Out with the old, in with the new….AIM gets the chop while Symphony picks up the slack

The recent explosive growth of collaboration platforms like Symphony, Slack and Microsoft Teams can be at least in part attributed to the withdrawal of existing older chat platforms from the market. Or in some cases, their support for 3^rd party integrations is leaving users no choice but to look for alternative solutions. As the user base of older chat bots declines, users are turning towards new collaboration platforms.

One example is the support for third party APIs within Skype. Skype originally launched in 2003 and grew rapidly, reaching 600 million users by 2010. One of the key Skype features that was used by businesses was its support for 3^rd party APIs. These enabled users to build bespoke functionality such as simple chat bots to automatically push information into Skype from other applications, such as a local database or a spreadsheet running on the same box.

Skype APIs have already disappeared

From late 2013 Skype withdrew support for third party APIs to deliver messages between Skype and other desktop applications. Initially, the impact was fairly minimal because most existing users simply did not upgrade to the new version. However, recently Microsoft has been removing the ability for customers to log in to older versions. One major ‘forced upgrade’ occurred in March 2017. Although customers do benefit from newer features, the result of the forced upgrade is that many of the historical 3^rd party API features, and therefore customer integrations, are no longer supported.

AIM gets dropped on December 15th 2017

Another example of a change to a legacy platform which is impacting (in this case) the financial community is the withdrawal of AOL’s instant messenger service AIM. Launched in 1997, AIM was one of the first online messaging services to catch on in mainstream America. At its peak, AIM had more than 18 million simultaneous users, and the ability to communicate instantly made AIM a huge hit on Wall Street. However, with the arrival of many other social media and chat services, usage of AIM has gradually diminished, and current owners Verizon have announced the withdrawal of the service on December 15^th 2017. Which means the existing 100,000 or so users need a new chat platform to move their business communication to.

And there’s more – another chat service that was widely used in the financial community is Yahoo Messenger, originally Yahoo Pager, launched in 1998. This recently discontinued its legacy platform, including support for ‘plug-ins’, resulting in loss of functionality for many in the financial community. Yahoo shelved its legacy messaging service in August 2016. At the time ICE Chat picked up much of the slack as Yahoo messenger was heavily used by commodities traders who were already trading ICE commodities instruments.

The Age of new communication platforms – replacing legacy chat bots

So what options do customers who have been using these legacy chat platforms have when key legacy features, such as third-party API support, are removed?

First of course, if the platform itself is withdrawn then the team, or often the whole community, may need to migrate to another chat platform. Historical users of AIM and Yahoo have migrated to a number of different services. Symphony, CME Pivot and ICE chat, for example, have proven popular alternatives, leaving the problem of migrating all those chat bots. In the case of Skype, while the platform itself has not been withdrawn, those all-important bespoke applications and bot integrations still need to be somehow migrated from the discontinued API.

All in all, a lot of headaches for the user base and a lot of work for developers.

However, many more forward-thinking users are taking the opportunity to explore a wave of new chat and collaboration platforms such as Slack and Symphony. When combined with a powerful live data platform like ipushpull to connect into other applications, they offer not only a richer feature set but also a much more user-focussed off-the-shelf experience for building automated features like bots – requiring far less, if any, of that premium developer time.

Using chat applications with 3rd party APIs

Using a bot to interrogate a spreadsheet to pull out specific text value and post to a chat – may have required in-house developers to build some complex VBA (Visual basic for applications) to interrogate the in-house application and a further integration to post to the chat application in a rather crude text format.

In comparison, building such a bot with ipushpull and, for example, Symphony (the fast growing collaboration platform of choice for the financial services community) is a quick task, can be done by a non-developer, providing a far richer set of options for management and presentation of data, as well as interoperability through APIs into other systems and all-important security and audit.

Henry Schwartz of Trade Alert LLC, has built a thriving business providing real-time options flow and analysis to most of Wall Street’s banks. Trade Alert provide their intelligence as a messaging service to many different chat platforms including AIM. Trade Alert have been a supporter of Symphony and have now built bots to pull in timely option market colour servicing the vacuum that the disappearance of AIM has left.

“Financial professionals are beginning to realise the potential of next-generation chat and collaboration tools like Symphony. Between proprietary in-house applications and innovative offerings from service providers like ipushpull we expect to see explosive growth in these spaces”

Henry Schwartz, Trade Alert

Working with exciting new platforms like Symphony and ipushpull means we can add a layer of additional richness and interoperability that old legacy platforms could never provide. Below is snapshot of an options traders dashboard within Symphony integrating Trade Alert content with live data from ipushpull.

