bipp is Reimagining BI for the Data-Driven Decision-Making Age

Data-driven decision making has become a business priority as they try to speed up decisions. Data, workflows, and collaboration are intersecting, and whether it’s adjusting supply chains or deciding which product lines to focus on, it’s clear that intuition is nothing without data-based insight. For many companies, accurate business intelligence (BI) is a big part of the answer. Though not a new concept, modern BI comprises both technologies and strategies to analyze business data. BI platforms access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in dashboards, graphs, and charts. Modern BI platforms like bipp’s are engineered to let business users explore and query these visualizations to make strategic and tactical business decisions. In an interview with Analytics Insight, Angshuman Guha, Co-Founder and CEO of bipp, elaborates how their company is working towards delivering best and unique cloud-based business intelligence to a wide range of companies.  

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers

We founded bipp to help organizations seamlessly derive insights from data to make informed decisions. Our driver was that everyone in an organization should base decisions on the same data and trust those data to be confident that they’re making the right decision. Our core technical premise was to build a modern BI platform using best practice software development techniques. We wanted a SQL native, real-time cloud business intelligence platform. One that creates reusable data models that become enterprise-wide single sources of truth, or data dictionaries. This means data analysts will never have to re-write SQL queries once defined, saving time, and helping users build and explore ad hoc reports. Being in-database also speeds up time-to-value, and our pricing and modern engineering help all staff become data-driven. They can slice and dice data and create visualizations with real-time updates. Insights can then easily be shared across their organizations.  

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

My co-founder Vishal Joshi and I met working together at Microsoft and Sears. We were familiar with the BI platforms in the marketplace and realized there was room for improvement. There are many fantastic products out there, but most aren’t investing in the data analysts who spend most of their working hours using the platform. We saw a way to bring our love for analytics and algorithms to help analysts deliver higher quality business intelligence faster and launched bipp in 2017. We’ve been building our platform for more than three years, and in a world where data, workflows, and collaboration are intersecting, being new is a good thing. Unlike competitive offerings, bipp is a future-proof, innovative, and modern BI alternative. As we’ve been building bipp, we’ve been making improvements for our own data analyst team. We’ve made it easier for them to write data models to analyze data and perform queries. We’ve invested in helping them isolate and resolve issues with data and databases. And now we’re launching bipp to a broader audience.  

3. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes by adopting its technology innovations?

We think that, over the coming years, there will be more focus on making business intelligence actionable. It’s not enough to have a warehouse of data. It’s not enough to have reports. The key for analysts is to help deliver actionable insights. With this in mind, we have several features that help streamline the process of developing actionable insights. bipp’s modeling language, bippLang, enables analysts to create reusable complex data models with custom columns and dynamic sub-querying. This separates the modeling layer from the database where it’s stored, and the model itself becomes a single source of truth. It gives the business logic, and tribal knowledge implicit in SQL queries somewhere to live, allowing every user to reuse a query. Variables such as which table has which data, what the column names mean, how to join table A with table B, and so on, are captured and consistent. Git-based version control allows analysts to commit and automatically merge changes from the browser. Our built-in Grid Chart visualizations allow users to display multiple visualizations of similar graphs or charts side-by-side, arranged in a grid on the end user side. This makes it easy to compare across variables in a pivot view and reveal the range of potential patterns in the charts, all within the browser. We’re also striving to make it easy for companies to get started with bipp. bipp comes on a flexible, freemium pricing model. We’re providing individual analysts and teams with forever-free access to a powerful BI cloud platform, with enterprise features such as the bippLang modeling language, grid charts, Git-backed version control, and in-database analytics included at no cost. For larger organizations, a Premium package starts at $10 per user per month.  

4. Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of business intelligence and its future.

