Image via CrunchBase
As part of this weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston a launchpad series was run where four finalists were invited to pitch to the audience who would then vote for a winner. I posted about the four finalists before the event and made my prediction for the eventual winner. I’m pleased to say that my prediction was right and youcalc took top honours.
youcalc’s proposition is very simple, they “let you create and share custom reports and analytics on data from SaaS systems – zero coding required!”. Basically youcalc utilises the plethora of data sources that already exist, and allows users to analyse that data, mashing varied data from varied sources while allowing users to created their own analyses.
In a move akin to salesforce’s force.com platform, youcalc has built a marketplace where users can find, create, distribute and implement various analytics modules – in my testing I did a simple Google Analytics anaylsis and was impressed by how quick and simple youcalc is to use – it truly is as simple as clicking a box, entering in login details and viewing the reports.
The great thing about youcalc is that it doesn’t try and replicate data or build data warehouses to store data – that’s a sure road to disaster as the demise of LucidEra showed, it also creates time delays. Instead youcalc integrates with live data feeds from applications merely using the numbers from those sources to run the analytics – it’s a truly cloud based, and cloud optimised solution that offers truly staggering analytics capabilities for only $19.95 per month for the business rated analysis applications. youcalc can also be used to perform an analytics integration between an on-premises application and a SaaS one.
youcalc’s marketplace also allows users to create their own analytics apps, using a comprehensive modelling logic library and their drag and drop user interface. The applications themselves can be used as widgets with a product like iGoogle, on an iPhone, within corporate intranets or on the web. The screenshot below shows the application builder. At the moment the application builder is a desktop product – youcalc co-founder and CEO Rasmus Madsen pointed out, with some justification, that the vast majority of users will utilise existing applications from the marketplace – the small number wanting to create their own applications will generally be happy to do so within an installed product. That said there is the intention of creating a hosted application builder offering at some stage in the future.
I’m really impressed with what youcalc has done, mostly because my perspective is that SaaS can have a democratizing effect on business, allowing smaller businesses to leverage technologies formerly unavailable to them. The level of analysis that youcalc offers is almost limitless, and their marketplace approach means that SaaS users will begin to create applications which other businesses can then utilise.
[..] (my reviewhere) excited me when I came across them. You see YouCalc provides direct queries on data sources, rather than relying on data warehousing and what must inevitable end up as analysis on obsolete data. TouCalc is the business that should have the big dollars behind it but, as is often the case, style tends to overcome substance, at least in the short term. [..]