Other fintech companies such as London based fincloud have also been able to capitalise on the phenomenal rise of Symphony. Bringing expertise from trading applications, and API connectivity, fincloud have created bots which improve workflow across sales and trading desks, as well as operations staff, by creating simple to use bots that can massively improve efficiency of tasks. For example a portfolio manager can look up research recommendations via a chat message or a trader could put on a trade via a bot in a chat room.

An innovative fintech collaboration between fincloud and ipushpull has produced a trading bot that can make a trade via a chat message and show real-time orders through a live blotter. Normally this workflow would require a trader to use multiple (and costly) applications to create a trade, instead this entire workflow can all be done in a chat inside of Symphony. This solution could be used as chat based OMS (order management system) for small hedge funds instead of using expensive trading applications.

“This is only the start of what can be done bringing together cutting edge financial markets technology. Chat and bots are the future and fincloud, Symphony and ipushpull are part of the revolution”

Jon Jenkins, fincloud

Furthermore, in cases like Slack where the in-app UX is somewhat limited, platforms and plugins like ipushpull‘s are able to deliver not only the off-the-shelf connection to other apps and bots, but also a much-improved set of in-app features such as formatted and streaming data, so everyone in the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information. Out of the 1000’s of apps in the Slack app directory ipushpull is the only way to push or pull ranges of live data from Excel into Slack.

And if you’re still happily using Skype – well in that case ipushpull’s interoperability means that your bots can post to the latest version of Skype (and Microsoft Teams) too!

So if your bots and bespoke apps are about to be rendered obsolete – maybe rather than looking for a quick band-aid it might be worth looking a bit further afield – it may be a lot simpler than you think!

Co-author: John Eccleston

November 9, 2017November 9, 2017

Share spreadsheets into Slack – app takes data interoperability to the next level

In a recent blog we highlighted that if chat and collaboration platforms are looking to replace email then ipushpull is positioned to replace file attachments and file sharing.

In the past few years, driven by version control frustrations, email fatigue, security concerns and the desire for faster, more interactive communication, the sharing of information via email is increasingly being overshadowed by a growing range of collaboration tools.

This space is occupied by a combination of familiar tech heavyweights together with specialist collaboration app providers where Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook compete with the likes of Slack, Symphony and Atlassian’s Stride.

The development of this new set of messaging and collaboration applications offers new channels for ipushpull‘s real-time data interoperability for end users in applications they already use. ipushpull is one of the first providers to really push to the limit the capabilities of these new collaboration tools, making it easy to share spreadsheets into Slack and Symphony along with other data.

In recent years, Slack has become one of the most popular and established applications in the chat space and has seen incredible growth with 6 million active daily users. It offers cross-team channels, private groups and 1-to-1 direct messages for messaging as well as file sharing.

However, even though Slack allows spreadsheets to be uploaded on the go, there is still no way to view them in the app itself. For sharing data from Excel spreadsheets, this can be a big drawback introducing the common problems of version control and collaboration difficulties associated with files. While users of Google Sheets still have to jump out of Slack (and thus context switch) to see their data, leaving ipushpull as the only app on the market that allows users to share spreadsheets into Slack.

How to share spreadsheets into Slack with ipushpull

Until now there has been no way to view selected ranges of data from spreadsheets within the Slack chat platform. ipushpull‘s Slack app offers just this – the ability to pull a selected range of data from a live spreadsheet directly into a Slack channel whether that’s a snapshot, live data or streaming data, in a secure encrypted form, so everyone on the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information.

The ipushpull Slack app can support a wide range of use cases where customers have a need to share data in a secure way. Static, live or streaming data may be shared within the channel manually or via simple ipushpull Slack bots. Let’s explore a couple of use cases to explain how this functionality can be used.

Snapshot, or static, data

Snapshot data maybe shared manually or automatically when certain user-defined criteria are met. For example, a manager of a chain of retail stores may share sales data with management or staff by copying and pasting data into a chat channel, instead they can improve scalability and efficiency of their service by using a bot (also provided by ipushpull of course) to share the current state of sales or automatically alert management when a sales target is hit. All from a spreadsheet connected to Slack via ipushpull.

Live data

Live data enables someone in a team, working in a collaborative way, to make updates to data in their Excel spreadsheet, or local database, for example, and have that automatically – in real time – update in the ‘team’ Slack channel. For example, a multi-national enterprise, with a bid team working in diverse locations, can use the chat and ipushpull to collaborate on a financial model in a spreadsheet with changes reflected in real time within the Slack channel. The ‘no files’ model combined with the use of live data ensures the model is maintained in a single version and is always up to date.

