I remember 7 years ago, getting a call from Mico with a vision to create a community around Xcelsius. From that one discussion EverythingXcelsius.com was born and we quickly learned one lesson.

“People make a Community, Not Technology.”

A group of passionate and highly intelligent professionals gravitated toward Xcelsius in 2004-2010 and the community that formed was something very special. Needless to say, riding the Xcelsius wave has been amazing. I’ve enjoyed meeting so many of you at various events around the world.

What I’m most excited about now is Mico’s vision for BI Brainz and the soon to be released new ‘Analytics on Fire’ community.  Having once again and personally discussed with her over the last two years, it’s something that we feel will be very exciting.  As the market continues to rapidly evolve, the timing is perfect to take the existing Xcelsius community who are older, wiser and more diversified in technology knowledge into the next 7 years!

See you on the other side…. but first, since this my last EverythignXcelsius post, I put together my “Ultimate Top 3″ lists. Let’s go down memory lane!

My Top 3 EverythingXcelsius Posts

1. My Take on Flash vs Few - The controversy around this post was just amazing
2. Dashboards don’t kill Dashboard Projects, People Do!  - Ouch! Still holds true today.
3. The Slow Death of a Gauge - This may be getting up there with pie charts.

My Top 3 Xcelsius Memories

1. The look on customer’s faces when I could drag and drop a gauge or chart on a screen, wire it up to a simple slider and stick it in a power point within a couple minutes.
2. Traveling the world in 2006-2007 evangelizing the possibilities of dashboard with Xcelsius and meeting hundreds of colleagues.
3. The Xcelsius party that took over GBN conference in 2008 after SAP Acquired BusinessObjects

My Top 3 Areas of Focus Moving Forward

1. Maps for Everyone - Through CMaps Analytics, I am focusing all of my energies to make geo-visualization and analytics available to everyone, everywhere in the enterprise.
2. Indoor Analytics - With internet of things on the horizon, Indoor tracking is one of the next big data generators, so someone needs to figure out how to funnel this location data into useful information!
3. Keeping up with the community - Though EverythingXcelsius as we know it is winding down, I am not going anywhere as BI Brainz picks up where EverythingXcelsius left off.

My Top 3 Dashboard/Visualization Tools for the Future

1. Antivia DecisionPoint- I am seeing lots of Xcelsius users gravitate to DecisionPoint for Excel. These guys helped make Xcelsius enterprise ready with XWIS, and from my perspective built the successor to Xcelsius that SAP should have created.
2. Tableau - In 2013 Tableau’s maturity as a visualization powerhouse took the BI industry by storm. It is not really a dashboard tool, but is best of breed for data exploration and what I use for my data exploration.
3. D3 - This is more geeky and more about coding visualizations than rapid design, but D3JS.org is a visualization framework is very slick; it is also the foundation for several large software vendor visualization packages (including SAP).

Ryan Goodman is the Founder of Centigon Solutions, an SAP® software solution partner that is strategically focused on developing add-on products for use with Xcelsius®. To learn more about him, please visit our new Gurus page.