Because that’s increasingly the choice that customers are being asked to make, and one, quite frankly, we’re more than happy to have a discussion around.

 

With the recent consolidation of vendors in the BI marketplace, there are predictably hard choices to be made where you have overlapping ( in some cases 4-5 overlapping) products that all do basically the same thing.  In one such recently publicized case, with the selection of the company's go-forward planning product, it was praised for having an “Excel-like” interface.

 

This cracks me up.  Here the poor, humble, beaten-down-by-1000-whitepapers spreadsheet is pooh-poohed endlessly by BI vendors.  Meanwhile, somewhere on the list of reasons why one product should be kept over the other one at a corporate level, potentially disrupting hundreds of customers and thousands of users on the old products, there’s likely a whiteboard somewhere that says “Excel Like Interace—PLUS!!!”

 

Increasingly, we’re finding that rather than having just “some” of the functionality of Excel, or Excel “Like” interfaces, finance professionals, and indeed, people who work in data in any part of the organization, want to use Excel to do the job—not an add-in or plug-in or “Like” interface; and not in a vacuum, but as an integrated component of the BI environment.  The real thing.

 

With the new collaboration and sharing capabilities that easily turn the personal spreadsheet into a shared document, or the front end of an enterprise-wide budget, IT Directors who used to be unsure if they wanted people working in the Excel environment are finding reason after reason to push out their end user BI functionality to the rich Excel environment.  And today, with the ability of IT to retain version control, access, and security down to the individual cell level (not to mention a million rows of spreadsheet goodness), this increasingly makes sense to implement.  They get a tool that their users already know how to use; they cut down on the IT backlog and make BI more of a self service solution; and they increase adoption of the BI initiatives and capabilities in their organization--they get people wanting more.

 

So with apologies to our friends at Hertz, while some vendors will continue to push “Like,” we love that customers are increasingly coming to the conclusion that there's Excel, and then there's "Not Exactly."