Proclarity Replacement webinar

Thank you for joining our session. This is Gianni Girardi. I'm the founder and CEO of dataself. We have a pretty busy session today. We have a lot of folks joining us. I'm really excited about it. Looks like there's many people still using proclarity and looking forward to knowing what's next. Should you stay, should move forward. And that's the goal of today's presentation. Because we have so many people, we decided to mute you all. So I'm sorry about that, but our goal is to give you some very informative session, a quick one, like half an hour and then if you have more questions, more comments, if you want to discuss your options further, then we'll gladly circle back with you and contact you and talk on a one on one basis. So let's get started. So, so today we're going to be talking about proclarit replacement options. First option is should you stay with proclarity, which is a valid option, or some options we recommend for replacing it, and we're going to show one of them that we recommend the most. So we'll have a quick presentation about it, we'll give some ideas about pricing, and then at the end we'll open for a Q and A session. So let's get started. So first of all, what if you keep proclarity? Well, good news is Microsoft has an extended support plan for pro clarity until July 2017. So you can keep it, you can keep on using it. I have a link here if you want to find more information about what is included in this extent support. It's not much, but there's some support still coming and the support is going to come from Microsoft as well as from us. So if you need help, if you need to keep working, it's a valid option. The officially supported platforms are listed here on the slide. We have been able to get ProClari working on newer platforms than what is listed here. It's a little bit of a headache sometimes we just can't get it done. But you know we're here to help you if you want to keep with proclarity. We want to be sure that you're getting value out of your investment. So these are some of the information if you keep with proclarity. The most important thing if you want to avoid headaches with proclarity is don't touch it, don't change your environment, don't upgrade your Windows or your Office, your SQL Server or ERP and CRM. If you don't touch it, it's going to keep on working. If you have to touch it because of other needs, contact us, we'll talk with you, we'll give you an assessment what's likely to happen. We have several clients who have moved over successfully. Some we couldn't. We have learned some things in the process. So if you want to keep and upgrade some of your components, let us know and we can talk about it. But overall, if you don't touch it, you can continue to use it for years to come. Proclaritors are still pretty valuable for many companies. They're still happy. So if you want to stay, it's a valid option. Now what if you want to move over? What if you want to use something that is the latest and greatest? There are many options out there in the market and we spent quite some time assessing options that would be in our assessment, the best replacement for proclarity. For about a year and a half we pushed or we worked with people to upgrade to Excel as a replacement for Proclarity. That's the direction that Microsoft took. Excel is supposed to be the BI tool for Microsoft and there are many clients that are happy with Excel successfully and low investment because they usually have Excel licenses. So it is a valid option even though it's usually more towards people who have more IT knowledge. Excel is great because usually people already have it, but in order to use it you have to be more tech savvy. You have to put more time into learning all the possibilities you can do with Excel. And if you learn that Excel is a great option, it's very flexible, it has a lot of built in functionality and Microsoft is just making it better. Pretty good offer, inexpensive. And we also can support you in case you go with Excel. The other option that we're offering is called Data Self Analytics. This engine is actually powered by Tableau. Make a long story short, when proclarito was killed or announced they would be killed by Microsoft and they decided to go with Excel instead, we tried to dance that music. Let's use Excel as the client tool. We actually offered Excel alone for about a year and a half and we noticed that a lot of our clients Excel was too much learning for them was not really the core of bi. The core of business intelligence analytics is empowering people like decision makers who are not necessarily IT savvy with a tool that they can actually do things by themselves. So we went through a process of about a year and a half looking for something else besides Excel and we look at several Leading BI tools that could be plugged to Data Cell, BI and Replace for clarity. And making long story short, Tableau, which is an OEM now of Tableau was the tool just to give an idea. This engine is powered by an engine that was actually designed by Stanford University professors. They come up with an algorithm that checks how business people analyze this data and based on what criteria you're looking for. The tool helps decision makers walk through the process. Doing data analysis is like a journey. You know where you're going, but until you start walking through the process, you don't know exactly what you want to see. So this tool has several features that helps that help decision makers figure it out, what they want to see, how they want to see it, what kind of charting capabilities, mapping capabilities in a very easy format, very user friendly format. Most importantly, this information can be accessed anywhere, anytime, through mobile devices and through desktop and web browsers. So Data Self analytics is our preferred option. Is more