Mark Scanlon, the founder, majority shareholder and CEO of XLCubed Ltd will  add the roles of Chairman and CEO of BIX Software to his responsibilities.

Mark established XLCubed in 2003 after realizing why Business Users were always exporting data to Excel based on his experiences with customers at Major Oil companies at the first company he founded, IIS Ltd.   IIS had provided consulting services to the Oil industry since 1990 and specialized in latter years in delivering sophisticated Fuels Pricing software which collected vast amounts of market data which were then analysed using complex algorithms, including machine learning,  to recommend prices for each selling location.    Mark designed and developed significant elements of the commercial package that was sold into 50 countries around the world pricing both retail and b2b outlets.

Mark split his time between IIS and XLCubed until 2018 when IIS was sold to PDI, a US private equity backed large Oil industry software vendor.  XLCubed was a key part in the success of the solution as customers wanted adhoc, fast access to the rich data that the FuelsPricing application collected with datasets measured in the terrabytes.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180705005097/en/PDI-Acquires-Inform-Information-Systems-IIS-FuelsPricing

During this period XLCubed product and customer base grew significantly such that it is recognized as one of the premier independent excel based BI tools with over 1000 customers globally.

Mark now focuses on the strategic vision of the XLCubed business and M&A activity.  In 2019,  two transactions were completed adding the IBCS based visualization technology Message from pmOne and BIX Software.

Outside of work, Mark is a keen golfer and in his younger days rarely missed the opportunity to play for Bristol University and then Wycombe Pirates Basketball club in the London leagues. This is now replaced by watching high quality basketball be it the NBA or march madness when travelling to visit customers/partners in the US.

Gary Crawford the COO of XLCubed adds the role of COO of BIX Software to his responsibilities. 

After a year in a graduate IT position within the retail sector Gary joined IIS Ltd, a consultancy focused on the Oil and Gas industry. Initially involved in the UK application support team for one of the largest oil majors he gained a wide range of exposure to different aspects of the business particularly in downstream. Gary was involved in a number tactical solutions addressing niche areas of the business, and went on to manage the application support team handling business critical applications including fuels pricing applications for both retail and business to business.

Having had responsibility for a number of large scale MIS systems, Gary was delighted to take up the opportunity to move to XLCubed and focus on the rapidly growing business intelligence arena.

As COO at XLCubed Gary has worked with corporate clients across many sectors globally, and has helped drive a successful global partner network which spans large international IT providers through to regionally focused BI players. Gary enjoys helping to steer product direction, with customer and partner input, and has a strong interest in data visualisation having spoken at a number of conferences on the topic.

Outside work Gary enjoys spending time with family and friends, and a good book or movie.  Gary enjoys most sports, particularly football though moreso as a spectator these days be it Premier League or on the sidelines at grassroots level passing on his expertise to one of his sons…

Completing the management team, Jean-Christophe Cabot is the Product Manager for BIX Software

Over the last 25 years, Jean-Christophe handled many growing responsibilities from Support Specialist, Training Department Manager, BI Consultant, Pre-Sales Engineer, Pre-Sales Manager, Principal Consultant and Product Manager.

During these years, Jean-Christophe endorsed various roles in order to serve major international companies such as as Oracle, Crédit Agricole, Airbus, Carrefour, Auchan, Axa, Alcatel, Edf, L’Oréal, MCDonald’s, Google, Pfizer, Cap Gemini, Caisse d’Epargne, Kantar World Panel or Société Générale.

Originally from a business training background, his interested in technology led him to develop several areas of expertise related to the BI space.  From BI solution deployment, to sophisticated modeling or software development, he rallies both expertise from technology and business operations stand point.

Jean-Christophe is thrilled to join a team of people with the same mindset, dedicated to serve business users thanks to new exciting technologies.

When not at work, Jean-Christophe is fortunate to often share his deep interests for jazz, travel and sport with some dear friends or his wonderful children.

Following version 8 of BiX Analytics, which offered connection to relational data sources, the release of version 8.1 is a game changer for BiX Software customers.

A daily challenge for business users is to bring together and use data from multiple varied sources. Faced with an absence of suitable software or, on the contrary, the numerous tools to be mastered, this work is most often carried out using formulas or macros, within the everyday environment of Microsoft Excel.

Thanks to BiX Analytics 8.1, users can now, within their preferred environment, easily create and manage analyses and dashboards that mix data of different types, using previously reserved specialist’s tools.

The new graphic wizards in BiX Analytics 8.1 hide the technical complexity, to let the user focus on managing data extraction, filtering, and calculations. Thus, with a simple “drag and drop”, the user selects the columns from various tables and lets the links be created automatically. Data consistency is transparent and guaranteed by the integrated query synchronisation capabilities, issues such as complex formulas, formula errors and outdated data become history!

Faithful to the BiX Software ethos, which aims above all else to understand the needs of users through collaboration at the field level, business constraints and desires were taken into account throughout the development cycle from the design phase to the release.
Thanks to the involvement of several customers, such as SeLoger, EOL or Caisse d’Epargne, the architecture, technical choices, and user interface continuously evolved, in order to meet real business needs.

On top of the ability to easily build complex relational queries, certain features enhance user comfort. For example: the automatic management of links between tables, the management of a personal query library, the instant generation of standard filters or the large gallery of personalised filters which make the use intuitive for the end user.

The new “InfoQuery” object, used for rendering queries on “flat” data sources, benefits from the same capabilities as the “InfoSet” object well known to users. Among these particularly appreciated highlights are the complete integration with Excel formulas and formatting as well as labels despite changes in the table size.

BiX Software is proud to unveil BiXAnalytics version 7 for Microsoft Excel. Version 7 represents a major release for BiXAnalytics, with many new features giving unmatched power and productivity to the end user.

Among the many new features is the support of Excel calculations. This makes it easy for BiX 7 users to add a new column or row to an “InfoSet” and then type any Excel formula, including Vlookups. The “BiX Excel” formula then becomes dynamic and automatically adapts to the resizing of rows and columns and will be replicated by BiX when drilling into the dimensions.
These calculations are secure as the formula is being managed by BiX, they are truly dynamic and will no longer become wrong or obsolete during changes.

Improving the ease and efficiency of use was also a key priority in this version’s development cycle.
Two new options in the Excel ribbon now provide intuitive and direct access to most navigation and formatting options. These buttons appear or disappear depending on the active cell thus reducing clutter and irrelevant options.

Navigation and interactions have been sped up: The user can now quickly perform actions such as keeping or removing rows and columns, adding the selected member’s descendants, choose all members from a level or apply filtering options that have previously been saved.
New, more sophisticated filters can be applied just as easily. With a single click, it is now possible to automatically select the last period containing data, to add a certain number of previous periods or the YTD periods, and to display a 20/80 analysis on any dimension at any level.

Layout management has also been improved with brand new management options, it is possible to set a layout using native Excel controls in a single cell then, using the “apply” option in the ribbon, the user can define the range, the member or the level where this layout should be applied. Bix will then apply the correct format even if the number of rows or columns changes.

Label management has been upgraded. Once the labels have been modified, they can be saved with a single click on the “Apply” button of the “Label management” section.
Several other tools, such as the ability to copy labels from one “InfoSet” to another (or all those on the sheet), or the option to switch between displaying the original or modified labels enable common reporting issues to be easily addressed.

Finally. the performance of the new version has been greatly improved thanks to, among others, a new connection management which is now synchronised by default. This single change results in a vastly improved reactivity and significantly reduces Excel’s memory use.
Optimisations in the MDX query generator also offer considerable performance gains, particularly with regards to nested dimensions.