IntelligentApps Product FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

	Freedom to excel?
	How does the product work with Excel?
	Why do you think that people will use IntelligentApps Excel Edition?
	Who do IntelligentApps see as the competition?
	What makes IntelligentApps Excel Edition different?
	Who are your target markets?
	How are you funded?
	What are IntelligentApps channels to market?
	Why do you think that IntelligentApps will succeed?
	What is your relationship with Microsoft?
	Who are your customers?

Freedom to excel?

IntelligentApps Excel Edition allows users complete freedom (subject to appropriate security login) to access their corporate data. Within minutes users are productive producing queries and reports of critical value to their organizations, helping them excel in achieving their business objectives. Once reports have been developed, publishing to the web for wide scale distribution using IntelligentApps Web Server Edition is just a “save as” away. No jargon, no code, just immediate delivery. Freedom to develop easily, freedom to deploy, freedom to excel.

How does the product work with Excel?

The Excel user sees IntelligentApps Excel Edition as an integral part of Excel and part of the main Excel menu system. The product is totally integrated within Excel, appearing as additional functionality both in the Excel menu system and on the "right click" menus. IntelligentApps Excel Edition extends the scope of Excel by integrating massively scalable OLAP capabilities allowing users to build powerful reports in minutes. You may think that it is impossible to analyze quickly, millions of rows of data within Excel or any traditional Business Intelligence tool. Well….think again.

Why do you think that people will use IntelligentApps Excel Edition?

There are four key reasons why users will benefit from using IntelligentApps Excel Edition:

1) Power - The power of the combined Excel and IntelligentApps Excel Edition products together with the underlying scalability of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, allows almost any Corporate Performance Management application to be undertaken irrespective of size or complexity. Essential to the successful deployment of these systems is the support of the internal IT function. IntelligentApps Web Server Edition takes the Excel based applications and converts them to a fully interactive web based application.

2) Understanding - Users have the opportunity to build the reporting applications in a familiar Excel environment. In our experience users are productive in minutes, and leverage their existing knowledge of Excel to produce attractive and compelling management reports and applications.

3) Low Cost - Getting started with the product is low or even zero cost, and deployment across a department or even the entire enterprise is possible with the lowest cost per seat deployment of any comparable Business Intelligence software solution.

4) Accelerated Development - Users of IntelligentApps Excel Edition can speed up the development of multidimensional solutions. Applications that were previously built in Excel or a traditional Business Intelligence solution in over a month will only take a few days with IntelligentApps Excel Edition, and individual reports are produced in minutes.

Who do IntelligentApps see as the competition?

There are several major competitors in the Corporate Performance Management space, all of which are publicly listed and extremely successful. IntelligentApps successfully competes with these organizations by providing faster, more scalable solutions at considerably lower initial cost and ongoing cost of ownership.

In addition, over the last eighteen months all of the Business Intelligence vendors have produced some form of reporting add-in for excel, realizing the impact products such as IntelligentApps has had. These form additional competitors, but seldom scale to the levels our corporate customer base demands. In the latest version of the OLAP Report (author Nigel Pendse), truly independent products such as IntelligentApps are stated as having the highest user satisfaction and success rate of any BI client tools, and of those products the market leader is IntelligentApps.

What makes IntelligentApps Excel Edition different?

There are many features in the product that makes IntelligentApps Excel Edition unique. IntelligentApps Excel Edition is different because it looks at the world from the users perspective. IntelligentApps Excel Edition empowers business users to define and build their own applications without the need to explain to a third party what they are trying to achieve and without having to wait for a third party to build the application.

Who are your target markets?

We see several key markets :

The Corporate Performance Management market is key to IntelligentApps. This is where organizations are under continual pressure to maximize their achievements to deliver shareholder, customer and employee returns on investment. Applications such as Business Scorecards, KPI Dashboards and Sales Analysis are essential in this area and scalability for massive volumes of data which are doubling every 12 – 18 months is essential. Corporate organisations are increasingly adopting Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services as the platform for delivery of these applications. IntelligentApps Excel Edition delivers the ideal end user reporting, analysis and application environment and with the new IntelligentApps Web Server Edition product, applications that are designed in Excel can then simply be Web enabled in minutes. The ideal combination for users and IT alike.

The Real Time analysis market for areas like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is also growing and up to now, has been insufficiently addressed. Users in finance departments need the same level and speed of analysis as offered by Corporate Performance Management applications, however their needs are based on live access to the underlying transactional data without the need for extraction. IntelligentApps Real Time Analytics Edition is a product developed as part of an exclusive partnership between IntelligentApps and Digital Aspects and offers this functionality on top of leading ERP packages such as SAP, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

Our final mainstream market is where other software companies wish to add Corporate Performance Management functionality to their own product range which is branded with their own product name and imagery (OEM). Sage (UK) is one of the first companies to sign an OEM agreement with IntelligentApps, releasing Sage Business Intelligence in 2004 on top of it’s leading Line 200 and Line 500 applications.

How are you funded?

We have secured a total of £3.3 ($5M) million in funding. This funding has come from NewMediaSPARK, Zouk Ventures, Artemis Ventures and a private investment from Geoff Squire, ex Oracle COO. During 2002 and 2003, IntelligentApps significantly increased its revenues, becoming profitable in Q4 2002, and growing its profits to the end of fiscal 2003 year well ahead of target.

What are IntelligentApps channels to market?

IntelligentApps has three routes to market, a direct sales force targeting large enterprise deals, a partner and industry focused distributor network, and an OEM channel to maximize the exposure and usage of the IntelligentApps products. During 2003, we experienced significant increases in revenues from our distributors as well as our direct sales force.

Why do you think that IntelligentApps will succeed?

IntelligentApps is already actively demonstrating success, attracting over 140 corporate customers and showing consistent growth during 2002 and 2003. Further growth will be due to a combination of factors: IntelligentApps has a clear vision about the Corporate Performance Management market, the solution that it is offering and understands the real world issues of corporations based on 20+ BI man years per person in the IntelligentApps Management team. The firm is well backed financially, has a low cost business model and a very experienced management team. Our key product drivers of low cost, industry standard and massively scalable reporting and analysis solutions, place us in a good position to capitalize on all management users in any organization worldwide and to tap into the growing base of over 120 million Excel users worldwide as potential customers and users of our products.

What is your relationship with Microsoft?

IntelligentApps Excel Edition and Web Server Edition are products that are designed to be totally complementary to Microsoft's offerings and represent the first 100% .NET based Business Intelligence product set on the market. The Excel Edition product runs as an add-in to Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003. IntelligentApps was the only Business Intelligence partner to be included and demonstrated by Microsoft itself at the launch of Microsoft Office 2003. IntelligentApps is a Platinum Data Warehousing partner, and Microsoft has links to IntelligentApps Excel Edition from their web-site. IntelligentApps has had great support from Microsoft during the development of the product from both the SQL Server and Office development teams in Redmond and our managed account team in the UK.

Who are your customers?

IntelligentApps has signed over 140 customers world-wide. These range from small SME's just getting started in Business Intelligence to our main base of Corporate customers such as Shell, News International and Reuters. A more complete listing can be found in the Customer section of the IntelligentApps web-site.