Share data in Slack

Streaming data

Streaming data allows a real-time ‘ticking’ feed of data to be viewed in Slack. For example, whether monitoring the US stock market or live sporting results from one of ipushpull‘s streaming ‘public’ pages, or providing access to ‘in-house’ private streaming data in manufacturing or health sectors, ipushpull delivers the ability to share true real-time updates in fast changing environments where access to up-to-the-second information makes all the difference.

These use cases demonstrate just some of the ways ipushpull’s chat integrations can be used to enhance and improve workflow and communication within organisations. And with the recent launch of shared channels within Slack, which support intra-company collaboration, there will be many more to come.

So chat is great – but it takes more than just chat to make real improvements in business efficiency. That’s why ipushpull is focussed on taking chat to the next level.

Co-author: John Eccleston

May 22, 2017May 22, 2017

The Future of Work – Symphony, the Latest $1bn Unicorn

2017 has been an interesting year for the enterprise workspace collaboration market with Symphony becoming the latest unicorn fetching a valuation topping $1bn -which means Wall Street now has its own coveted ‘unicorn’ tech company. Symphony now ranks, and competes, alongside Slack, Microsoft, Google and Facebook in the enterprise collaboration market…. and…. of course…. Bloomberg.

Who is Symphony (aka the latest $1bn unicorn)?

Formed in 2014, when Goldman Sachs, leading a consortium of tier 1 banks, acquired Perzo for $60m from founder David Gurle, Symphony combined Perzo’s expertise with Goldman’s own internal chat platform Live Current. With David Gurle at the helm as CEO, Symphony set out to standardise industry-wide communication including end-to-end encryption and regulatory compliance that is necessary for financial markets.

Initially, onlookers saw Symphony as a rival to Bloomberg due to its prestigious banking shareholder roster but it is clear that Symphony has much bigger ambitions. Although Symphony customers are based in financial centers around the world the company still retains its HQ in Palo Alto because, ultimately, that is where the competition is.

Why the ‘Bloomberg killer’ title then?

Within the front office of banks, asset managers, hedge funds and brokers – Bloomberg is king. With 325,000 terminals around the world Bloomberg has become an icon and essential piece of kit on trading floors everywhere. Because of this, a huge network has formed of alpha producers that are plugged into Bloomberg’s own messaging service called IB (Instant Bloomberg) with the sell-side (banks, brokers) talking to the buy-side (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds) with traders and brokers exchanging news, gossip, orders and flow.

However, outside of the front office environment banks lack a unifying chat platform. Most banks will use a combination of messaging platforms such as Eikon messenger (formerly Reuters messenger, note that Gurle was Reuters Global Head of Collaboration), Skype for Business (Gurle was GM at Skype), ICE chat, Pivot, AOL, Yahoo (now defunct) and Microsoft Lync. Communication problems occur because there is no interoperability between these messaging platforms – they don’t talk to one another – so inter-bank communication often falls back to email.

Earlier this decade it was not uncommon for staff outside of the front office environment such as operations, risk, compliance and management to have a Bloomberg terminal just to access IB chat. However due to cost cutting across the financial industry, this is no longer the case due to Bloomberg’s very high subscription costs.

Gaining traction

Since Symphony’s launch 18 months ago it has quickly amassed 200,000 users, albeit a large proportion are from the same banks that invested in the company, but there is now significant traction among large buy-side players with T.Rowe Price and AllianceBernstein joining Blackrock as users.

The key to continued fast growth, which is essentially powered by the ‘network effect’, is twofold; in the front office for each buy-side Symphony user there could be anything from 5-10 sell-side Symphony users vying to win their business. Away from the front office if Symphony becomes an internal chat platform of choice for a bank, then user numbers will swell because for each front office sales person or trader there may be another 10+ support staff in the back and middle office who need to communicate with them. If Symphony’s ‘pod’ is enabled for inter-bank communication then back office staff can also chat to their counterparts at other banks, adding further Symphony users and ‘stickiness’ to the platform.

Symphony are aiming for 300,000+ users by 2018 which would rival Bloomberg and Reuters within financial markets, except the established vendors are limited to front office users only. With the recent $63 million fundraise, Symphony are setting their sights much higher and are planning to expand into other security conscious sectors such as government and healthcare as well as enhance functionality on the platform to include features such as video calling.

The financial market incumbents

Bloomberg and Reuters have had a stronghold on high cost financial terminals for decades, leaving other vendors way behind. However, one factor that led to the creation of Symphony was Bloomberg’s now infamous snooping of users activity which came on the back of complaints made by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan (later becoming major shareholders in Symphony). Financial market players are a paranoid bunch who do not take well to being spied on.

