Simply Business Deploys BI Platform for Business Expansion

Online business insurance broker Simply Business wanted a high-performance business intelligence (BI) system to expand into new markets and respond rapidly to customer insight data. The United Kingdom (UK) firm implemented Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise to provide specific analytics applications for its product specialists. This is helping Simply Business develop its business and produce new products quickly and easily for customers.

Simply Business is the UK's largest online business insurance broker. It operates in a highly competitive market, but its internal underwriting capability and strong partner relationships meanit can cover more than 1,000 trade types. Launched in 2005, Simply Business has recently adopted a "build, measure, learn" business model to help it develop its e-commerce products.

Steven Peters, Head of Business Intelligence, Simply Business, says: "We wanted to respond more rapidly to customer insight by analysing key metrics and interactions from our website. Our aim is to keep finding new markets and customers, and developing our product range. Until two years ago, we lacked any focused business intelligence strategy and used Oracle Transactions and Microsoft Excel for pre-aggregated reports. We needed a strategy that aligned our business intelligence capability with our business ambitions."

Simply Business required an approach to BI that mirrored the agile processes adopted by its product and software teams. Peters says: "We had a number of requirements to ensure agile business development. We needed to deliver analysis, reports, and statistics quickly and frequently to our developers. We had to cope with a constant cycle of change in our products and business channels due to our iterative approach. We also wanted a solution that would make it easy to integrate structured and semi-structured data for our business users."

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