In our regular series, our Community Manager Daisy interviews new arrivals at Sussex Innovation about their business, why they joined, and their plans for growth. Today she chats with Graham Spicer from Splash Business Intelligence.

First of all, tell me a bit about SplashBI…

The company is Splash Business Intelligence and the product is SplashBI. The product was developed 4 years ago now, it emanates from the US. Our parent company is in Atlanta; they’ve been running now for 18 years and they have an historical product called EiS Express. [EiS is] quite an old-fashioned reporting product that can only be used in a particular marketplace, SplashBI is the next generation of that. SplashBI is more than reporting – it’s reporting, visualisation, dashboards, analytics…it competes with products like Tableau. More importantly, where our original product had one market only, this can go anywhere. It connects to any data source, it can report against anything, it has an HTML front end, it has an Excel front end and you can use it for marketing, CRM, anything like that. It’s quite a panoramic approach to business intelligence… a platform as opposed to a product.

You don’t have a typical user then?

No. Our smallest company is an IT network services provider and they’ve got just 5 users using it for reporting against HR (that’s in the UK). Our biggest customer in the US is Macy’s the department store and it’s used by 8000 people across the entire enterprise for reporting and visualisation against every aspect of their business. They bring data from their tills, data from HR, data from everywhere and report in one go.

What’s your role within the company?

My role is sales director. I’ve been doing business intelligence for 38 years now, almost as long as it’s been invented! I ran my own business from ’83 to 2012 and EiS were a bit of a competitor (not that much because they specialised in the reporting side and we did other more generic business intelligence type developments). I left my own company for a number of reasons and was approached by the owners of SplashBI who said: “Look, we’ve got this product we want to launch at some point, what do you think?”