can chat directly online with one of our experts.

Tabular, Columnar, In-Memory and Cache

Just like HP Sauce, our workhorse, the backbone of our analytics engine is a complex set of applications on top of Microsoft SQL Server hosted in the highest performing cloud infrastructure of Azure. We push Microsoft SQL Server’s database engine to the maximum including Columnar Stored Indexing (CSI). CSI is a powerful feature that prepares certain data elements to be ready for aggregation and calculations ahead of time by indexing them differently. Our application uses several techniques to optimize data loading and data retrieval so that the dashboards are as fast as we can make them! Each type of data behaves differently and each chart or table or calculation requires different parameters so that when our customers ask for data, they get it quickly. Our machine learning algorithms optimize each query request differently to ensure that we can achieve maximum power.

New (Old) Kids in the Block

Honey Garlic Sauce is not one of the best cooking sauces but on chicken wings, it is absolutely delicious. The combination of the sweetness of honey and byte of garlic is equivalent to the way we designed ClicData. ClicData is both simple and powerful. It is made for small/medium-sized companies but can easily handle large corporate data. It is priced to be accessible and can easily scale to provide more power when needed. The main reason for that is that it was designed by business analysts and engineers that have implemented many different enterprise applications such as those typically found in mainframes and AS/400s, SAP, Siebel, Business Objects, Cognos, and they did that with a new team of engineers and business analysts that are younger, the Minecraft and WeChat generation, filled with new technology. It means it’s built with innovation and agility and yet it is highly stable and with strong foundations for growth. Most importantly it was built with a business sense. We understand business and what it takes to measure and report on data. This was and is our primary focus. In doing it this way we also built a platform that is easy to maintain from our side and hence at a lower cost than others. Everything we do is automated. We are not in the business to buy servers and configure them for each customer with a database and all the workaround that. We automate everything because that lowers the cost, increases our efficiency and service to our customers and keeps the platform more responsive.

Data Interpretation

ClicData attempts to understand your data so that it can help you report on it easier, identify anomalies, clean it and even suggest alternatives or topics of interest. Much like a search engine that provides you with auto-suggestions based on your previous searches as well other people, chances are you or someone on your company has done the same thing multiple times with your data. If not the same at least similar, and ClicData is capturing that. We are looking at ways to make this knowledge more useful to our customers so that they can be faster and analyzing and visualizing dashboards. Much like a Chateaubriand sauce, our data interpretation machine learning application will take a while to provide good results, and as we have more customers, more data, and more use cases, you will benefit from this knowledge directly by getting to insights faster.

Conclusion

So there you have it, our seven secret sauces! Actually we have a few more but I ran out of sauce names… and after all this talk of sauces, I am getting hungry!