Costs – As important to tier 1 banks as it is to you and I

Bloomberg does provide a lot more than just messaging, yet a large proportion of their user base only uses a fraction of the terminal’s functionality. For these users cost then becomes a major factor. Bloomberg charges around $2000pm, with no discounts for higher user numbers and contracts are for a minimum of two years. To put this into perspective, in 2015 JPM had 7000 Bloomberg terminals and Goldman had 5000, that’s more than a combined $250m a year in subscriber fees alone. Since the financial crisis banks have been in cost cutting mode so any reason to reduce costs will be looked at. It’s no coincidence that last year Bloomberg lost terminals over a 12 month period for only the second time in its history (losing 3000 terminals to 324,485, although still managing to take home $9.2bn in revenue).

When it comes to cost Symphony is in a different league. Access to the young, disruptive technology company costs $15pm per user for corporate access.

In workflow where back office staff use Bloomberg chat to communicate with the front office or to simply check reference prices then $2000pm vs $15pm is a no-brainer. For sales and traders in the front office, maybe not so much – there is a lot of invaluable functionality on a Bloomberg terminal. But Symphony doesn’t need to build everything itself. It has opened up the ‘Symphony Marketplace’ where tech companies and financial market vendors can add features and functionality that would otherwise be hard and expensive to build. In addition, Symphony has an Open Source Foundation which is an environment to share ideas and shape the direction of development, with members spanning across the financial market space.

On the other hand Bloomberg is a walled garden, restricted to the alpha producers – as the Financial Times put it, “Symphony similarly aims to spread widely rather than seizing the high ground“.

Regulation, compliance and security

Compliance, oversight and security goes to the very core of Symphony. Goldman’s original messaging platform called Live Current was created to meet the stringent regulatory requirements of the financial industry. According to financial regulations, confidential client information must be secure and separate to internal business functions and banks must “retain unaltered, auditable and retrievable records of information flows with demonstrable, proven controls and surveillance“.

This is one of Symphony’s biggest selling points and where a large portion of the millions of dollars raised has been put towards. Symphony clients hold their own encryption keys and compliance departments can review and recall full audit trails and history of conversations and interactions of everything on the Symphony environment.

Information (email) overload

Symphony describes itself as a ‘platform that powers work’ for secure workflow, communication and collaboration. With 140 billion business emails sent daily with an average of 6 attachments per day (which would be fair to assume is substantially higher within a back office environment at a bank), staff in operations and middle office want to move away from inefficient emails going backwards and forwards with attached Excel spreadsheets. In today’s workplace, email is no longer the best way to communicate – Symphony’s Palo Alto staff would argue moving to a secure, audited ‘social operating system’ means the entire financial market ecosystem (and lots of others to follow) will benefit from improved productivity, efficiency and workflow.

One lesson Symphony has learnt from Slack is to allow developers to build their own applications inside their platform which means content from other services is pulled into one location for the end-user, which avoids productivity killing ‘context switching’.

ipushpull has been working with Symphony to enable live connections into the messaging environment from data applications such as Microsoft Excel or internal databases. Both Symphony and ipushpull are striving for interoperability across applications and across data.

Complementing Symphony’s real-time collaborative environment ipushpull is targeting significant improvements in back office workflow by removing the need to attach files, such as spreadsheets, when working on trade breaks or reconciliations with traders or counterparties and instead share and collaboratively work on data, helping to reduce context switching into other applications and avoid email entirely.

The future – integrated collaborative workflows

Symphony is ideally placed to benefit from both intra-bank and inter-bank communication. “Cross-company collaboration is critical to streamlining complex workflow and to helping people work efficiently“, according to the CEO of MarkitSERV and Gurle sees “a pressing need in financial services to simplify disparate communications streams” and expects “to see a tidal wave of innovation to streamline traditional financial services workflows”.

Bring in the ability to add bots to a users chat to automate and reduce manual workloads and set trade alerts and notifications that are integrated into banks internal systems, then the potential market for Symphony suddenly looks a lot bigger than Bloomberg’s. Morgan Stanley thinks “Symphony could be the gateway for financial market participants to move away from traditional bundles to lower-cost products” with “unbundling likely leading to increased competition given that new entrants can compete on individual parts of a legacy product“.

With a fresh funding round of $63 million Symphony will be throwing its bank balance and pushing the ‘network effect’ harder than ever.

April 10, 2017November 19, 2018

Excel spreadsheets to WordPress in One Click

The popularity of the ipushpull plug-in for WordPress has been going strong for nearly 2 years which is why ipushpull is ranked number 1 on Google for “Excel to WordPress” and “Excel to websites”. Use of the plugin is far and wide with a variety of companies from different industries all pushing data from Excel spreadsheets to WordPress and webpages. From financial market traders to sports clubs, what our customers have in common is the need to get data in their spreadsheets to the web, and one of the many features of ipushpull does exactly that.

