Conventional BI solutions are designed for the need of big corporations where data could reside in hundreds of the source systems and all types of reports are needed. They require a major data integration project upfront to integrate data from a myriad of corporate systems into a single data warehouse where data is consolidated in a very simple structure, often a star-schema or "cubes", which their software can understand. And, to render reports for thousands of the employees in a corporation, their technology architecture mandates a dedicated BI server. Therefore, a conventional BI implementation is often a multi-million dollar project that takes six months to several years.

Here is the problem.

Obviously, the cost and time does not suit well with small- to mid-size companies, who we believe have been shut out of the BI market. In recent years, there are some alternative BI solutions emerging to fill the gap. The price point of those solutions is attractive and some of them even offer good data visualization capabilities. However, these solutions share the same pitfall with the conventional BI solutions - they require the source data to be stored in a simple data schema or in pre-built data "cubes".