This week I had a meeting with Oco, a vendor of analytic SAAS BI Applications based in Waltham, MA. I had never heard of them, but the first versions of their current offerings have been available since 2007 and the company has been around since 1999.

Currently, there are many vendors on the market that deliver SAAS BI capabilities. However, most of them deliver tools and technologies. The customer BI applications have to be designed and build first. Not so with Oco. Oco's claim to fame is a set of data models for different application areas, such as buyer performance, supplier evaluation, capacity utilization, revenue trending, and account visibility. This means that the product comes with pre-defined data structures (that customers can adapt to their own needs) plus pre-built BI applications operating on those data models.The attractive part of this is that if the data structures of the customer's production data has been mapped to Oco's data models, the hard part has been done. And very quickly, the business data can be analyzed.

Being a SAAS vendor, they host all the software. Data can be uploaded periodically to refresh the database. They have their own products for copying and transforming the data. The database server and data integration technology are all developed with Microsoft software. The front end is partly based on SAP/BO software, such as Xcelsius, WelIntelligence, and Explorer. In addition, some of the front ends, such as the one for KPI Dashboards and Multi-dimensional reporting, are developed with their own tool. It's all Flex based.

Oco is an interesting company with an interesting offering. Although they are very much focused on SAP, their market is still very US based. Maybe that's the reason why I had never heard of them?