Excuse the title of this post, I couldn’t help but go with the alliteration. The company it refers to however really is cool. MoxyReports is a creation by boutique New Zealand based development house EndGame. EndGame was set up by Andrew Butel, one of the earliest brains behind Xero, and Moxy is another example of a well thought out proposition.
Moxy Reports was created to power another offering, SpotLight reporting, an application that gives accounting practices the ability to output highly detailed performance reports for users of Xero. When developing the tools behind Spotlight, EndGame realized that an approach that saw the creation of an entire reporting engine, was significantly more useful than creating on product. The fruits of the labor created MoxyReports, which has gone on to power three products created by EndGame themselves, as well as another SaaS company’s product.
Created for .NET based apps, Moxy Reports is an XML based model-view-controller reporting engine. The MVC pattern allows report definitions (the controller) to be separated from HTML, PDF and Excel presentations (the view) and allows many reports to be run over a standard set of data sources (the model). In execution, Moxy reports and charts use XML report definitions and XSLT presentation templates running over a key-value database that has been designed and optimized for report and chart creation.
MoxyReports continues the theme of other products (think Zuora or SendGrid) that offer a highly specific functional offering that allows SaaS companies to focus on their core proposition and not undifferentiated building blocks. Charting is a fairly generic requirement, and it makes little sense for a SaaS company needing charts to recreate the wheel and write an entire reporting engine when MoxyReports has done it for them.
At this stage MoxyReports is sold as source code licenses. Pricing is around $20k for the reporting engine + $5k for charts + 20% p.a. maintenance. I’d be keen to see some kind of utility pricing that de-risks the transaction for SaaS startups.
Pricing models notwithstanding – MoxyReports is a great little tool. Well executed and answering a specific pain point for vendors.
