Background

We have been in systems development business for a long time. Most of the time and after we delivered the product, we'd have our client come back asking for Business Intelligence features, they want to extract their database for more information. We worked mainly with MSSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL.

We noticed the increasing need of our clients to leverage their existing data for their future decisions, and their desire to create a data-driven culture in their companies.

We have created customized database visualization tools over and over to our thrilled customers who were enthusiastic about being able to see all their historical data, and loved being able to tinker with their database tables and generate charts.

The Problem With Existing BI Tools

The market has had some powerful Business Intelligence and Data Analysis tools for some time. Tools like that are great, they help companies analyze their data and create their strategy. All good, except they all have some main problems:

• Confusion: They focus on creating more features, most of the time irrelevant to SMEs management needs, which leads to confusion rather than help the companies reach their data analysis goals. Confusion also costs companies valuable time in unneeded training sessions. Time that can definitely be better utilized.
• High Learning Curve: They have a very high learning curve. What is SQL? R? Write your query? Seriously? Businesses don’t have to deal with this, ever.
• High Cost: Not every company has the budget of Apple, and not everyone can ditch thousands or tens of thousands of dollars every year just to analyze their database.
• In-House Support: Although they provide technical support, they expect clients to have some sort of in-house support for minor issues. Those “minor” issues require tech gurus that most SMEs don’t have.

Old solutions are built, priced, and maintained to serve big companies; SMEs are an afterthought for them. It’s about time someone built a Business Intelligence solution for small and medium size companies.

The SME BI Solution

Putting the small and medium size companies as our main target, we decided to build a BI solution with the following rules in the center of our attention:

• Provides all database analytics needs.
• Has low learning curve.
• Goes the extra mile to make it non-techie friendly.
• No fancy buttons that no one ever clicks.
• Affordable to SMEs so they can keep using it for as long as they need.
• Doesn’t require dedicated staff to run. Anyone can use it without technical help.
• Doesn't charge per user.
• Has personal feel to it. It might be an everyday tool after all.
• Has shareable, embeddable, and downloadable charts and tables.
• Has high security standards.
• Has the best support possible.
• Constantly upgraded based on users feedback.

With all the experience and knowledge we’ve built throughout the years, and after hundreds of BI solutions delivered, we decided to build DataLynx to address just this problem.

DataLynx is built for small and medium size companies, who don’t have the bandwidth to invest in yet another “IT Tool” with all the overhead of recruiting more staff to manage it, and coming up with a small fortune to pay for it. If you are interested in talking further about the subject you can contact me at omar at datalynx.me, I’d love to get your insights.

Omar Digna