Displaying live data from Excel spreadsheets in WordPress has simplified several aspects of our customers’ businesses, examples of which include:

Sharing live sports results for a diverse range of sports clubs
Real-time sharing of data in financial services
Displaying daily work rotas and shift s
Displaying live inventory data on a mobile device
Linking internal databases to your website and remote Excel users

As you can see, the ways in which the ipushpull plugin is used has been as diverse as the companies themselves. The platform is very flexible by design, which means data embedded in a WordPress website can be public or private, updating live every second or manually once a month. There is no development needed. For each page an embedded code is generated and can be used in WordPress or any other web building platform.

Since the plugin has proved so popular with a lot of our customers, we have decided to add some of the following new features: the new Shortcode Generator in WordPress, the ability to download published tables and embed from CVS files, give even more functionality and ease of use.

Better ways to embed live data from Excel spreadsheets in WordPress

The new ipushpull button to the WordPress menu means you can insert spreadsheet data to your web page by selecting it in drop down menus, which generates a ‘shortcode’. The shortcode creates a link between the data and your web page. This quick solution allows you to embed your spreadsheets without the need to search for cumbersome workarounds, literally at the click of a button! How great is that?

The other handy new feature is the ability to download live ipushpull data into Excel from your website. Maybe you need to run some data analysis, ipushpull lets you do so with live data from your website straight to Excel. As the data updates on the web page, so does your Excel spreadsheet.

Want to share CSV files on your WordPress web page or website? We can do that too! Since CSV files can be uploaded to our platform, they can also easily be embedded in WordPress. A user can specify to automatically Pull data from the CSV file once a day at a set time or update it manually. If you would like to find out more about this or any feature, please contact support@ipushpull.com or fill out our contact form.

Start using the ipushpull plugin to get Excel spreadsheets to WordPress by downloading it from the WordPress website. Create a free trial ipushpull account to start embedding live data in your website today.

Are you using the ipushpull plugin for WordPress in your business? Write to us with some details for a chance to appear in on of our blog articles.

March 22, 2017November 19, 2018

Live Data from Excel to WordPress – Trading, Price lists, Rankings, Schedules…

ipushpull is a cloud based data sharing platform that connects desktop Excel to websites, webapps and cloud services. Our number 1 ranked WordPress plugin lets you display live Excel data onto the web. From there you can choose whether you want to share it privately with other ipushpull users or share it with everyone by embedding it into your website. It’s easy for those wanting to share Excel to WordPress as our handy WordPress plugin helps build the shortcode for you.

Although ipushpull was created to get live futures trading data onto a mobile device, the uses of the platform have been wide ranging. Keep reading to see how creative ipushpull users have been in finding alternative uses for our unique technology, including leader boards, schedules, retail price lists and even rankings.

Excel to WordPress for Trading

Golden Algo

A former Bangalore Stock Exchange member has set up algorithmic trading strategies for stocks, futures, and commodities markets. As the algorithms run, using Excel as a calculation tool, they use ipushpull to display the live market signals onto their website. This provides the most up to date data. Golden Algo have been happy to use ipushpull and said that they are ‘grateful and appreciate your prompt and quick support’.

Check out their page:

Excel to WordPress for Leader Boards

Quality Racing Sim-dicate

As the sanctioning body for two of the most popular iRacing leagues, QRS keeps track of the latest results. For the Continental Endurance Sports Car Series, they use ipushpull to display the live team and driver results of the different types of cars, with their car number, position, name, points and race location in real time on their website.

Excel to WordPress for Schedules

Lifeguard University

Lifeguard University is a certified lifeguard training program provider offering free resources, rescue skills, and certified training. They use ipushpull for their scheduling system so that everyone can have easy access to it on the web. They currently use it to show the U.S. Olympic Trials Swimming schedule.

Excel to WordPress for Retail Price Lists

Bluffton Rentco Tool & Equipment Rental

A rental company based in Bluffton Indiana rents out equipment from brick pavers to bouncy castles. The rental prices vary for 4 hours, overnight, 24 hours, and weekly rentals of equipment. To be able to maintain and easily display the prices, Bluffton Rentco uses ipushpull to display their Excel spreadsheets of rental pricing lists and embed them into their WordPress site. Any changes Bluffton Rentco make to their pricing on Excel, automatically updates their website.

