South Africa's largest mid-size BI vendor continues to blaze an innovation trail across the BI landscape by announcing its release of Alchemex Software as a Service (BETA) offering which is due for public release late in 2008.
"We are demystifying business intelligence. It's very simple, and it's available to everybody," says Gary Boddington, Managing Director of Alchemex.
"The solution provides unique international opportunities by removing geographical boundaries and eliminating expensive proof-of-concept travel needs. It represents another first for Alchemex and sustains our innovation focus."
If you've ever felt that business intelligence is abstract and vague, think again. Microsoft Gold Certified partner Alchemex proves time and time again that you, too, can gain unprecedented insight into your business. And it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg.
In a groundbreaking new SaaS offering, Alchemex provides simple and affordable BI to the market. "We believe we provide the easy and affordable solution that users are looking for in a BI solution, says Boddington, "and we are now extending our offering to a global audience to make good on our promise of delivering business intelligence, simply."
Alchemex, based in Durban, South Africa, is a leading developer, enabler and support provider of affordable Excel-based BI software for small to medium enterprises.
Alchemex delivers business intelligence that interacts with a company's ERP system, providing a low-cost integration into existing IT infrastructure while extending and strengthening its functionality. The use of Alchemex, with its familiar Excel interface, also makes BI accessible in terms of ease of use.
For over 10 000 users in Africa, Europe and Australia, Alchemex's reporting software provides a series of modules for sophisticated yet easy-to-use management reporting, delivering real-time automated management packs, dashboards and other decision-support reports into Microsoft Excel 'at the click of a button', directly from a company's accounting or payroll system.
Unlike other proprietary reporting solutions and Excel links, Alchemex delivers a suite of pre-formatted Excel report templates for a number of install bases to fast-track solution delivery and currently offers solution sets for a vast range of accounting and payroll applications, making for easy and affordable BI.
In 2006, the Alchemex team, with its penchant for innovation, saw an opportunity to build on its successful BI solution for mid-sized companies by deploying BI more broadly via the Web as a SaaS solution. The solution has addressed the common need of management reporting in Excel with a simple and easy-to-use software solution through a project that was originally mooted as collaboration between Microsoft and Alchemex at the Microsoft Partner Summit at Sun City in 2007.
The Alchemex offer is a disruptive, unique and refreshing change in a BI environment that has become bogged down with high-ticket prices, delayed deployments, failed integrations and slow response to BI requests, and reflects the Alchemex commitment to innovation.
The collaboration between Microsoft and Alchemex included the adoption of some of the latest release of Microsoft software including:
* Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
* OneClick installs
* VSTO
* Excel services
* SQL Server 2005/2008
* Open XML Excel file format APIs
* LINQ
* Office 2007
* Microsoft supporting mechanisms such as Metro and the Microsoft Innovation Centre
* Vista gadgets
The BI industry needs some fresh angles and Alchemex is the first to market with this bold new SaaS offer which promises to shake up the industry, specifically in the small to mid-size market that previously was considered to be adverse to BI.
The Alchemex SaaS solution was designed to address the need for small businesses to have accurate and up-to-date essential reports at their fingertips. Without access to large IT budgets and specialized IT staff, a solution that offers immediate return on investment is crucial. Small and mid-sized business decision-makers now have the opportunity of pay-as-you-go pricing for immediate access to trusted reports that will provide a competitive edge by providing real-time insight into a company's business that other business applications cannot. Alchemex will focus on performance, reliability and security in its SaaS offering and aims to save its customers time by ensuring their reporting processes include automation and wide distribution, while operating in a familiar (Excel), trusted environment with no manual intervention.
David Ives, Developer Platform Lead at Microsoft SA, says innovative partners like Alchemex are helping businesses take advantage of the ways that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities.
"One of the highlights of Alchemex's SaaS-based solution is that it provides the flexibility to do whatever's best for the business," says Ives. "Their successful BI implementations are changing the way information is generated and used within their clients' organisations. This has a direct impact on the organisation's increased effectiveness and efficiency."
"The benefits are many and varied," says Boddington, which appears to underpin the disruptive nature of his Web 2.0 affront on BI. "We can now reach the widest possible global audience, with a negligible distribution cost relative to traditional software distribution costs and we have no issues with legacy version support or any access to networks and environmental conflict issues which we would normally deal with in a desktop application installation. The moment the users log in, they are on the very latest version. We also find that the web environment enables more and easier social possibilities because users of our online solution will find other similar users in cyber space to get up and running quickly. Best of all as a vendor, our IP is now completely piracy proof."
The Alchemex SaaS solution represents a well thought through entry level offering for smaller businesses to get an inexpensive yet powerful taste of BI before migrating as and when required onto the full value of the Alchemex BI range of products which enable consolidations, drill downs, complete flexibility to interrogate disparate data sources, Web distribution, security, OLAP solutions, additional reports and many more capabilities. "We don't only provide software to overcome BI frustrations." continues Boddington, "we pride ourselves on what we call the Alchemex 'whole product' which includes our cutting edge technology as well as all the support mechanisms which exist online for easy access and learning, including search options, discussion forums, Online enablement videos to get going fast, software training and accreditation in an online academy and a range of other options to get our customers empowered to help themselves in the shortest possible time - and they are using Microsoft Excel."
Thanks to this new innovation, Alchemex has been able to extend its product range. It also uses the technology in its existing software and future releases are already scheduled. "We have demonstrated our pedigree in the mid-size BI space," says Boddington, "and we believe we have a solution which adds immeasurable value to our clients and which will undoubtedly drive our growth, enabling us to fast-track the rapid deployment of BI solutions into new markets and ultimately grow market share and revenues."
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