expensive because there's more value, but is an option so Excel, I mean the three options that we recommend is stay put, go with Excel or go with Data Self Analytics. Data Self analytics is the exciting one. So let's talk more about this option. So first of all, when we were searching for a replacement for Proclarity, one of the most important components was user friendliness. It must be really intuitive. It must really empower business people to get a grasp of their data. I'm sorry about that. So this tool which is powered by Tableau, is actually right now considered the king of the hill when it comes to data visualization techniques. So we're using best of the breed in the marketplace. So easy of use was critical and we pick the best one. Also it should have desktop, web and mobile. So this technology support all of these devices, which is pretty exciting. Pricing. The pricing should fit the budget of mid sized companies. So was another component. So all of this package we got with this tableau engine and then we incorporated, we did an OEM and then we added our out of the box solution which comes preconfigured with thousands of KPIs and dashboards. So that's pretty much what Data Self analytics is. What does it take to deploy it? So first of all it can co exist with proclarity. So if you move to Excel or to Data Self analytics, you don't have to scratch proclarity. You can keep on using it until you find that you can decommission it because the new solution replaces it. So all our solutions we support can coexist with proclarity until you decide to decommission proclarity. So that's the good news, you don't need to kill it. Second is existing custom reports or new reports, they have to be rewritten. The good news is the tool is very easy to use, so it doesn't take much effort to rewrite dashboards and KPIs. And we can do that job. If you want to, you know, if you want to have hands off, you pay us, we install the new solution, we rewrite the reports. When you switch, you have everything ready. We can do that. So far, most of the clients we have who moved over from proclari to dsa, they actually decided to do it themselves as a way to learn the tool is because it's fairly quick, quick to do the job. So it's an option. You can do it, we can do it. As far as training, the good news is we provide live web based training, but we also have a pretty comprehensive set of recorded sessions for people who like to learn at their own pace. These recorded sessions works really well. A lot of our existing clients who moved over about 70% actually learn most of the tool by just giving it a try and also watching the web recording session. So it's pretty valuable. The deployment can be on premises or in the cloud, so we have both models. If you want to have something hosted by our cloud server, we have that. If you want to have it hosted in your private cloud cloud, we also support that or everything on premises, all options are supported. This is the architecture pretty much if you are familiar with dataself already. We pull the data from the data sources, the erp, the CRM system and other data sources into a ultralight data warehouse which uses our technology to eliminate programming and leverages the SQL Server platform. This framework can use OLAP cubes or not, it's optional. So whatever you have invested in OLAP cubes will continue to be leveraged. So that's good news as well. Then the data self analytics component, which is powered by Tableau, it's like a cloud based approach which can be on premises or in the cloud, but at the end of the day you're going to have access to this information through desktop, web and mobile devices. All right, so that was a quick overview of the main points. Now I want to show a brief presentation of data self analytics and we compare it like a Ferrari among the BI solutions and there's a whole story why it's like a Ferrari. It's very fast, it's Very advanced, yet it's easy to use. So in my presentation now, I'm going to cover pretty much two topics. One is to show some sample KPIs in the Datasoft analytics platform. And then I'm going to show how easy it is to change something on the fly. And then I'm going to talk about what it would take to build something from scratch. So this presentation is going to take about five, 10 minutes. So it's going to be short but hopefully informative. So first of all, there are two main type of clients on Data Self analytics, the web portal, which can be accessed through a web browser or through mobile devices. And most people would have access to Data Self analytics through that means either in a web browser or mobile devices. And when you log to the portal which is secured, you have access to your own dashboards. So if you're a salesperson, you're going to see the sales team dashboards and you can have several of them, dozens, even hundreds of dashboards available to yourself. Now when you open a particular dashboard, I'm going to open one of them right now. You can have security kick in to only show your own information. So if I'm looking at my top customer by sales this year versus last year, like this dashboard here, what happens is I would only see my own accounts, let's say the California accounts, while Mary in Florida only sees her own accounts, while my boss would see access across all accounts. So it can be sensitive that way. We have again a very comprehensive set of dashboards available out of the box. The good news compared to the procrastinary solution is that this framework allow us to release new dashboards and you'll be able to get them easily and install on your framework by yourself. So as we release new dashboards will be easy to apply to your framework. That was something with proclare that was really complicated. We barely did it. So the new framework provides that, which is good news. The other good news as