LBB Connexica: BI with a difference

The management team at Little British Battler, Connexica, have already made a success of taking a business from start-up to successful exit. Co-founder of Connexica, Gary Luke, was CEO of Ardentia, a provider of business intelligence solutions to the healthcare market. Co-founder, Richard Lewis had been CTO of Ardentia. While Luke was CEO, Ardentia grew from a business with six employees and £100K of revenue, to one with 60 employees and £5m revenue. Ardentia was acquired by US health SITS company IMS Health (see UKHotViews archive), for an undisclosed sum, in August 2011.

Connexica was originally part of Ardentia; it was spun out as Ardentia Search in September 2006. The name was changed to Connexica in 2009. The company has one product – CXAir – consisting of several modules. CXAir is a business intelligence (BI) tool built on the open source information retrieval and software library, Apache Lucene; its differentiator is that it utilises search engine technology to give end-users fast access to large volumes of data for ad-hoc queries and static reports. The product also offers extensive visualisation functionality, including dashboards, mapping and Venn diagrams. The search engine technology allows indexing and searching of both structured and unstructured data.

Connexica highlights client feedback which points to CXAir being quick to deploy, competitive on price and commercially flexible. The company boasts around 200 clients with most its business in the public sector (and mainly in health). However, as well as selling direct, Connexica is building up a partner network to target multiple sectors. Connexica has had some success starting small with customers – e.g. offering anti-fraud capability - but then broadening the relationship to cover the whole range of business intelligence functionality. As it continues to invest in its product and service range, including the addition of predictive analytics, it will have more opportunities to cross-sell to its existing client base and to open doors to new prospects.

Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '08:00' - Tagged: search   sme   analytics   lbb   BI