Excel to WordPress for Rankings

Aviation Focused STEM Program

A company that runs a Pietenpol building program in which they bring together builders with mentors. This unique company teaches members how to create EAA 690 aircrafts with a wood and fabric airframe. Participants are then able to work on builds to earn credits that count towards their payment for flight training in the future. To keep track of the total credits earned and the total credits remaining for each builder, they use a spreadsheet. With ipushpull they are able to display that spreadsheet onto their website so all the builders are able to see how many more hours they need to work, to attain their flight training. What a great idea!

If you think that ipushpull might be useful to you, get in touch so we can help! Are you already embedding data in your website through our platform? Get in touch to get featured on our website.

January 24, 2017February 9, 2017

iPushPull – Giving you Big Data, Fast

Big Data describes the increasingly large volumes of data that companies collect every day, through social media, clickstreams, data sensors and point-of-sales. If they’re able to analyse these massive sets of structured and unstructured data and unearth the patterns and trends hidden inside, companies can discover a great deal about their customers, employees and even their business’ operational efficiency. Big Data is becoming the key basis of competition, increasing productivity and aiding innovation, as found by MGI and McKinsey’s Business Technology Office. But if we can’t get to big data, fast, is there any point?

For companies completing operations such as fraud detection and compliance reporting, for example, data needs to be analysed on demand and acted on quickly or it loses value. To get around this issue many industries, including financial services, have started to integrate outside API technology.

The Problem with Big Data

As a recent article from DataInformed stated, data has a shelf life. It’s all very well if your analytics framework can tell you how you should have kept your customers satisfied yesterday. However, you’re likely to lose out to a competitor who has worked out how to keep them satisfied today and tomorrow.

The era of big data seems to be fostering the false notion that we are obliged to retain any data that we come across as it could potentially be useful. Companies need to employ a ‘use it or lose it’ attitude in order to combat this data hoarding. Data needs to become transparent and usable at a higher frequency, making big data fast and flexible. This can lead not only to better consumer insights, but also expose variability and boost performance through the collection of accurate and detailed information on everything from product inventories and purchase behaviour to employee performance.

This is particularly relevant in the financial markets, where in banking and insurance, enterprises need immediate access to the most relevant data. They need big data, fast. It is far more valuable than the petabytes of historical data that has sat in warehouses for years. Having rapid access to relevant information can be used for low frequency forecasting, high frequency nowcasting and help management make more precise business decisions.

The Solution

At iPushPull, we’re experts in delivering real-time data to the desktop for our financial markets customers, from trading services to Fortune 100 banks. Not only do we help you get access to your big data in less than a second, but we also deliver it to the applications you and your team already use, like Microsoft Excel. And we let you do more with that information by letting you share it instantly and continuously between Microsoft Excel, Slack, Symphony, the web and mobile on our encrypted, audited and monitored platform.

Next we’re partnering with big data platforms like Cloudera and SAS. Just another way we give our customers real-time access to their analytics wherever they are, whenever they need it.

Please get in touch to find out more, or sign up for a free trial.

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017

Top 5 workflow tools – supercharge your Excel and spreadsheets

Microsoft Excel‘s entrenched position as the most popular business tool owes a great deal to its breadth of functionality and flexibility. Over the years Excel users, from small businesses to financial professionals, have found that they’ve been able to turn its power to solve a huge range of challenges. However, many people are also using Excel for purposes that it isn’t suited for. I’d hazard a guess that every business has at least one critical spreadsheet that has spiraled out of control over time to the point where no one fully understands how it works, making it difficult to collaborate on. So we’ve come up with the top 5 workflow tools for Excel to help you overcome this problem.

Many fully-featured spreadsheet competitors to Excel have been launched with varying degrees of success, including Google Sheets and Zoho Sheet. However, for this article we’ve compiled products that solve self-contained problems – the kind of challenges that people have used Excel for, even though that’s not what it was designed to do.

Smartsheet – the project management tool

Even the smallest business needs a tool for managing employees’ time and tracking the progress of projects. For many years Microsoft Project has set the gold standard for this purpose, but it’s expensive and far too complex. Consequently, many businesses have gone back to using Excel for scheduling and time-tracking, which has given way to version control problems arising from spreadsheets being shared between multiple users.

Enter Smartsheet – a web-based project management tool with a spreadsheet-inspired interface. It’s taken the best features of Excel and Microsoft Project, added new features like notifications and real-time reporting and presented them in a powerful but simple-to-use online package. It has no version control problems that Excel files have and it automates many of the manual workarounds. It does this without the steep learning curve of Microsoft Project, that’s why it’s in our top 5 workflow tools. Simple enough for small businesses and powerful enough for large enterprises, it counts Netflix, Bayer and Accenture among its customers.

