The Next Xcelsius? RoamBI Provides BusinessObjects BI for the iPhone
The original creator of SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius has done it again. Santiago Becerra founded Infommersion in 2002 and the company developed Xcelsius, which provided a intuitive and interactive dashboard interface for excel spreadsheets, using Adobe Flash technology. Donald MacCormick and others quickly spotted the potential for corporate data sources, and Infommersion was purchased by Business Objects in 2005, and Xcelsius quickly became an integral part of the BusinessObjects enterprise platform.
Santiago’s new company is called Mellmo, and it recently launched a beautiful BI front-end for the iPhone called RoamBI. The dynamic visualizations were designed from the ground up to make the most of the mobile environment and maximize use of the iPhone’s small screen size, allowing you to access, analyze, and share data from just about anywhere.
RoamBI does a great job of showing off the interface, with an interactive demo embedded directly into their home page, and a nice overview video:
Just like Xcelsius, you can use it RoamBI directly with your own Excel spreadsheets by uploading them to RoamBI.com, and this time around, Santiago has included corporate data sources from the beginning, with access to Salesforce.com, SAP Crystal Reports, and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence documents (using the Enteprise version).
It’s early days, and the interface looks almost too good to be true, but the feedback from users of the application on the Apple App Store is bordering on the euphoric (the only complaints have been about trying to figure out how to do some things – which is presumably easy to fix with a bit more documentation).
- “Most Amazing UI. This App is amazing. Beautiful UI, pie chart is awesome, I can see analyze data visually. Keep up the good work.”
- “Talk about the Killer App!!. Can I just say WOW!! this tool is insanely functional, beautifully designed UI, easy & intuitive to use, and miraculously it seems to work work and work without flaws! I’m an exec producer in the film industry and think this app will make a huge impact…”
- “Visualization fun at your fingertips!”
- “WOW! RoamBI it is an Amazing application. I can’t believe how good the application is. I love it. I really like the pie chart and the viewer of the bar chart. My favorite chart type is the Catalyst. Good Job….”
Like SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, RoamBI is part of a new generation of BI front ends that require little or no training, yet still let the users “roam” freely through data with a minimum of setup, using data from “the cloud”.
So maybe the only question that remains is “how long before Santiago gets acquired again?!”. If you’d like more information, Shawn Rogers has written a great post on B-eye.com about the launch, and you can download the application yourself here (link opens in iTunes).
Was this interesting? Share with others on Twitter with automatic URL shortening!
I was the eighth employee of 
RoamBi is definitely an exciting proposition for organizations who want to get the most out of their mobile device and BI investments.
For more information on best practices for using RoamBi and implementing data visualization on mobile devices, check out this new website- http://mobiledatavisualization.com.