We had the final night of CapVenture last night. Southeast Innovations, a publication which covers startups and investment firms in the Southeast, has a nice writeup on it.
CapVenture, as I’ve written before, was a great program run by the ATDC and TAG to help early stage companies in the fund raising process. Bravadosoft was one of 15 companies selected out of 100 applications.
Last night we had the final night. We were very fortunate to have the chance to be one of the 4 companies selected to give an extended 10 minute pitch. What a great time! I had quite a few potential partners and investors talk to me after the presentation, and I know several of the other companies did as well.
Many thanks to the ATDC and TAG, especially Cindy Cheatham and Charles Ross for organizing the program. Also thanks to Jim Morgan and Lance Weatherby for coaching and help during the program.
This is a great time for Bravadosoft. We’re in Beta now with 3 customers (more on that soon) and we’re actively speaking to potential investors.
So Apple simplified the product line yesterday by discontinuing the 4GB model; now there’s only the 8GB model. They also dropped the price $200 (33%) to $400.
So was this a mistake on their part? Did they price the product too high at first? Hubris on Infinite Loop?
Or, perhaps, did they have a clever plan all along. Maybe they realized that a certain group of people would buy the first ~ 500,000 units at just about any price. Apple loyalists, gadget freaks, and startup entrepreneurs who didn’t quite realize they didn’t have an income anymore (ahem) were all going to buy the device as soon as it came out. It was the cool thing, the bleeding edge. Only after this group has satisfied its craving for new gadgets would Apple simplify the product line and reduce prices.
I’m not sure. I personally think it was all planned out to happen like this. Obviously they knew they’d be releasing the new video iPod Nanos and the iPod Touch devices, and maybe it made sense all along to tweak the iPhone line at the same time. Then again maybe it was just their turn to make a mistake.
At Bravadosoft we like the iPhone. I’d like to get our software running on it. I really believe it’s a superb platform for web apps. Our problem though is that we use Flash in our application, and the iPhone doesn’t support it yet. A chart like this one doesn’t render right now, and that’s a shame.
We have a sharp looking application and we’re Apple fans. My guess is that we’ll figure a way around this, even if means having a separate iPhone-compatible version of our application. I think Apple wants us to use QuickTime but I don’t see that happening.
Final note–I like the concept of simplifying a product line and having pricing that makes sense. At Bravadosoft we’ll keep our configurations and pricing as simple as possible. Traditionally in the Business Intelligence market (and really the enterprise software market as a whole) the pricing schemes are byzantine in their complexity. Vendors have had a goal of selling as many components of a large suite as possible, and playing around with the pricing models to make it all look right. We’re not going to do that.
So I did a post about a year ago when I was starting to form the ideas for our product. It’s cool looking back at it to see where we’ve come. We’ve got something working that does what I wrote, and that’s very cool.
During a recent client engagement it became apparent that there is a need in the market for a Business Intelligence Extranet.What do I mean by a Business Intelligence (BI) Extranet? It’s a good place to start–the definition. For the purposes of this posting, a BI Extranet is defined as:
A secure web portal made available to an organization’s clients, partners, or other external groups for the purpose of presenting structured, relevant information through reports, ad hoc analyses, dashboards, and other visual elements.
Ok so let’s break that down:
- Secure Web Portal–Essentially you need a web application that is able to authenticate users across different organizations, provide a framework for authorizations down to the report component or web page layer, and keep track of a user’s identity and group membership across page views.
- Clients, Partners, External Groups–The users in an Extranet in general are those outside to the organization developing the application. For example, a software company might create an extranet to demonstrate to its consulting partners their YTD performance on several metrics (sales revenue, client satisfaction, etc.).
- Sharing Structured, Relevant Information–This seems obvious I guess, but the whole point is to present information that has been structured into something interesting to the user. You can’t just have a standard portal page with a few documents to search through. You need to spend the time in the normal functions of analysis & design on the underlying data. That data needs to be structured in such a way as to allow relevant and valuable reports to be created against it.
- Reports, Ad Hoc Analysis, Dashboards–This is the meat. Create a dashboard of the high level metrics, present a guided path from there to some static and parameter-driven reports, and then allow ad hoc analysis when the information calls for it.
Now that we have a good working definition, let’s talk about the market. Many times when I’m speaking to a client about a possible BI project the first thing they’ll ask for is a rating of the different products on the market. I’ll hear questions about Business Objects, Hyperion, Microsoft, Targit, ProClarity (now Microsoft), Cognos, and other vendors. My standard (and correct I feel) answer is to say something like, “Each of these are excellent tools and they may work for you. Let’s explore this a bit more in the first phase of a project and we’ll see where we end up. It looks like at this point that is looking like a good choice, but that could change as we find out more information.”
The issue comes in when you start to consider the mix and depth of requirements that tend to come up and compare those requirements to the base features of any BI product suite. Very few of the product suites support an extranet. They are much more focused on features for corporate intranets, small groups of power users, etc. They are also now more inclined to target an entire BI environment with their product mix–data quality, ETL, reporting, analysis, dashboards, etc.
What the market seems to be missing (or perhaps what I’ve missed in the market) is a product made specifically for the BI extranet.