Virtually every company across every industry is looking to incorporate data insights into their decision-making process. Whether it’s adjusting supply chains or deciding which product lines to focus on, companies are moving beyond intuition in favor of data-based insights. For many companies, true BI is a big part of the answer. It’s not a new concept, but modern approaches to BI are expanding the ways businesses can explore and understand data to make strategic and tactical decisions. Modern BI comprises both technologies and strategies to analyze business data. They access and analyze data sets and transform them into end user-friendly dashboards, graphs, and charts. A key trend is the conscious incorporation of software development principles in business intelligence. Platforms like bipp and Looker have dedicated modeling languages beyond SQL to allow analysts to build data models in the background, thus separating the model itself from the data’s physical location. This means that analysts can work in the background to shape the data so that end users can answer queries independently. These models turn disparate databases into a single source of truth based on the company’s business logic. This can then be applied across the entire company, so everyone uses the same language to represent critical KPIs and data. All this is within the context of BI being actionable. Companies are no longer using BI solely to develop insights for PowerPoint presentations three months down the road. End users and analysts are working closely together to generate insights the organization can act on quickly.  

5. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it

Our ideal client is any company that needs to make decisions based on one or more data sources. For example, consider a small company that relies on Google Sheets for customer profiles, promotes new products using Facebook Ads and uses MongoDB for e-commerce transactions. In that case, bipp could help them by incorporating filterable visualizations from disparate sources into a single dashboard. A larger manufacturing company may want to understand the relationship between assets, sales, and market value. bipp could help them build a dashboard that obtains data from sensors on machinery, supply chain databases, and production item databases. This dashboard could act as an integrated information system, providing data such as production quantity, overall speed, operation rate, and errors. Critically, it could become a tool used by end users across the organization and not just by data analysts.  

6. Could you highlight your company’s recent innovations in the business intelligence space?

We’ve been building our platform for more than three years. The way data, workflows, and collaboration intersect is rapidly transforming, so being new has enabled us to build out bipp in a future-proof, innovative, and up-to-date way. Here are four things we focus on that help bipp stand out from a jam-packed field:   i) SQL-First Our commitment to SQL makes it easy for customers to get up and running quickly. We have a built-in SQL editor integrated with Git and have enhanced query writing with one-click queries and code completion. Users can also debug multiple databases in the same editor.   ii) Self-Service Reporting and Visualization We’ve built bipp to enable non-technical users to run and manage reports and queries. They can drill down into row-level detail and slice and dice data in their sales funnels or HR dashboards with real-time updates. Our visualizations are interactive and act like applications. This means business users can monitor and measure performance in real time or simply be alerted by email when a threshold or KPI is met. It also means it’s easy for business users to create ad hoc reports when they need them. This frees them from constantly relying on their data teams and enables the data teams to work on higher-value activities.   iii) Data Modeling Included for Free Our recent data analysts survey tells us that 90% of analysts want a data modeling language within their platform, and we delivered. Our bippLang data modeling language is the most significant difference between bipp and most of our competitors. bippLang helps clients build their data dictionaries. Its lightweight structure (only 31 keywords) and auto-SQL generator make it easy for users to create and run ad hoc queries.   iv) Trust is Built In The most common reasons BI projects fail is a lack of understanding of what BI truly is, dependence on outdated technology, and a fundamental lack of trust in the data. Our data modeling language creates trust by giving the business logic implicit in SQL queries somewhere to live. Everyone uses the same vocabulary to represent critical KPIs and data. This improves data quality, collaboration, and productivity while reducing inconsistencies. All this combines to build greater trust in the output.  

7. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

COVID has undeniably accelerated companies’ digital transformation efforts. Forward-looking companies want to put the power of data in everyone’s hands and wish to boost proactivity and productivity by making more confident decisions. They also aim to create sales opportunities and realize cost savings. Finally, they’re looking to their BI teams and platforms to give them the actionable insights they need to accomplish these objectives. bipp is filling a much-needed place in the BI space by delivering an easy-to-use platform with self-service capabilities. It’s designed from the ground up with data analysts’ pain points in mind. Most importantly, we’ve built it to deliver actionable insights to make better decisions based on present, historical, and predictive data presented within their business context. It has been road-tested by thousands of users at Fortune 500 companies for many years. Having completed our public beta phase, bipp now focuses on expanding our enterprise proposition and SaaS models. We’ll be refocusing our product development, sales, and marketing strategy to reinforce bipp’s support of a broader spectrum of users, industries, and use cases. We’ll continue to release updates every month based on feedback from our thousands of users. And while we can’t go into detail about all of the upcoming new features, users can expect a more comprehensive, platform-wide approach to AI and a wider range of platform options designed to support specific use cases.