At Gartner Inc.’s annual Business Intelligence Summit in Las Vegas last week, the white flag was waved on using Excel for BI. Gartner analysts and BI managers said that efforts to stop Excel BI use were bound to fail and that the use of Excel as a BI tool is inevitable.
This is what BI vendor Alchemex has been saying for the last eight years: For SMMEs especially, BI in Excel is the route to go. Not only does the adoption of a ‘BI in Excel’ product like Alchemex leverage existing technology and keep costs down (integrating with the existing accounting application and presenting the data in the familiar face of Excel) but it offers a rapid return on investment due to pre-built Excel report templates for most major accounting packages to get users up and running immediately. It also gets rid of spreadsheet chaos by automating the creation of reports, drawing trusted data upon request from the ERP database into the pre-defined report format, eliminating repetitive manual cutting and pasting.
Gartner’s acknowledgement that BI in Excel is here to stay affirms Alchemex’s vision of not only providing easy and accessible BI in Excel to small to medium enterprises worldwide, but of being the global BI partner of choice for ERP, accounting and payroll vendors.
Alchemex’s longstanding and very succesful partnerships with Softline Pastel and Softline VIP have entrenched to use of ‘BI in Excel’ in South Africa via Pastel’s Business Intelligence Centre and VIP Payroll’s Business Intelligence Manager. Now the OEM agreement with Sage North America is set to proliferate the use of Alchemex software globally via the recently launched Sage Accpac Intelligence, as well as products in the pipeline for Simply Accounting , MAS 90/200 and MAS 500, all innovative ‘BI in Excel’ software powered by Alchemex.
Almost two years ago, Alchemex President Gary Boddington had this to say: “Microsoft Excel is here to stay. Ask anyone that has worked with Excel for many years, and talk to people in companies that have created BI technology that integrates with Excel to provide BI solutions for mid sized organisations, and you will get a good appreciation for how relevant and critical Excel is to so many companies globally. Excel is unlikely to lose its position of dominance in the world of BI and spreadsheets in a hurry. There are already, and will no doubt be many more, pretenders to the throne but Excel is pervasive, it is easy and will get easier to use, it is immensely powerful and will get more powerful (despite everybody still only using a fraction of its functionality). With this anticipated growth in functionality and usability, it is easy to wager that Excel will remain a great BI base for the mid sized market for a long time to come, and including it as part of your total BI solution would be a wise investment in technology and skills.”
Now Gartner is speaking the same language!
See full Gartner BI Summit article here: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/2240018042/Gartner-BI-Summit-Wave-the-white-flag-on-using-Excel-for-business-intelligence
