Roambi Flow, a BI publishing breakthrough

Network World - My love affair with my Apple iPad continues apace. Despite the me-too products that have flooded the market, the iPad remains the gold standard, not just because of the quality of the hardware (pricey though it may be), but because of the vibrant application marketplace that has evolved around it. And in a market loaded with a surprising number of outstanding apps, a few qualify as, at the risk of using an over-used word, groundbreaking.

Many moons ago (actually, almost eight years ago!), in my now defunct Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter (to sign up for my new newsletter, send a message to newsletter@gibbs.com) I covered a product that still stands out as an example of genius-level conceptualization and engineering: The product was Xcelsius, a system for wrapping up Excel spreadsheets inside Adobe Flash such that the cells of the spreadsheet are interfaced by visual controls.

What Xcelsius did was allow you to attach controls such as sliders, text entry fields or spinners to spreadsheet cells so you could change the cell values in an intuitive way. Similarly, you could attach a display field or, even better, a meter or a chart, to a cell or group of cells that were the results of the spreadsheet calculations. Then, when you changed the input controls, the output controls would present the results in a visual form. It was pure magic! Suddenly dry spreadsheets became animated, rich visual experiences.

Xcelsius was targeted at the world of business "dashboards" -- software tools for the presentation and manipulation of data from corporate resources. The product was acquired by Business Objects which was, in turn, acquired by SAP.

Today, Xcelsius is known as SAP Crystal Dashboard Design and has been significantly enhanced, although mostly with an eye to supporting SAP enterprise reporting solutions.

But the chaps who created Xcelsius formed a new company called MeLLmo, Inc. and launched a product a couple of years ago called Roambi for iOS devices. In my humble opinion, Roambi is as groundbreaking as Xcelsius was.

In common with its ancestor, Roambi tackles the problem of presenting spreadsheet data. But rather than requiring what are essentially moderate development skills as Xcelsius did, Roambi takes your data and transforms it more or less automatically into some of the slickest data displays you'll find on iOS devices.

I reviewed Roambi in 2009 (again in my Web Applications Alert newsletter) and I was, at the time, impressed. As I wrote: "It would be a disservice to try to explain the subtleties of the Roambi iPhone user interface - it is stunningly slick and a great example of how to build a truly usable user interface."