One of the cool little startups I’ve been very positive about over the years is Danish cloud analytics company YouCalc. Today SuccessFactors are announcing an acquisition and integration that’s been in the pipeline for several months. YouCalc is now part of SuccessFactors and is being rolled out to provide integrated analytics within the SuccessFactors platform. The acquisition was for an undisclosed sum, but was a cash and stock deal. YouCalc CEO Rasmus Madsen will stay on as senior director of product marketing, while YouCalc co-founder and CTO Henrik Kjaer will become senior director of engineering.
Renamed “Calculator in the Cloud”, this new integration leverages YouCalc’s core technologies to enable analysis of real-time data for insight and predictions. The integration has been designed to perform analysis across all data in the BizX Suite as well as data from 3rd party cloud-based applications, allowing users to create ad-hoc analytic mash-ups from multiple systems such as financials from an ERP system, sales metrics from a CRM system or customer satisfaction stats from call center software.
Calculator in the Cloud will be initially available to a limited number of SuccessFactors customers on a free trial basis in early 2011 and is initially launching with limited capabilities, in this case Live Forms and Live Analytics meaning that business users have the ability to instantly run simulations and “what-if” scenarios based on mash-ups of data from any cloud-based app.
Existing customers of YouCalc will still be able to access their analytics, Madsen commented that the existing service will continue, at least for the time-being, as a standalone offering.
Why is this important?
The introduction and increased use of cloud applications has only highlighted the problems associated with traditional business intelligence solutions that tend to be based on data warehousing. The traditional approach slows the time-to-analysis and therefore reduces some of the potential gains that real time applications can bring. The addition of YouCalc functionality, which provides a real time analysis of data, will help SuccessFactors bridge this gap.
This move also molds nicely with SuccessFactors recent acquisitions of both Inform and CubeTree – these applications offer business insight and collaboration functionality with a real-time take.