AbleBits Suite – the timesaving tool for Excel

If you’ve recently had to merge large tables in Excel or remove duplicates then this painstaking, fiddly process is fresh in your mind. It can take up a large chunk of your time, time you could have spent doing something a lot more productive than squinting at cells one by one. Ablebits delights everyone who completes these tasks day to day with their suite of Excel add-ons, taking away the manual chores that plague Excel. To name a few of the tools, Merge Tables Wizard does exactly what it says on the tin. If you think that you could merge tables even without this tool, then you should try working with bigger tables. Advanced Find and Replace Tool gives a lot more flexibility and allows to search inside notes, formulas and even all the sheets in your workbook. If you need to Remove Duplicates and Trim Spaces or just Fill Empty Cells, they’ve got the tool for you. All in they have 10 add-ons that incorporate a variety of useful task automations.

iPushPull – share and manage Excel data tool

Most businesses have critical data with functions to analyse it held in multiple Excel files. If they want to share this data across their businesses or with clients and customers they have to send entire files as email attachments or manually upload them using services like Dropbox. This inevitably leads to version control and security problems. It’s rare that these sheets get redeveloped as standalone applications – business requirements keep changing and there’s limited budget or desire to do so.

The iPushPull cloud service lets you share data ranges directly from desktop Excel and access them in other spreadsheets, on the web, on mobile and in other applications like Slack and Symphony. As your spreadsheet data changes, it automatically updates everywhere else. It’s the perfect tool for aggregating sales and finance data from multiple sites across organisations. With this live collaboration tool you can distribute information to customers or clients without leaving Excel, with built-in permissions and auditing to control who views or modifies the data.

Workday Worksheets – forecasting and planning for enterprises tool

This new addition to the host of Workday process management and planning tools, creates a new way to reconcile the forecasting and budgeting process for financial services. The original app is a collaborative tool for organisations to share live data and manage spreadsheets, and even has a chat interface. It gives enterprises a more adequate solution to working with spreadsheets than Excel. The Worksheets application looks great as a standalone tool, but you have to migrate to the Workday platform. A subscription to which is quite pricey, therefore making it more viable for large companies such as enterprises. The app isn’t directly integrated with Excel but spreadsheets can be uploaded to Worksheets.

OpenasApp – turn your sheets into mobile apps tool

Anyone who’s tried to open a full-sized spreadsheet on a mobile device will know that the user experience is not great. Finding the data you’re looking for is time-consuming, involves lots of swiping, pinching and zooming. Trying to manipulate the data or perform calculations is even more difficult. The new offering from OpenasApp lets you transform your spreadsheet data into an interactive mobile app. You select tables of data from your spreadsheet and use OpenasApp’s wizard to create your app. It attempts to work out what kind of data you have selected, and automatically generates graphs and charts using its built-in BI functionality. It even lets you integrate simple calculations into your new web app (unfortunately it doesn’t support macros yet). It’s a new product so it’s yet to be seen how popular it will prove, but we’ve put it in our top 5 workflow tools because its ability to create web apps on-demand using your existing business data is very attractive.

As a result of its functionality and flexibility, Excel has outgrown its original purpose. So there’s an increasing range of products and tools to help customers make their spreadsheets better such as the top 5 workflow tools we’ve described above. If you have a favourite tool that’s improved or replaced your spreadsheets, please tell us! And if you’d like a free trial of iPushPull, please sign up here today.

December 22, 2016February 23, 2017

Tech trends 2017: Convergence – Not the movie

Convergence. Sounds like the title of a dodgy b-movie, doesn’t it? And it is. In fact, there are several. But I’m not concerned with badly-scripted, straight-to-streaming films today. Convergence is one of the hottest subjects in tech press at the moment, particularly in the area of cloud services and productivity tools. For tech trends 2017: convergence is likely to remain there and here’s why.

Some are euphemistically calling it a bundling event, which sounds like a Black Friday sale at Walmart, but it amounts to the same thing: implement or acquire exactly the same features as everyone else and force them into your core product. In other words, the tech equivalent of a huddle of hipsters hanging-out in the same Dalston dive and choosing to assert their individuality by growing exactly the same beard.

Dropbox announced their new suite of productivity tools, which amount to a loosely-related collection of features that have been cherry-picked from the likes of Evernote, Office 365, Quip and others.

Slack integrated voice calling into their product earlier this year, just in time for Microsoft to announce Teams, which is essentially Slack with voice and video calling (as noted by CEO Stewart Butterfield in a full-page ad in the New York Times). In a move that surprised nobody, Slack responded this week with the addition of video calling (sadly lacking the very useful screen-sharing facility in Teams). Incidentally, both of these products look a lot like Yammer, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft.

