On a cold and gray Danish January morning, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andes Loukianos, Head of Business Unit at Touchstone BI.
Of course, the interview took place remotely, because Covid is still around.
On the bright side, it's easier to talk to and interview data, analytics and BI experts today than ever before everyone has been "zoomified" so it's easier than ever to make a call and share ideas.
To be clear, I don't work for Zoom. Zoom is just easier to turn into a verb than Microsoft Teams, anyway, I digress.
Andes and Touchstone BI are TimeXtender's longest standing partners in the UK. That means Andes and the team have seen data, analytics and BI requirements evolve as fast as TimeXtender itself, and that creates opportunity, but also competition.
During the interview, which you can watch below, I forgot to ask Andes - I blame it on the weather - how they use TimeXtender internally - as each TimeXtender partner gets a free license for their own business - so Andes sent me an email to close the circle.
Thanks Andes, I promise to increase my level of caffeine prior to our next chat.
So, to the question of "How do you use TimeXtender Andes?"Here is what he had to say.
by Andes Loukianos
TimeXtender is at the heart of our business systems integrating from multiple sources on premise and in the Cloud.
The key record across all these systems is Client ID that enables us to see all the interrelated activity by customer. A genuine “360 degree” view.
For example: By Customer / Division /Product Group / Time period
What orders they have placed, what on going projects they have, which consultants they have assigned and what stage of the project they are, their invoice status, what opportunities there are, any outstanding support tickets and what is their support and maintenance schedule.
Because we make use of Analysis Services Cubes – that are automatically generated by TimeXtender - we can pivot on any dimension and provide personalised dashboards for Management, Account Managers and Services teams.
We have a suite of operational reports presenting project information by customer that includes forecasting utilisation. This insight gives us the ability to schedule and plan our resources so that we can meet our customer’s needs more readily.
These reports are published through a suite PowerBI Reports and Dashboards, SQL Reporting Services Reports.
Access and Security is strictly managed by Active Directory user roles in TimeXtender.
We have over 10 years and 10 million rows of data. Depending on the application the data is refreshed from 15minute intervals to daily. TimeXtender is virtually maintenance free.
My mantra is that it’s all about the data and there is no better proof than practice what you preach!!
About Touchstone BI
Touchstone BI are a long established partner of TimeXtender.
As an OEM partner as well as a reselling partner they have shown skill, commitment and passion for delivering great data warehouse automation solutions to their customers. Touchstone Group has delivered 1500 successful projects in 50 different countries and their mission in this digital age is to help customers perform better by enabling them to harness the data they need to make better decisions.
About this series.
In this interview series, we talk to our partners, collaborators and thought leaders, because they are the real experts on data. We cover data technologies and the impact they have in the world. From AI, machine learning, IoT, cloud computing, cloud architecture and machine economy to everything else.