One Version of the Truth
Of course the guys at Rugged Logic always welcome new entrants into their space… that market zone we might call “Rugged Excel“, where vendors are increasingly aiming to provide enterprise-ready solutions that also retain the user’s ability to create and model in everyone’s favourite envirionment, Excel.
So hats off to Jedox, that I first read about in CIO India, of all places. On the face of it this looks like just another one of the zillion database companies maskerading as Rugged Excel by simply giving their users an Excel-like input interface for the data entry, but I do actually think that in this case they’ve done a little more than that.
Yes it’s true that Jedox is a database solution and doesn’t attempt to crack the problem that Rugged Logic principally addresses, viz the true modelling in Excel of the Business Drivers right through the working capital needs and all the other inner finanical workings of the company’s future cashflow, but at least this particular database engine does do what it says on the tin this time… that is, properly work with Excel.
What I like most is the way these guys characterise the reason why an FD would ever consider giving up his control of his Excel by linking it to a database… so that they get “one version of the truth”. But you still have to do your Excel modelling to get any ideas at all about what the truth is, of course.
So I suggest this is one for the Rugged Logic devlabs to consider for some future version in the years to come; why not get the best of both worlds by linking all that awesome Rugged planning power to some off-the shelf enterprise databases, so that once we find out what the truth is, we only keep one version of it?
