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Kirk Cunningham is Executive Director, Marketing at Business Objects, creators of
Crystal Xcelsius software. Prior to Business
Objects, Kirk was VP Marketing and Planning at Estee Lauder, responsible for launching and growing their successful ecommerce subsidiary. Before
Lauder, Kirk served as VP Marketing at InterPacket Networks and VP Marketing at Elemental Software. In 1986, Kirk founded Crossfield Marketing, a
Silicon Valley consulting firm with clients including Apple, HP, Xilinx, Raychem and Tandem Computers. He has BS Engineering and an MBA,
both from Stanford University.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Business Objects and Crystal Xcelsius.
Kirk: Business Objects is the world’s leading business intelligence(BI) software company. We are a billion-dollar organization with more than 37,000 customers -- including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 -- and a network of more than 3,000 partners and resellers. Crystal Xcelsius is PC software that transforms ordinary spreadsheets into interactive charts, graphs, data presentations, Excel dashboards, visual models and more. With a simple point-and-click interface you can import your Excel spreadsheet and create stunning data presentations that will steal the show at your next meeting. Crystal Xcelsius is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office, so with one click you can exports your dashboards and presentations to PowerPoint, Word, PDF documents and the Web. It’s available in three versions:
Geetesh: How did Crystal Xcelsius evolve and what directions are you looking at for the product in the future?
Kirk: Xcelsius was the brain child of Santiago and Santi Becerra, a father and son team and co-founders of privately held Infommersion, Inc. It provided business users a method of interacting with their data that was previously unachievable -- via interactive dashboards and business models that contained the stunning graphics and interactivity of Macromedia Flash. Following its acquisition by Business Objects in November 2005, Xcelsius became part of the Crystal product line, and today works in conjunction with the rest of the Business Objects product suite, including Crystal Reports, Live Office, and more.
Geetesh: What benefits does Crystal Xcelsius offer over built-in charting capabilities in Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel?
Kirk: Crystal Xcelsius provides the business user with the ability to display data via breathtaking Flash graphs, charts, and gauges. The visual quality of these data models far surpasses anything currently available within Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel. More importantly, Crystal Xcelsius allows the presenter to modify their underlying data assumptions on the fly, simply by moving sliders or dials on their screen. The result: the presenter can display the results of an unlimited number of scenarios in real time, all within a single PowerPoint slide. Presenting the same analysis via Excel would require hours of work and dozens of slides.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your support infrastructure.
Kirk: Crystal Xcelsius offers free technical support to both trial users and customers. Support is available via phone at 858-552-6674, Monday-Friday 7a.m. - 6p.m. PST, or via email at [email protected] A free trial is available for both Crystal Xcelsius Professional and Crystal Xcelsius Workgroup at: www.xcelsius.com.
Geetesh: Can you share some trivia with Indezine readers -- some tips, something funny, or just an unconventional usage of Xcelsius?
Kirk: Did you know Crystal Xcelsius can be used for more than just business dashboards and data presentations?
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