What is IBIS 2023?
A few weeks ago the Squirrel365 team attended IBIS 2023 an education and knowledge exchange event dedicated to BusinessObjects. Why were we there with Squirrel365? Well, as you may or may not know, Squirrel was born out of a connection to the BusinessObjects world.
As long-time users of the SAP BusinessObjects suite we, like others, were mortified that one of the products in the SAP BO stable was going away. The death of Flash sealed the fate of Xcelsius (also known as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards) and it left a huge gap in the market.
Hello Squirrel!
So, after 6 months of research, and a year of development, we had a product that gave people a way to move forward. It became possible to migrate existing Xcelsius content over and create new dashboards and what-if calculators in a way that was familiar with little to no learning curve. Allowing users to leverage the already considerable investment they had spent both in terms of time and training.
Modern-day Squirrel is about no-code app development, rapid prototyping and creating interactive web calculators.
Squirrel365 has evolved a LOT since those early days. The migration wizard is a thing of the past and dashboarding is no longer the primary use case. Modern-day Squirrel is about no-code app development, rapid prototyping and creating interactive web calculators. However, the relationship with SAP BusinessObjects remains strong. Squirrel365’s connectors and webi extension capability allow you to bring web intelligence data into your Squirrel projects and Squirrel projects into your web intelligence reports. So it makes sense to attend and present at IBIS where the community of BO users can ask questions and learn about the existence of Squirrel as a tool to enhance and augment their current BI technology stack.
Fascinating case studies…
It’s always encouraging to see what people are doing with the product. Some of the great case studies we attended this year included…
400 spreadsheets replaced by one app.
We learned how Tenet Health replaced 400+ individual spreadsheets that were used to track cashflow at surgery centres and hospitals with a single web app created using Squirrel365.
Communicating the impact of changing critical input assumptions.
A leading consultancy in the renewable energy space is using Squirrel365 to create calculator apps that allow key stakeholders to view critical metrics and experiment with the impacts of changing critical input assumptions.
Reducing freight costs saving over $500,000 a year.
One of the biggest challenges with any BI solution is user adoption. A major paper wholesaler had freight saving opportunities identified in a 50 page report that no one was reading. Using Squirrel365 they replaced this report with an engaging interactive solution that resulted in savings of over $500,000 per year.
The Squirrel team presented on several subjects during their sessions. The new PPTX Parser, PDF Monkey add-on and PWA capabilities were a big hit! More on these soon 🙂
Meeting people
Ultimately, attending a conference like IBIS is all about human connections. We spoke to people that were completely new to Squirrel. Others who have been watching as Squirrel matures and with its new focus on app building can see areas where they can use Squirrel alongside their existing tools.
Finally, I have to mention the Squirrel Hackathon 2023. For the second year running attendees were invited to take part in the hackathon. You can read about last year’s Squirrel hackathon 2022. Participants are given a spreadsheet, a little bit of context and a Squirrel365 account and told to go forth and build an app or dashboard. With a couple of prizes up for grabs. See what our hackathon participants created in our blog post.
It can be tough working on Squirrel day in and day out and not seeing any of the fruits of your labour. But being present at an event like IBIS lets us see some of the fantastic stuff people are making with our product. We’re looking forward to next year already!
