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Any company calling itself iCharts knows at one point or another they will have to fend off jokes about being geared only for optometrists or whether it has a “clear vision” about its strategy in business.
Only afterward will the inquisitor discover that iCharts isn’t about wall posters with large and small letters, but that it is a business intelligence visualizer that supplies enterprises with the data they need directly through the applications they use every day on the job.
Originally known as an enterprise-grade visual reporting extension to the popular NetSuite cloud platform, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has now evolved its product into a new, more full-featured version, iCharts for NetSuite Enterprise.
New Set of Functions
The new set of functions was introduced May 17 at NetSuite SuiteWorld in San Jose, Calif., an annual conference for customers, partners and industry thought leaders. iCharts’ new enterprise product enables business users to integrate non-NetSuite data with NetSuite data directly inside the NetSuite dashboard.
iCharts was later honored by the conference hosts as SuiteApp of the Year, a high award in the NetSuite world.
iCharts for NetSuite Enterprise is a business software package built entirely on the SuiteCloud platform that is a collaborative visual reporting solution. It enables enterprises to visualize their data within the context of all their business processes. With iCharts, NetSuite users can visualize their data directly within their NetSuite dashboards without having to export them to spreadsheets or external BI systems.
Specifically, NetSuite customers now can visually blend data from sources that include other business systems (such as CRM, marketing, web analytics); third-party market data, such as Nielsen and Dun & Bradstreet; or historical or legacy data that must be migrated from a legacy ERP system to NetSuite.
It turned out to be a big week for iCharts. The next day, during Google I/O 2016 on May 18, the company announced that it has integrated with Google Cloud Platform to natively deliver big data solutions powered by BigQuery directly inside popular cloud-based applications for the enterprise.
“We’ve been providing our very advanced BI solution in the background for Google for a while now, and for some very big customers,” iCharts founder and CEO Seymour Duncker told eWEEK. “It’s completely cloud-based, and we exceeded performance specifically in the Google Cloud platform over some other big names in the i-tool field.”
“This is a win for enterprise customers who will get a fully native, cloud-based BI layer on the best data platform on the planet.”
Systems Opened to New Data Flows
With the expansion of iCharts outside the exclusive NetSuite data realm, users will be able to open their systems to a lot more data that can help their businesses make better decisions.
“This is a fairly big deal in many ways, because there’s no shortage of data that’s been collected by ERP users, and there’s not always the need to bring it strictly into NetSuite because it might be some processing information from some plant, or it might be Google Analytics—places that already have good repositories of data themselves,” Duncker said.
“We enable a cloud-based conduit without having to import the data into NetSuite, to be able to visualize what you’re seeing.”
Being able to see charts and graphs—and not simply columns of numbers—that show trends, spikes in sales and supplies, and other key business information are what employees in all parts of the supply chain require.
Go here to view a short YouTube video about how iCharts is being used at Fairlife, a dairy products company in Michigan.
“Our live production data resides outside of NetSuite, yet it is important for us to see this data alongside the other key indicators we manage inside of NetSuite,” said Brian Krosschell, Finance Director at Fairlife.
“iCharts and Google Cloud Platform have given us a way to bring this data to life, enabling us to integrate external data live for our users directly inside our NetSuite dashboard.”