Information Builders is now ibi – a term many customers called it in the past anyway.
Last year, at the Information Builders Summit in Orlando, Frank Vella, who had replaced the company founder as CEO, took the stage for the first time in the top role in an important address to set out the company’s vision going forward. This year, in the company’s 41s annual event, the circumstances were changed. Vella took the virtual stage from his home, thanks to the coronavirus. He announced the change of the company’s brand, to ibi, as well as related changes like a new company website.
“In order to stay relevant in the rapidly changing space of data and analytics, everything you do does not have to change but there comes a time when a more modern, fresh approach meets the current and future demands of the market,” Vella said. “Today, we are bringing together the 45-years of history across the data and analytics market and aligning it with our new, modern vision, and mission to help organizations meet customer demands today while also planning for the future and turning them into information builders for their customers.”
While the ibi brand allows for a modernization of the company’s image, Vella emphasized that it’s already a name that was strongly associated with the company.
“This is how we’re known in the market, and how our customers, employees and partners have been referring to us for many years,” he noted. “Our web address, www.ibi.com and our email addresses [email protected] have always been our primary defaults. We are meeting the market where they are and will also continue down this path as we add ibi in front of descriptive product names to simplify our naming architecture and make it easier to understand what benefits our products provide. Our new logo also clearly reflects both ibi and Information Builders.”
Vella also stressed that the company’s core value proposition and core values, including their heritage as a customer-first organization, and their commitment to an open platform architecture, will not change.
“This is our 45th anniversary as a company, and I mention our history because I’m proud of it,” he said. “But we are moving at a brisk pace. As the world around is changing, ibi is evolving.”
Kabir Choudry, ibi’s Senior Vice-President, Global Field Technical Services and Customer Success, recapped the company’s recent initiatives to improve its technical support and improve customer experience.
“We have made three recent investments here,” he said. “We took our global field technical community and integrated it into one organization. That simplifies the engagement model and leverages the resources of the organization.”
The company also created a new Strategic Services organization, with very deep technical experts.
“We are also making significant investments in our technical account management organization, and integrated it into professional services,” Choudry said. “That lets us focus better on the post-sales experience for customers.”
Choudry than got to announce three new program launches.
“We are introducing a new professional services service catalogue, with fixed prices, which is architected to drive time to deployment faster,” he said. “We are also introducing a new customer onboarding program, with resources and assets to assure a strong onboarding experience.”
Finally, Choudry announced a new customer success program.
“It introduces two new roles, customer success managers and customer success specialists, who are contacts for customers to manage their day to day needs,” he said. Phase one of the program launched in North America in March, with international markets being slated for launch in July and August.
Dan Ortolani, senior vice president, Worldwide Customer Support Services then announced the launch of myibi, a new customer and partner community platform.
“It includes modern discussion forums, for both new users and seasoned veterans,” he said. “It will ultimately replace Focal Point Forums. That has already begun, with the most active discussions being migrated to myibi.
“Education is another area of major expansion with so many working remotely,” Ortolani continued. “We have added and upgraded over 25 courses, and also loaded up our YouTube channel with free content to help you get started.”
Keith Kohl, senior vice president, Product Management and Eric Raab, senior vice president, Engineering introduced the new product enhancements in a tag team format.
First was Omni-HealthData Cloud Essentials, a new, enterprise-class data and analytics solution targeted at midmarket health care providers.
“Expect to see more of these Essentials offerings in the coming months,” Kohl said.
Also new is Open Data Visualizations, which uses ibi’s Unity Open Data Platform to connect non- ibi data sources, file formats, and applications in real time with third-party visualization tools.
“It gives you access to these other data sources you have made an investment in,” Kohl said.
Automated Insights is another new offering, which leverages AI and machine learning to discover insights in their data
“It gives everyone a faster and easier way to explore their data,” Kohl stated.
“We are also building a new Unity front end to let customers safely share applications,” Raab indicated.
Ibi and ASG have also entered into a new technology partnership, which integrates ibi’s data and analytics products and ASG’s Data Intelligence solution, to monitor the quality of data that goes into the metrics.
