We connected directly to the data in our SAP system. And we were then able to demonstrate the capabilities of Style Intelligence to all our internal clients. That began to generate a lot of excitement, a lot of participation, and people started thinking about what the possibilities were for Style Intelligence.
Since then, what we have done is we are now in the process of proliferating business intelligence, and what I mean that is actually getting the BI tool fully functional to make it available to use with all of our info cubes that we have already available. We expect to do that over the next probably about six or seven weeks. And in second half of the year, we will have a number of projects lined up.
Even in this preliminary stage, though, we have already seen some organizational impact. People are starting to see how they can use this information, how easy it is to access. The tool is very intuitive. The ability to actually have it on the iPhone is great. We have gone ahead and we have demonstrated that. We have demonstrated it on the iPad now. So as a result of that, people are starting to say, “You know what, how can I use the information that I have available? What do I need available to me at my fingertips anytime?”
And now let’s hear from another InetSoft customer, Len Barrymore.
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Look at Point-of-sale Data
Len Barrymore: We had a really good case that came up from our business about how to give the users the ability to look at point-of-sale data from clients. So if we want to say ‘how many car seats did I sell this month versus last month’ or ‘this year versus last year’ in this region for this customer grouping, it takes just a couple of clicks in Style Intelligence.
When our users saw the demo, they said, “We have got to jump on this right now.” We firmed up our architecture, our data model and our cube design was cleaned up. We then did a really quick demo using InetSoft's hosted evaluation option. We loaded some data in the Cloud, and we showed our people what the possibilities would be for the BI product, and they were like, “Okay, this is something we are very, very interested in.”
We look at point-of-sale data. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of rows and cubes and things like that. So we need quick response time. And what happened, and we are just finishing up our integration testing with that right now, is that the users are coming back really, really excited, and they now know that they can take this BI tool and adopt it to other areas of their business where right now they might have even a web report or a dashboard even just a lot static management reports out there. They know that they can actually take this BI product, set it on top of some cubes that they might have and be able to do the same type of slice and dice.
So they are coming to us, not only in the same business unit but other business units, saying, “Hey, we want to get in on this.” So last year we were kind of saying, “Hey, hold off, we are still trying to figure some things out.” Now, they are lined up out the door saying, “We really want to adopt this as well. You have been able to show us with this used case how important it might be.”
I really feel that once you get an application, whatever it might be, whatever the used case might be, you get it up and running, I think that it’s going to really catch on. People are going to start to really see the power of it. But you need to get something implemented. And I think in a few weeks. All of the sudden, you are going to have even more demand than you have today, which is a good thing.