Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Vishal Joshi, the Founder and CTO at bipp Analytics:
Q: Why you founded BIPP Inc.?
A: We founded bipp to help organizations seamlessly derive insights from data to make informed decisions. Our driver was that everyone in an organization should base decisions on the same data and trust those data to be confident that they’re making the right decision.
Our core technical premise was to build a modern BI platform using best practice software development techniques. We wanted a SQL native, real-time cloud business intelligence platform. One that creates reusable data models that become enterprise-wide single sources of truth, or data dictionaries. This means data analysts will never have to re-write SQL queries once defined, saving time and helping users build and explore ad hoc reports.
Being in-database also speeds up time-to-value, and our pricing and modern engineering help all staff become data-driven. They can slice and dice data and create visualizations with real-time updates. Insights can then easily be shared across their organizations.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your cloud BI platform?
A: We’ve been building our platform for more than three years, and in a world where data, workflows, and collaboration are intersecting, being new is a good thing. Unlike competitive offerings, bipp is a future-proof, innovative, and modern BI alternative. Here are four things we focus on that help bipp stand out from a jam-packed field.
1) SQL-First
bipp is a SQL-native BI tool, and our commitment to SQL makes it easy for customers to get up and running quickly. We have a built-in SQL editor integrated with Git and have enhanced query writing with one-click queries and code completion. Users can also debug multiple databases in the same editor.
2) Self-Service Reporting and Visualization
We want non-technical users to run and manage their reports and queries. They can drill-down into row-level detail and slice and dice data in their sales funnels or HR dashboards with real-time updates. Our visualizations are interactive and act like applications. This means business users can monitor and measure performance in real-time – or simply be alerted by email when a threshold or KPI is met. It also means it’s easy for business users to quickly create ad-hoc reports when they need them and not rely on their data teams.
3) Data Modeling Included for Free
The most significant difference between bipp and most of our competitors is our bippLang data modeling language. It helps our clients build their very own data dictionaries, and bippLang’s light-weight structure (only 31 keywords) and auto-SQL generator make it easy for users to create and run ad-hoc queries. We speak the language of data. And our key audience is keen to learn, with our recent survey of data analysts telling us that 90% wanted a data modeling language in their BI platforms.
4) Trust is Built-In
BI projects fail because of a lack of understanding of what BI truly is, dependence on old technology, and a fundamental lack of trust in the data. Perhaps bipp’s most important feature is that our data modeling language creates trust by giving the business logic implicit in SQL queries somewhere to live. Everyone uses the same vocabulary to represent critical KPIs and data. This improves data quality, collaboration, productivity while reducing inconsistencies, which all lead to trust.
Q: Who is your ideal client, and why?
A: Our ideal client is any company that needs to make decisions based on multiple data sources. For example, suppose a small company relied on Google Sheets for customer profiles, promoted new products using Facebook Ads, and used MongoDB for e-commerce transactions. In that case, bipp could help them understand which customers are buying based on which ads and how much they’ve historically spent to help refine future promotions.
Or a larger manufacturing company may want to understand the relationship between assets, sales, and market value. bipp could help them build a dashboard that obtained data from sensors on machinery, supply chain databases, and production item databases. This dashboard could act as an integrated information system, providing data such as production quantity, overall speed, operation rate, and errors. Critically, it could become a tool used across the organization and not just by data analysts.
The alternative often relies on each platform’s analytics engines, exporting data into .csv form, then manipulating the data to create reports manually. Such time-consuming ‘spaghetti’ analytics is destined to get messy, which leads to a lack of trust in the data.
Q: Can you tell us something more about your pricing plans?
A: The complexity of technology and licensing costs has historically meant that only a small team could create BI data insights. But with the number of data sources and analytics needs accelerating massively, the demand for flexible pricing to give more people access is growing dramatically.
bipp provides individual analysts and teams – whether they’re students, working for startups, mid-sized organizations, or large enterprises – with a forever free version. They can experiment with our modern BI platform without worrying about time-limited trials or having to provide credit card information.
For companies wanting enterprise-level business intelligence benefits such as a data modeling language, grid charts, Git-backed version control, and in-database analytics at a more flexible price, bipp is a powerful alternative. Unlike competitors such as Looker, Sisense, and Tableau, our product starts at $10 per user per month.
And realizing that organizations have unique challenges, bipp can create custom solutions too. Our professional services team can build custom enterprise solutions that include advanced features such as embedded analytics, audit reports, custom Javascript-based visualizations, and row-and-column level security.
Recommended: Q: What can we expect from bipp in the next six months? What are your plans?
A: Having completed our beta phase, bipp is now focusing on expanding our enterprise proposition and SaaS models. We’ll be refocusing our product development, sales, and marketing strategy to reinforce bipp’s support of a broader spectrum of users, industries, and use cases.
We’ll continue to release updates every month based on feedback from our thousands of users. And while we can’t go into detail about all of the upcoming new features, users can expect a more comprehensive, platform-wide approach to AI and a wider range of platform options designed to support specific use cases.
We continue to invest as we build a new BI platform for a new age of data-driven business. Given the pressure for real-time decision making, organizations need something more robust than what’s currently available.
Our difference is that we’ve built bipp from the ground up using modern software development techniques to be intuitive. We’ve also removed the frustrating back and forth between analysts and business users that is time-consuming and makes it harder to use data. This should ensure all users trust the data they are using to make critical business decisions.
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