Interesting Products I Saw At PASS

For my last post from the PASS Summit, I thought I’d mention briefly some of the products that caught my eye as I wandered round the exhibition hall this afternoon:

• OData Connectors from RSSBus (http://www.rssbus.com/odata/), a series of web apps that expose OData feeds (which then of course can be consumed in PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular) from a variety of data sources including Quickbooks, Twitter and MS CRM. I’d seen the website a month or so ago, actually, but I found out today they are close to releasing OData connectors for Google, Google Docs, Facebook, Email and PowerShell as well, which open up some intriguing possibilities for PowerPivot analysis. I can imagine doing a really cool demo where I set up an email address, got the audience to email me, then hooked PowerPivot up to my inbox and analysed the emails as they came in!
• XLCubed (http://www.xlcubed.com/) – well, ok, they aren’t exactly new to me but it was good to have a chat with the guys on the stand. It’s worth pointing out they have a good mobile BI story for SSAS users.
• Kepion (http://www.kepion.com/) – I was quite impressed with the demos I saw of their products for building SSAS-based BI solutions, especially for (but not restricted to) financial planning; it looked pretty slick. 
• Predixion (http://www.predixionsoftware.com/predixion/) – again, the company itself isn’t new to me but I got a demo of their new product, Predixion Enterprise Insight Developer Edition, which I’d been meaning to check out for a while. This is an immensely powerful free tool for doing data mining in Excel and it’s very closely integrated with PowerPivot too. Even if you don’t want to do complex stuff, it has some features that would be useful for regular PowerPivot users such as the ability to select a column in a PowerPivot table, analyse the data in it and then generate bandings which are then persisted in a new calculated column.