Making sense from the ever-increasing quantities of raw data available to us is a recurring theme in the companies I speak with. Indeed one of my theses when looking at companies is to search for fabrics that span multiple disparate systems and bring sense to them. Business Intelligence is one space where much opportunity lies – whether that is RPM Retail bringing plain English actions to retail data or Chart.io giving visual meaning to aggregate data. Another player in this general space is EdgeSpring who are today moving their BI and analytics platform to general availability. EdgeSpring aims to allow users to quickly derive business insights from data without the need of either business analysts or IT resource. Since founding in 2010 hey have attracted $11M in funding from KPCB and Lightspeed.

As part of their onboarding and proof of concept, EdgeSpring has developed CrunchEdge, a public playground where people can explore EdgeSpring applied to the Crunchbase data. I’ve had a bit of a play and it certainly does what it says it does – allows people to drill down into the part of the data set that is relevant to them – in the case of CrunchEdge that could be getting some data on deal size, on vertical industry, or on any other part of the data that is of relevance. The EdgeSpring platform allows users to:

  • Acquire data from any source and bring it in to the platform – currently from SQL, Hive, salesforce.com, and some other sources.
  • Manipulate data to meet specific requirements
  • Query the platform – either manually or programmatically
  • Derive visualizations off the back of the queries

In terms of its go to market products, EdgeSpring offers to distinct products, SalesEdge and MarketingEdge – as the names imply, these two products offer sales and marketing people the ability to gain insights into their area of specialty and to be in a position to assess where to best prioritize their time. SalesEdge offers pipeline management as well as salesperson-centric opportunity visualization and management-centric salesperson reporting. MarketinEdge on the other hand attempts to connect the marketing initiative data to customer acquisition/retention data to more accurately assess the efficacy of marketing initiatives. EdgeSpring already has some interesting customers including Equinix, Netflix and Intacct.

I really like the area that EdgeSpring is going in to. As with other BIO solutions the key barrier to uptake is the ease of adoption/deployment. If they’re able to make it far easier for organizations to get started leveraging business intelligence, they look set to achieve some real success.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Hey Ben, this post comes exactly at the right time for us. We are a SaaS vendor (we offer Accounting, Accounts Payable/Receivable, Stock Management & CRM software) and we are currently looking into this issue. Do you have a short list of BI/Dashboard vendors that can integrate to our products? We need to deliver new BI/reporting capabilities to our users without writing new code, ourselves.
    Also, we seek to deploy (and offer to our customers and internal staff) a Graphical User Interface for the design of workflows, which ultimately will populate our existing “workflow engine” parameter database. Are you aware of any such products?

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