They call it the last mile of data, the ability to run business intelligence applications that are natively mobile.
“Can you imagine doing a pinch to zoom of a huge Excel spreadsheet on that small mobile screen?” asked Jure Zih, director of marketing for Databox, which bills itself as the first and only BI platform built specifically for mobile (Okay, they’ve got my attention). “Our audience is decision makers. We started by talking to executives in the Boston area and it was amazing to see how they get their data (on the road) and how much it helps their decision making process.”
Databox doesn’t compete with the Tableau and Qlikviews of the world because it is mobile-first, a UX challenge that would make most designers’ eyes water.
From Databox:
Databox Rolls Out Enterprise Edition, Delivers Intelligent Insights To Decision Makers on Smartphones
BOSTON–Nov. 18, 2014 – Databox, Boston-based Mobile BI / Analytics startup, today announced the release of their new product – Databox for Enterprise.
Databox is a Mobile-first BI platform that empowers decision makers with actionable data and intelligent insights. Business users on all levels are now able to stay on top of their data, get notified when something needs attention and take action instantly – right from their smartphone.
Databox features an award-winning mobile experience for iOS and Android that sets new standards in reporting, analysis and intelligence for enterprises. Business users in several Fortune 500 companies, including Staples and Sears already trust Databox to empower them with actionable real-time data and intelligent insights.
Mobile is driving the next big shift in the BI industry
Business intelligence remains one of the fastest growing software markets and is expected to reach over $17bn by 2016, with mobile playing an essential part. While BI has risen to become one of the top priorities and investment areas in today’s enterprises, the vast majority of solutions on the market are built for desktops; complex, expensive and mainly used by analysts and data experts.
Enterprise mobility and BYOD are changing the dynamics in the enterprise. Demand is accelerating across organizations as business executives, managers, and frontline users require better and faster access to data. Boris Evelson, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, writes, “Information workers can no longer wait to make decisions until they get back to the office – that may be too late.”
Databox is empowering business users on mobile
Databox is built for decision makers, not analysts and data experts. The whole user experience is carefully thought of and tailored to best-fit the busy schedule of an executive. Besides data visualization, scorecards help accurately assess business performance every morning, delivered as short daily reports based on the most important KPIs. Smart alerts are instantly delivered via push notification when something needs attention. Users can create annotations and start team conversations around any metric or report to tackle the problem right away.
Instead of the traditional approach, where business users are demanding information from their team, Databox brings that information directly to them. It delivers the right data at the right time, making it an ideal solution for business executives, managers, directors and frontline users who require intelligent insights 24/7.
Technology overview
Databox is an easy-to-deploy solution that is build on top of the latest big data technologies, capable of processing millions of incoming data sets per seconds. The platform includes instant out-of-the-box connectors to dozens of popular cloud services such as SalesForce, Xero and Omniture, on-premise solutions and other data sources, including Hadoop, RDBMS, NoSQL and Excel.
The Databox Metric Relationship Engine (MRE) and smart data objects are the core of the Databox platform and enable a variety of advanced operations and bindings to structured and unstructured data. Any performance metric can be intelligently related to existing and historical data, enabling it to spot and identify unexpected changes and instantly bring that to user’s attention. MRE derives meaning from data and delivers intelligent insight to a smartphone interface using a unique mobile communication protocol and a dynamic visualization engine.