well is right now we have a special framework where if you move with Data Self analytics, you'll get all of our templates available. So even if you only purchased, let's say Data Self in the past for sales, if you move to Data Setup analytics, you're going to get all the modules, sales, purchasing, receivable space and so forth. So you'll get a lot more KPIs than you had in the past. How can you change dashboards on the fly? So let me show some examples of functionality here. So suppose I open this dashboard here, that Gives me information by territory. So I see bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. Each bubble has slices which represent sales by the size of the deal. And I'm looking at information 2014. And I also see here the sales in gross profit by rep. So here I have bars for sales amounts and bars as well as for profitability in the color of the bars, also have this color schema to tell how proper they are. So this dashboard, which is available out of the box, it gives me right now some informative insights into territory, sales and sales by rep. Now what if I want to interact with this report? Well, first of all, if I look at here, I can tell that Jack Black, it's fairly unprofitable, it's very reddish, meaning low profitability. That could be an insight right there. And I have to work with Jack to see what's going on. Now this dashboard, let's say if I just want to see sales on the west coast states, I could come here and select with my mouse or with my fingers if I'm using a mobile device when I do that. Now the whole dashboard changed. And here is showing my sales reps who are selling to those three states and how they're doing. So the dashboard is dynamic. Now if I come here and I select, let's say only one of the salespeople, I'm further changing the dashboard just to showing for those three states how much Sam is selling. This dashboard could have more information, such as products being sold, customers that are being sold to. And as I keep on clicking this dashboard, I could filter things dynamically. And let's say if I select more people here, I get more information. So very dynamic. I can also change things. Let's say I'm going to change the year to 2014, 2013, I'm going to show 2012. So these are kind of very simple ways to change in, in this way. It's pretty much a way to change things designed for report consumers. So if they only want to have basic interaction, that's what they can do. So someone else would build a dashboard, publish to the web, and then people would just use this framework to interact with it. How long does it take to build a dashboard from scratch like this? Well, if I would have to build this dashboard from scratch right now in about five minutes or less, I could do it. It's fairly straightforward. It's very, very, very easy. Now the good news is, what if I'm in a meeting, I want a dashboard like this and I was not available. I call my head office and I asked my Assistant, please build this dashboard. And I'm discussing and then she calls me back. Check it out. I go to my iPad, I open this dashboard, I get that information. Awesome. But then I want to further analyze it. And I'm a sophisticated user, I can do it. I can do it on my iPad. I could click the edit button. And when I click the edit button I have a pretty comprehensive functionality available. I can pretty much slice and dice dramatically. Let's say I'm looking at the sales by state query. I can see all the queries involved, the dashboard and now I can change it. Let's say I click the show me button and I only want to see a grid approach instead. So there it is. I have the same information looking on a grid approach instead. Hey, I want to see this. By year I can come to my list of reporting parameters. And by the way, they have these pop up windows that they tell what the reporting parameter is. So salesperson is the rep recorded on the invoice while the account manager is the rep currently sent to the customer. So it's a tool that helps people figure what they want to see. And now I can drag and drop things, let's say if I want to break down by customer name, I can drag customer to my rows. So now what I have is by salesperson, by customer, sales and gross profit. Do you want to see by date? I can drag and drop, let's say to my columns. Now right there I have amount sales by year, gross profit by year. Very easy for a more sophisticated user to take a report and extensively slice and dice it, scratch it and change completely. I could save it now and have this as a permanent query. Anyway, this tool when compared to Proclarity with Excel as well, is a lot easier to use, is faster and it has a lot of graphing capabilities such as mapping, scattered charts and many other options that can help you find the right data visualization as needed. So that was a quick preview of the tool. If you guys want to learn more about it you can go to our website and we have actually on the About Us events we have always some webinars coming up. There's a bunch here. Also if you go to the past events there are some recorded sessions of different webinars for verticals for different ERP packages. So feel free to use those and obviously the most effective way to find if this is a good fit, call us, Talk with us. We'll help you decide if you're ready to move forward, if you should stay with Proclarity or What's best for your business. Let's circle back to the presentation here and wrap it up before we start the Q and A. Right now we are offering upgrade incentives for you to move forward. First of all, because you attended this webinar, we have this year end incentive of 5% off of our licenses. So it's not too big but it's an exciting incentive to move forward. If you are an existing client using proclara, have upgrade credits and it completely depends on your environment. So if you are interested