Today we announced that Incorta has been recognized for the first time in the 2020 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report. We were one of two vendors that received a 94 percent rating in the “Willingness to Recommend” category by customer reviewers who indicated they would refer the product to others.
We’re really proud of these results, which are very encouraging given where we are with our product and how many customers we have. It’s gratifying to read reviews such as, “Awesome technology enabling IT to deliver hyperfast and accurate reports for the enterprise. Simplifies the technology and skill sets required to deliver Enterprise Reporting,” wrote one reviewer — and many others expressing similar thoughts.
The reviews we have today speak to our product’s ability to speedily ingest and load data. IT people can really geek out on that, and rightfully so. That’s great technologically, and it is a prerequisite to enabling business transformation and results. But it’s not the end all for why you need Incorta.
What we’re not seeing as much of yet are people speaking to Incorta’s business impact. I can do that.
Prior to coming to Incorta, I was Senior Vice President at Nortek, which is a publicly held global manufacturer. We were revamping our data analytics infrastructure and were on the verge of spending millions of dollars and beefing up our team. We came across Incorta, and it allowed us to do better than what our plan was, with a lot fewer people and a lot less cost.
Yes, it was super-fast and functional. But more importantly, it changed the game in terms of our ability to deliver and enhance data, and to present analyzed data to our executives so that they could make consequential decisions quickly. That resulted in profound changes throughout the organization, and in our ability to be competitive.
I remember the week when we first came out of Beta with Incorta. I handed our CEO a 13- inch iPad with some key metrics on it, and we couldn’t pry it out of his hands. There was one meeting in particular where the CEO asked the CFO a question, and the CFO said, “I’m not sure what the answer to that is. I don’t have the analysis in front of me. I’ll have to get back to you in a couple days, and we can talk about it in our meeting next week.”
The CEO pulled out the Incorta dashboard and boom, a couple of clicks later, he had the answer. That happened repeatedly, and it changed our meetings– we would not have to hit the pause button. We could go further with our questioning and drive down to whatever granularity we needed to in order to make a decision on the spot.
I saw the dramatic changes that Incorta helped unleash at our company, and how committed they were to customer success. So, when Osama said, “if you’re ever interested in coming on over, we need folks like you at Incorta,” I thought it over for a few months and jumped on board.
Based on my experience, I think that when we get Incorta in the hands of more executives, we will get the attention of the marketplace in a different way.
People still don’t really understand what our value proposition is and to be fair, we’ve had some false starts in trying to define ourselves. Early on, we thought that we could go after a big bang implementation and displace a lot of existing tools. That’s not so easy to do, so we shifted to focus on use cases that require quick decision making on complex datasets. That would prove the value proposition and expand use of Incorta further into the organization. But, we got a little impatient and started doing implementations with really modest price points. In doing so, we muddled our message because people all of a sudden thought we were a niche tool or point solution. In muddling our message, we diluted our perceived value.
Today, we’re talking to Fortune 1000 enterprises again, still with an eye to certain use cases, but with the confidence that once you see what you can do with Incorta in these situations,
we’re going to beat out other ways for you to process and analyze data and get it in the hands of your decision makers.
What are these use cases? They fall into three categories:
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Operational analytics on top of data from core systems. Many legacy systems contain valuable data, but do not have good analytics by today’s standards. Go into ServiceNow, Salesforce or Oracle ERP and you get some rows and columns you can download into Excel for analysis. We can transform that data into modern business intelligence dashboards that allow users to be much more sophisticated in how they analyze data, without going into Excel.
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Bringing together siloed data for consolidated reporting. Examples of this include consolidating the records of merged or acquired companies; matching pipeline in Salesforce to customer transactions in the ERP system, and helping supply chain professionals bring together data from the different systems they use in order to do forecasting and vendor management.
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Advanced data science and predictive analytics on top of existing transactional data. Let’s say you have field operations with machines and devices distributed around thousands of locations. You have service technicians to go around on a regular schedule to keep them all running. Well, if you can bring sensor data from those devices and match it up with the service records for each device, you can start to predict when your devices are going to fail. Then you only send a technician out when you get a warning, instead of on a set schedule whether your machine needs service or not. That creates huge efficiencies and cost savings.
We can’t just expect everyone to swoon because of our technological prowess. It’s great but it needs to be in the service of something higher that translates into business value, and improves the competitiveness of the company. We’re not yet hearing as much about that in these reviews. For today, being recognized on Gartner’s Peer Review platform is now part of the historical data about our company and where it is today. Without the benefit of predictive analytics, I predict we’ll get even better marks in our next review period.
Gartner “Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms,” Peer Contributors, 16 July 2020
Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.
For more information, please read our press release.