CONNECTING WITH BI AND REPORTING TOOLS

One of the biggest challenges for business intelligence (BI) companies that are trying to sell their tools to enterprises and to small to medium-sized businesses that are using Cloud data is getting access to the Cloud data in the first place. There are some tremendous data visualization and BI solutions in the marketplace. BI tools and BI implementations all have a similar challenge and that is that clients and end users often look at BI tools, data visualization, the ability to drag and drop and analyze data, and they get very excited about that component. The reality is that 80 percent of a BI project – 80 percent of its budget and 80 percent of the time – is literally spent getting the data from the various applications into a data warehouse. Add to that the complexity of getting access to data that exists in the Cloud with all of these SaaS applications having their own authentication methods, application programming interfaces (APIs) and underlying query languages, and it creates a very challenging and expensive solution to find. When these projects get more expensive than people perceive the value of the overall project to be, it slows down the sales cycle or kills it altogether.

What the MenSagam does to solve the problem of connecting for BI companies is really ground breaking. What it literally does is enable any of today’s BI tools that are open database connectivity (ODBC) or Java database connectivity (JDBC) compatible, to connect to the MenSagam. Through the MenSagam, they can connect to all of the different SaaS applications. What that does for a BI sales rep is it takes away a tremendous amount of the friction involved in a sale. It takes away the challenge of having to work the project around designing the data warehouse and what extract, transfer and load (ETL) tools will be used to manage this large, professional sales project. BI companies literally plug in our JDBC or ODBC driver to platform, and the users start seeing the data on their Cloud. When a sales rep is demonstrating their BI tool to a client using the client’s data that took all of five minutes to get access to and get up and running, you see from the looks on the client’s and sales rep’s faces that the MenSagam enables a very exciting situation.