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to keep up. You might argue that this sort of product convergence is good for competition and consumer choice; I can see that argument too. The problem for end-users is, when every product claims to do everything for everyone, how do we choose the right one?

Tech trends 2017: Convergence or integration?

Convergence is just another way of saying the current trend in tech is to value convenience over function. If it continues, we will simply end up with a selection of cloud-based multi-tools and users will find themselves choosing between the digital equivalent of a tin-opener attachment or the tool for removing stones from horse’s hooves.

The trouble is, as anyone who has ever tried to fix the car with a Leatherman or put up a shelf using a Swiss Army Knife will know, these general-purpose tools will only get you so far. They are fine for simple tasks, but bigger projects require more specialised and sophisticated tools to get the job done well.

It’s a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to perform some serious financial analysis using an online spreadsheet (assuming you’ve solved the not-insignificant problem of accessing the data you need in the cloud), or do something as simple as generate a table of contents in the online version of Microsoft Word.

When it comes to technology, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; integration is. At iPushPull, we are striving to bring together the tools you know, whether on desktop or mobile, with the accessibility of the cloud. We don’t believe convenience has to come at the cost of function, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the view that you need to give up the powerful, fully-featured applications you need in order to be productive.

The list of tools we are integrated with is expanding continuously, and now includes Slack, WordPress, Microsoft Teams, PDFs and of course Excel. You can chat in Slack with your team while viewing live updating data, host it on your WordPress website, or simply view live data on your mobile with our platform.

Start your 30 day free trial to see what iPushPull can do for you.

December 14, 2016January 6, 2017

Real-time Profit and Loss, Risk and Alerts on your Mobile

As a trader or risk manager in the digital age, is there any reason for you to be tied to your desk? Could you be spending more time doing more productive things, improving systems, analysing markets or even freeing up time for the family? Read on and find out how to keep track of real-time profit and loss, risk, and get immediate alerts.

How iPushPull can help monitor real-time profit and loss….

Whether you need to get out for lunch for an hour, away for the day or on a business trip or vacation, with iPushPull you can be away from the office with more confidence. Letting you stay on top of your work with any mobile device.

It’s easy – using simple Excel add-ins or APIs you can securely share real-time profit and loss, risk and other live data via the iPushPull platform direct to mobile devices and desktop browsers.

You can now see your live risk screens on the go and set custom email alerts based on your own limits or calculations. You can even set up SMS alerts for when you have no internet access. Now you’ll never miss a market move.

iPushPull is your very own automated trading assistant keeping an eye on things when you can’t.

Less Hassle – More Control

Ever tried accessing your risk systems remotely via VPN, remote desktop or similar? By the time you’ve logged on to the VPN and tried to resize your desktop layout just to make it viewable on your mobile – you’ve probably given up, unless you have lots of patience. Viewing data on the go can be so much easier.

With iPushPull you can control exactly what data you share and with whom. Our permission features lets you define and control what you can view when you’re out of the office, not your colleagues, developers or system providers.

You can share data purely for your own consumption or you can share different data with colleagues or clients, but you don’t need to give them access to the whole data set as you would with many other methods of remote access.

Cross Platform and Less Risk

If you know your way around Excel you can easily use iPushPull to pull together live data from one or more platforms and aggregate or manipulate it as you wish. Then simply push it out to the users you’ve given permission to so they can access it using desktop Excel, on their mobiles or at www.ipushpull.com.

With end-to-end encryption, iPushPull offers next-generation cloud security – meaning simple, secure access to live risk data from mobile devices and desktop browsers wherever you are. And you can share just the data you really need in an easily-viewable, read-only format, so there’s absolutely no risk of fat fingers and unintended mouse clicks.

For more information go here or to set up a demo give us a call on +44 20 3808 4085 or email sales@ipushpull.com

November 25, 2016January 6, 2017

Faster Excel workflow with new iPushPull Add-in

Following the release of the new iPushPull web platform, the Excel add-in has now been updated with great new features for a simplified experience and a much faster Excel workflow. These features provide a streamlined version of the Excel add-in and automates manual tasks, saving you precious time. Download the new version here.

We’ve put together a few tips on using the new add-in:

View the support article for creating new iPushPull pages from desktop Excel for an easy step by step guide to using this upgraded feature. Learn to create a simple Live Push without functions or a simple Live Pull in just a few clicks.

Intuitive features for faster Excel workflow

One of the great new features is a quick access of functions through right clicking, where iPushPull options are now available. You can also navigate to an iPushPull page in the web platform just by double clicking on that page through the My Pages/Push/Pull dialog boxes. View the support article on this feature here.

Download the new Excel add-in to take advantage of these great new updates.