Time for ‘Really Simple Analytics’
We’ve seen the cycle before — product life cycles have matured and the products bloat in size, complexity and price until people start to question their value. To those that have grown up with the products, this seems almost blasphemy. How could we question years of product refinement and adaptation? Don’t you remember all the lessons we learned along the way? There is NO WAY you can live without all those features!
Maybe it’s just us baby boomers getting older and less tolerant of complexity, but I am finding more and more telltales of a groundswell in search of simplicity. Being part of a software startup, we are constantly looking for new and innovative approaches (our potential competition), and I have been really surprised — there isn’t a lot of innovation in the Business Intelligence space, and it seems no one wants to simplify the status quo model of SQL databases and OLAP cubes feeding Excel spreadsheets.
First of all, Excel now sports even more features and can handle even bigger spreadsheets than ever before. That sounds great until you read about how many spreadsheets have errors and what the costs are. Then there are the increasingly scarce BI skills needed to build all the queries to feed all those spreadsheets.
Things like that make me believe we’re on to something with nextanalytics. Simple analytics, not complicated statistical analysis. A powerful script language that works on pages of data, instead of complex query statements, tedious cube construction, or a nightmare of formulas copied over thousands of cells. And it’s soooooo easy to build reports that would be a major challenge with all those other tools, and with a lot less to learn and a lot less to do. An order of magnitude faster to accomplish the task - and we’re not talking about compute speed; far less to learn, less to do, and much easier to reuse previous work.
And the whole thing is available to developers for free in a 300k download (on request), production servers get licensed for under $600. Why wouldn’t you consider it?
