About Us

We started Spendata as an alternative to what we saw as a serious regression in the power and flexibility of spend analysis tools.

It turns out that the same problems we solved with Spendata in the spend analysis domain are problems that exist in the much broader arena of business data analysis. Our customers, who began using Spendata to overcome all kinds of generic analysis challenges, hit us with a clue stick: Spendata attacks and solves a broad array of business data analysis problems.

So, what we ended up with was far more than a spend analysis tool. By cracking the code on what stands in the way of business data analysts, we created an incredibly flexible analysis platform with unique power and capability.

History

The Spendata story started in 2001, when Eric Strovink and Bernard Gunther joined forces at Zeborg to create ExpenseMap, perhaps the world’s first high-speed, in-memory spend analysis system. ExpenseMap was acquired and marketed by Emptoris, then IBM.

In 2005, Eric and Bernie joined forces again at BIQ, sending shock waves through the space with a spend analysis product that was much more powerful than competitive offerings, yet ten times cheaper. BIQ was acquired and marketed by Opera Solutions in 2012.

As technology improved but spend analysis products regressed, by 2015 it became clear that spend analysis could be better — much, much better. So Bernie and Eric linked up with Jeff Schachter from the ExpenseMap team — along with practitioners who had helped guide the creation of BIQ — and built Spendata.

Our mission is to solve issues that confront business data analysts and prevent them from extracting value from their data.

Here are some of the problems we see:

• Expense. The key tools for extracting value, such as mapping, are either difficult to master, poorly designed, or deliberately withheld from the end user. This allows third parties to charge whatever they like for services because nobody else can do it.
• Functionality. An analysis tool has to make things easier, not harder. If a user has to run to a services provider or to their own IT department every time a new dimension is needed, or data mapping or familying is required, that's… nuts. If you can’t manipulate your data in real time — and if you can’t do it yourself — you forfeit the ability to extract value from it.
• Security. If your analysis tool has to send all your data up to a cloud server, then you can't even consider using it until your vendor passes an exhaustive and expensive security audit. So we built a tool that keeps all your data where it belongs: on your own machine, behind your firewall, and off the public net.
• "Where's the analysis?" If you have to dump data to Excel in order to analyze it, what's your analysis tool actually doing for you?

Our goal is to make it easier for you to succeed in extracting value from your business data.

You don't have to de-install or disrupt anything to run Spendata. Spendata runs in the browser and never moves data to a server (making data security and data sovereignty issues into non-issues). You can run it right alongside whatever systems you currently have in place.

Moving data in and out of Spendata is easy. Spendata can load your data, reverse-engineer your rules if you already have a mapped cube, and get you up and running quickly. Watch our demo videos to see how fast this can be — five minutes from raw data to a useful spend cube.

Take a tour around our website, then give us a call or send us an email to learn more.