in learning more details, we're going to be emailing you and calling you back in the next few days. So just let us know. I'm not interested. We're not going to bug you or yes, give me a call. I want to learn more about it. More pricing or more functionality. We're here to help you decide what's best for you. Our current incentives end at the end of the year so if you want to take advantage, maybe you have a budget IT budget that you need to wrap up. We want to help you get the best out of it. That's it. We pretty much finished our content in 25 minutes as I hoped. We still have a lot of people present in the webinar. Appreciate it. If you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting panel. Just press a question and then I'll address it as needed. So we have some questions here. So about the training again, how it works. So first of all usually we budget six hours of live web based training for people, for companies and that's usually great to get you really going and taking ownership of data self analytics. We have several clients that only used about an hour or so just got an intro and they were able to complete their training using the self serve videos. Some of the clients require more training. We're here to help, want to be sure that you make an investment and get good value from it. So we are here to support you with that process. Another question here, a bunch of questions. What is the cost of data self analytics? The cost ranges significantly based on licensing what you have today, how many users the best we talk about costing is. If you're interested let us know, we'll get back to you. We'll see what your system is, what you have today already and then we'll address it. Specifically we have price ranges that can be on the four figure investment up to five figure investment. All depends on your specific requirements. So we'll be glad to get back to you if you have questions about cost. Is the web server hosted on site or in the cloud. We have both options. If you want to have everything on premises, we can have the data warehouse and the analytics server on premises. The data warehouse always has to be in the same network where your source system are. However, the analytics dashboard framework can be on premises or it can be in the cloud, your cloud. Or we also have hosted services, it can be in our cloud. So we have all of those options. Is ProClary compatible with Windows 7 so officially not. However, we have several clients that we managed to get it working on Windows 7. So if you want to give it a try, let us know and we'll take a stab at it. And we are going to all of the questions that you're posting right now. We're going to go back to you specifically and ask you if you want to help trying to get things more clarification, at least installations if required. But yes, we have been able to make proclarity work in some Windows 7 installations. In some actually we haven't, so it's not a guarantee. Usually should work though. Is there a business reporter equivalent? Not quite sure what the question is, but we have a desktop client and a web client. So it's like the desktop is more of a publishing tool, even though the web client has almost all capabilities of the desktop client. Almost all. We also are coming up with a module that allows to distribute reports automatically. Static reports and dashboards for an unlimited number of users. So you don't pay on a user license count. You just e blast like email to everyone. You can have thousands of customers. Actually we have a client who purchased from us recently and they have 3,000 customers they want to email reports to. So we're using this distribution module that it's unlimited number of users. Can proclaric queries be automatically migrated to Tableau or do they need to be manually generated again? So first of all, the out of the box solution from Tableau is going to be more comprehensive than what we had for proclarity. So we have very comprehensive out of the box reports on Tableau now, custom reports, things that you have built in proclarity. They were not going to move automatically. There is no tool to do that. It must be manual. The good news is we have two options to do that. One is you guys can do it if you want to do it, but we also have inexpensive services to move them over. It's a fairly straightforward job. So if it's kind of mechanical, we can do that as part of the upgrade process. So it shouldn't be a problem. We're here to help, but it's not automatic, it's manual. Is Data Self analytics compatible with acpac? Absolutely. We are compatible with pretty much all Sage ERP software. X3 is going to be supported early next year, the first quarter. We also support several Microsoft ERP packages. We also cover all sage CRM and SalesLogix as well in Everest ERP. Why did Microsoft kill ProClarity? That's a long story. Many people like myself are not happy with it, but it is what it is. One more question, then I'm going to wrap you up for upgrading current proclara reports to analytics. Are the reports rebuilt from scratch or is there a convert utility? So I already answered that it's manual, but again it's fairly straightforward. Usually we budget 5 to 10 minutes per report to convert and we have inexpensive labor to do that so we can take care of those conversions as needed. The point is we want to see what you have, what your needs are, and help you decide if you should move how much it's going to cost and take you through the steps. Folks, it's 9:30. I really appreciate your time. I hope this was informative. We're going to be getting back to all of you and seeing if you have more questions. If you want to take advantage of the promotions, if you want to stay put and continue for clarity, we are here to support you. Thank you very much. We'll be in touch with you and Happy Wednesday. Thank you folks.