Just over a week after its launch, demand is high for Reporting Manager, the latest tool from Babbage Systems, CEO Jim Cain says.
“We’ve already had several hundred downloads, which is pretty exciting. It was tweeted about by Google last week and all of a sudden things get interesting,” he says. “Having Google talk about you is pretty good.”
The Reporting Manager tool is a free Google Analytics data add-in for Microsoft Excel.
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“A lot of people who use Google Analytics need to do reporting in Excel on the data from Google Analytics, and it’s not very easy to get that data out,” says Mr. Cain, a 2014 Forty Under 40 recipient.
The Reporting Manager plugs into Excel, allowing the user to build reports using Google Analytics data without actually going into Google Analytics.
Babbage was spun out of analytics firm Napkyn last September. Its first product was called the Analysis Engine.
“One of the things we realized is that the thing people are most familiar with of the features that made up the enterprise solution was an Excel plug-in,” Mr. Cain says.
That created confusion, though, because users thought Analysis Engine was an Excel plug-in that did other things, he says.
“We’re like, ‘No, we’re a big platform that also has an Excel plug-in,’” he said. “So what we decided to do to create a lot more visibility to the company was just unbolt the Excel tool, give it away for free, with some limited functionality of the cloud platform as well.”
Mr. Cain says there are other companies that sell Excel plug-ins, but Babbage is the only one that specializes in Google Analytics.
“Large businesses use Google Analytics on their websites and the adoption of Google Analytics by big business is getting bigger and bigger all the time,” he says.
Fortune Magazine counts more than 80 unicorns – private companies worth more than $1 billion.
Mr. Cain says every single one uses Google Analytics, and Reporting Manager will help it better serve the needs of big business.
“Napkyn is using it to run part of its analytics practice. It is actively being used inside several large companies as well,” he said.
