ClicData, cloud-based dashboard systems designed to improve business efficiency

ClicData has raised $4.6M in total. We talked with Telmo Silva and Hélène Clary, its co-founders.

How would you describe ClicData in a single tweet?

ClicData is the world’s first 100% cloud-based Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing platform that helps every business get the most out of their data.

How did it all start and why?

ClicData started as a data analytics engine for the pharmaceutical industry. The high volumes and variety of data, complexity and regulatory processes surrounding the processing of data required days if not weeks of processing and intensive manual intervention to produce data that would then be consumable by data visualization applications. Part of the issue was the number of interfaces between core systems such as the transactional data, staging areas, data warehouse, and report cubes and the interim tools and scripting required to make it all work.

We set out to build the first end to end BI platform that was scalable, global, includes all the necessary modules (connectivity, storage, ETL, data viz, security, distribution, automation, etc.) needed for any business to operate in a data driven environment.

With the advance and alignment of web technologies, the acceptance of cloud as a better, safer and cheaper alternative than on-premise, and combining the data engines and functionality developed for pharmaceutical, ClicData opened up its platform to all industries and sectors as a SaaS offering. We currently count over 800 companies in 37 countries using ClicData for their employees and partners, over 50 TB of data, and 1M data refreshes and 2M dashboard publications per week.

What are your key features?

ClicData streamlines the whole process of data analysis, from the data connection, management, visualization, and collaboration.

• With over 250 connections to a variety of data sources, our customers are able to bring all their data in a single place. We have data connectors to all major marketing applications, CRM and financial systems, as well as most SQL, NoSQL databases and cloud storage applications. We also have a Web Service connector that can be used to connect ClicData to tier application’s SOAP or REST API.
• Data warehousing: we have a built-in data warehouse in which our customers can easily centralize and organize all their datasets. For ClicData, data warehousing is a critical component of any BI tool because it gives the users control of their data. First of all, it is easier for administrators to access their company data while maintaining a high level of security with advanced user management and access parameters. Second, they can keep track of their historical data to do comparisons over time. Finally, they can also easily change their data source if an upgrade or migration has been done on the other side, in which case the data warehouse is used as a hub not to lose any data.
• Data cleansing, transformation and merge: one thing that is often overlooked is the data management step. Every application or database has its own type of dataset with its own column names and because of that, it can quickly become a nightmare to build your reporting without pepping your data. That’s why we provide all kinds of ETL (Extract, Load, Transform) features to do the job within ClicData. You can cleanse, merge, combine, transform and even create calculated columns with quick formulas.
• Automated Data Refreshes: this is another important part of any business intelligence project. You need to rely on the latest data and that’s possible only if you automate your data refreshes. With ClicData, you can schedule your data refreshes every week, every day, every hour or even whenever your data changes on your application.
• Interactive and custom dashboards: data visualization is a powerful tool to quickly grasp information of what’s doing well and what’s not. With 50+ visualization options and fully interactive charts, our customers build meaningful reports with all their metrics and KPIs in a single place. Dig deeper into your data by building interactions between your charts or with custom formulas.
• Easy Collaboration and Dashboard sharing: Building reports is useless if you don’t share them with your team or customers. All our dashboards are embeddable and sharable with LiveLinks. You can view them on every browser or device with our mobile apps.

What makes your product different from your competitors?

First of all, Business Intelligence tools that you find on the market are usually specialized in Data Visualization but don’t offer the data warehousing and data management modules. This means that their customers need to find another compatible solution to store and transform their data.

Also, most of them are still on-premise solutions that don’t work on all operating systems. That also means they need to be installed, maintained, managed by an IT administrator. ClicData has started in the cloud, still is and always will be cloud-based.

By including all steps of BI in one platform, changes to data is immediately seen on dashboards without any intervention from development. Data flows across automatically and seamlessly. You can embed your dashboards in your portal, web site, or application or white label the entire application and add it to your portfolio of services.

Automation and security is built in so you can create user teams, or individual securities around data and dashboards without the need for other methods of security or even integrate it directly with your company’s User Directory.

The price! Due to its highly scalable architecture and deployment, we can pass on the savings to our customers. We also don’t have higher prices for dashboard editors than viewers, a user is a user. We are open and transparent about our pricing which most of other vendors are not. We also offer a 14-day free trial that gives access to all our features.

We also offer expert service and support for all customers. Some of them use our Business Analysts to train their team right from the beginning for faster implementation and adoption of our solution; some of them use this service to outsource their whole project and we do the job for them. All this is in addition to support tickets, in-app chat and screen sharing sessions.

What industry do you serve and who are your customers?

We cater our Business Intelligence platform to customers across multiple industries such as consulting, marketing, retail, healthcare, food and beverage, travel and hospitality, entertainment, public services… And all across the globe.

We are proud to have customers like VMWare, US Mortgage, Siemens, Lexmark, Carrefour, Deloitte and 800+ more.

What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

We are expanding our product offering to include more features such as data storytelling, advanced analytics such as predictive, forecasting, and segmentation machine learning algorithms. More connectors, we want to expand our connector directory from 250 to 500 over the next 24 months. More visualizations to include infographics and more diagram based widgets. More outbound integrations such as enhance our Slack connection bot, API, and callbacks.

Larger companies are now looking at ClicData as a solid alternative to their current mashup of systems and that requires us to be able to support them in their migrations, so a big part of our strategy is to increase our partner network to be able to support any customer anywhere.