SplashBI and the Secret Life of the Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is a remarkably stubborn creature. Give a finance department a new application, a new dashboard and a stirring speech about transformation, and someone will ask whether the numbers can go into Excel. SplashBI’s history suggests a sensible response: take the question seriously. The familiar interface may be the place where the useful work happens.

The reports that survived the move

Consider Bossard, the industrial fastening specialist. A SplashBI customer webinar describes migrating more than 250 Oracle Discoverer workbooks using SplashDM, with little involvement from Bossard’s IT team. That is an unusually revealing unit of progress. A workbook is more than a file. It can contain a hard-won agreement about which transactions belong together, which exceptions matter, and what a manager means by a particular question.

Rewrite every workbook and you may find yourself renegotiating those agreements. SplashDM’s proposition is to transfer workbooks, business areas and security settings into a newer reporting environment. The attraction is continuity: people can move beyond an aging application while retaining work that still earns its keep. The migration tool makes preservation part of modernization.

The City of Tampa illustrates a different difficulty. Its move from Oracle E-Business Suite to Fusion Cloud left reporting requirements that standard tools did not fully satisfy, particularly around grants and budgets. SplashBI’s case study also identifies limited customization and a learning curve. What failed first, in this account, was the fit between the available reporting and the questions departments needed answered.

These examples offer a more useful buying prompt than “Do we need a better dashboard?” Ask which reports must survive, which questions remain unanswered, and who waits for IT every time the requirements change. A polished chart is pleasant. A report that lets a department finish its work has a stronger claim on the budget.

A company born with Excel open

SplashBI’s formal beginning came in June 2014, when the board of EiS Technologies announced Splash Business Intelligence at the Oracle HCM User Group event in Las Vegas. Co-founders Naveen Miglani and Kiran Pasham brought an Oracle reporting background to a broader ambition: on-demand reporting across different data sources, on premises or in the cloud.

The launch already emphasized browsers, spreadsheets, mobile access and running reports within Microsoft Excel. Look closely and the present strategy becomes less surprising. The company was asking how to put reporting into familiar working habits long before conversational AI became a fashionable answer.

Today, GL Connect carries that idea into Oracle EBS, Fusion Cloud ERP and Cloud EPM. Finance teams can refresh financial reports in Excel and drill from general ledger balances toward underlying detail. An accountant investigating a balance needs the transaction behind it. The value lies in shortening that journey, while keeping the workspace recognizable.

“Data Never Lies And Data Never Dies.”SplashBI’s stated company philosophy

It is a splendidly confident company motto. Readers should supply the qualification: data still needs interpretation. A number can be perfectly accurate and answer the wrong question. The interesting part of SplashBI’s business is the machinery that gives those numbers a common meaning.

The plumbing is the product

SplashBI sits between the systems that record a business and the people trying to understand it. Its platform brings together sources such as Oracle, UKG, Workday and Salesforce, then serves reporting and analysis across finance, HR, sales and operations. A governed semantic layer supplies shared business definitions. That phrase sounds technical because it is. Its purpose is decidedly ordinary: get people to mean the same thing when they use the same metric.

The data pipeline product handles another practical chore: replicating Oracle Fusion data into destinations including Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift and Azure SQL. It supports full and incremental refreshes, monitoring and recovery. This is the work that makes analysis possible after the demonstration ends and the source system changes again.

Different departments then consume the results differently. People Analytics presents workforce measures; sales analytics combines information from commercial applications. Warner Music Group’s published case study describes automated invoice distribution, improved accounts receivable reporting and greater independence for business users. The common thread is fewer manual steps between a recorded event and a usable answer.

In the wider market, buyers can also assemble reporting with Power BI, Tableau and source-system tools. SplashBI’s argument is strongest where the source knowledge matters: Oracle structures, inherited reports, cross-application questions and familiar finance workflows. That is a positioning judgment, rather than a claim that one product wins every comparison. The right comparison starts with the reporting estate a buyer actually has.

The bill behind the dashboard

SplashBI sells to organizations, with enterprise pricing handled through a sales conversation. A UK government G-Cloud 14 listing supplies one concrete reference point: £150 per user per month for the listed service, with a trial and education pricing available. Treat that as a procurement-specific price, rather than a universal price tag for every SplashBI product.

At that advertised rate, ten users would mean £1,500 a month, or £18,000 a year, before any separately applicable costs. That is arithmetic, not a customer quotation. A useful purchasing exercise would add implementation, configuration, training and ongoing administration, then compare the total with the actual work being replaced.

That conference program also describes Arlington County’s use of SplashBI’s Data Pipeline and other technologies in a reporting initiative said to save over $130,000 annually. The other technologies matter to the interpretation: this was a combined project, not a clean experiment measuring one software license. Dooney & Bourke’s reported consolidation is another tangible outcome. Count the steps and reports removed before counting the applause.

AI inherits the filing cabinet

The January 2026 Tahoe V6.1 release moved SplashAI further into dashboards and Microsoft Teams. It added conversational interaction, chart explanations and data-quality features, including work on duplicate suppliers and invoices. The combination makes sense. An assistant can only explain an invoice usefully if the underlying records deserve attention.

July brought SQL Connect 26.2, an enterprise querying workspace with expanded application connectivity. Its Query Builder and Query Visualizer launched as beta capabilities. One creates SQL through a visual interface; the other turns existing queries into diagrams. That second function is particularly appealing when the person who understood a complicated query has moved on.

In August, Tahoe 6.2 introduced SplashML predictive capabilities, more choice over AI models and cloud environments, and benchmarking for AI responses. SplashBI says its existing role and row-level controls carry through to AI. The same month, it announced a broader data-intelligence positioning and reported more than 550 enterprise customers. Those are the company’s descriptions of its scope and direction.

The shift answers a changed market demand: companies want to ask questions conversationally, but still need defensible business answers. SplashBI is extending the reporting foundation into that demand. A shared model gives an assistant context; permissions define what it may reveal. Prediction adds a further requirement: historical patterns must remain relevant enough to justify a forecast.

Keep the habit, replace the chore

SplashBI’s stated culture emphasizes learning and a mix of newer graduates and experienced staff. Its 2025 Georgia Fast 40 recognition supplied a growth milestone. UKG’s 2024 White Glove technology-partner recognition supplies a different signal, centered on customer service. Implementation and adoption are part of the company’s story, alongside features.

There is a practical lesson here for anyone choosing enterprise software. Bring a troublesome month-end report, an old workbook and a permissions-sensitive question to the demonstration. Watch someone refresh the data, trace a total to its detail and check what a restricted user can see. The interesting moment is when the task gets easier under your own conditions.

This approach needs compatible sources, maintained definitions and people willing to own the data. It offers less advantage when a team has one simple dataset and a satisfactory reporting setup. A conversational interface cannot settle an unresolved argument about what counts as revenue, and a predictive model cannot promise that next year will resemble last year.

The spreadsheet’s persistence is a useful clue. People often keep a tool because it contains their working knowledge. SplashBI’s wager is that better enterprise analytics can begin by respecting that knowledge, carrying it forward and removing the tedious parts around it. Sometimes the future arrives with the old workbook still open.