Board International


Board International S.A. is a Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management software vendor known for its Board toolkit. The company is headquartered in Chiasso, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1994, and Boston.
While its core markets are still located in Europe, Board International has been expanding globally and now operates in 19 countries worldwide. It has a total of over 2,500 customers from a number of different industries, including large multinational corporations such as ABB, Best Western, GlaxoSmithKline, NEC, and Puma.

Products

Board International offers one product, the Board toolkit. It combines various BI and CPM functionalities within a single graphical software environment. Board's BI capabilities include multi-dimensional analysis, ad hoc querying, dashboarding and reporting, while its CPM capabilities include budgeting, planning and forecasting as well as "other finance-related activities". Like Business Intelligence software in general, Board is used in an effort to improve productivity and decision making while lowering costs. It does not require any programming skills to build BI and CPM applications.

Technology

As of version 7, the Board toolkit featured a service-oriented architecture that relied heavily on Microsoft technology, especially the.NET Framework with its Windows Communication Foundation. This allowed for a tight integration with other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office, but required Windows in order to run the full client, a limitation which has been identified by Gartner as a possible factor for preventing a deeper market penetration.
In 2012, the company introduced an update of its proprietary multidimensional database that Board is based on. This new technology was labelled as HBMP . It introduced a new compression method and combines disk-based and in-memory database approaches. It supports both relational and multidimensional data models.
As of version 11, Board resulted in a Niche Player in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant. Board is rated as one of only two vendors "offering a modern analytics and BI platform with integrated financial planning and reporting functionality", which works on premises as well as in the cloud. Its direct competitor is SAP with Analytics for Cloud.

Usage

According to The BI Survey 12, a worldwide BI and CPM user survey, the most widely used application areas of Board are reporting, ad-hoc querying, dashboarding, budgeting & planning, OLAP analysis, visual analysis & data discovery, predictive analysis & data mining and financial consolidation.

Effectiveness

A 2012 case study by Nucleus Research analyzed the effectiveness of Board when used as a company-wide business analytics solution. The research was based on three years' worth of actual data from Marketing General, a Board customer. It came to the conclusion that the introduction of Board allowed Marketing General to "raise profits, reduce customer churn and increase organizational productivity" while producing an average annual benefit of $119,962. It was calculated that, on average, the system saved 6 working hours a week per manager and IT worker.

Recognition

In recent years, Board has been frequently included in major publications on the BI and CPM markets. In terms of technology, the introduction of the.NET-based Board 7 earned the company a Microsoft. NET Swiss Innovation Award in 2010.

Offices

Board International has a total of twenty-seven offices spread across five continents and nineteen countries. Its two headquarters are in Chiasso, Switzerland, and Boston, USA. The company has recently been expanding, opening three new offices in 2011. Board retains a strong presence in Europe, with fourteen offices - a bare majority - located on that continent. The company has three offices in Australia, five in Asia, four in North America, and its lone Buenos Aires office in South America.