Background in BI
After nearly 10 years of experience, we aren’t new to the world of BI. However, we wanted to talk about why we do what we do, and how it helps businesses with gaining value out of their Business Intelligence environment
We’re not ones to brag or talk about ourselves too much (!), so we’ll keep this to the core concept of why we exist and what we want for our customers and our future.
Helping deliver BI in a better way and more cost-effective is the very essence of why we exist, so let us show you how it all started.
The Beginning
We officially started in 2013 based in the Netherlands and we’ve now grown to support over 200 customers globally. The idea for Platform Manager started with our MD and Owner Jeroen Gerritsen who, previously to Platform Manager, worked on several BI projects. He found himself deploying his own processes to help manage the problems that naturally occur when more than 1 person tries to work on something at once.
During a training session, he was asked about version management within BusinessObjects, and he realized that, not only was it not supported, but that this was a big gap for customers that could become a standalone product.
This was the birth of PlatformManager, and what started as an integration with BusinessObjects has now developed into a platform that also works with QlikView and Qlik Sense. Now we’ve even developed an API so that companies can access features that we provide from other tooling programs. We try to match our use cases with our customer’s needs, and this is what helps them recognize the value of it.
“If you purchase a BI solution it’s for analyzing data. Everything up to the point a business user gets their hands on the data should take as little time as possible. You don’t buy a BI solution because you like building apps, you do it because you want insight into the pace your business operates at. That is what PlatformManager helps to deliver.”
Jeroen Gerritsen – Managing Director and Owner/Founder
What We Do For You
Not having a version control and deployment system you can rely on creates several issues. There is a great deal of manual work to deploy an app, and in the many steps involved, there is a risk of errors occurring. Historically, it has been a people driven process, but with Platform Manager, the whole thing can be automated. Many of our clients report taking deployment time down from 8 hours to 2 and removing the potential for human error.
Some of our customers come to us to comply with specific regulations, such as HIPAA for healthcare or Sarbanes-Oxley for financial institutions. They need to identify any point at which data or apps are available to certain users at any given point in time, and PlatformManager completely fulfills that requirement.
When it comes to protecting your production, you need to know exactly which version of your app is in place. If you’re in a big team or have people new to a project, then you want to keep a close on who is making changes and when so that production is never interrupted. Some of our customers have 500 developers and nearly 100 servers, so manually managing deployment of apps and related items simply isn’t possible, particularly in a real-time business environment.
Looking Ahead
Right now, we’re continuing to grab feedback from the customers we work with, and we run a program where we get together with each and every customer at least once per year to understand their BI goals and how we can support them.
In line with that, we are now prototyping a solution for business users rather than developers. It will let them more effectively manage their data visualizations and help to support BI in the place that businesses care about it the most. Users will be able to store and restore visualizations they have created and this will also help manage sharing between users.
We want to continue giving businesses better access to apps that they can trust. Just as poor quality apps make for poor insight, so too does poor delivery.
Want to make your BI better? Find out how Platform Manager can help you today.