Data visualisation firm Roambi has announced Roambi Business, a cloud-based version of its platform that takes complex data and presents it in an interactive graphic format to business users on their iPhone or iPad device.

Officially available from today, Roambi Business offers similar capabilities to the firm’s existing Roambi Analytics product, but handles the back-end processing via a cloud-based service instead of requiring customers to deploy an on-premise middleware server.

This opens up Roambi to a broader audience, including smaller businesses that may lack the IT skills or infrastructure to deploy the existing platform, according to the firm.

Roambi vice president for Northern Europe Steve Neat told V3 that in both products, the aim is to redesign the way that people interact with data, share that data and present it, all from a mobile perspective in line with the modern workplace.

“This is about delivering content in a usable format on a mobile device that people love. People want tablets and want to interact and engage with these devices. Analytics is traditionally available on the desktop, but increasingly people are more mobile, so this is about helping people to be more productive by delivering insights onto those devices,” he said.

Roambi Business can take data from a number of sources, including CRM systems, databases or traditional business intelligence systems, but most commonly this will be an Excel spreadsheet exported as comma separated values (CSV), according to Neat.

Once the data is uploaded, Roambi analyses the data and intelligently looks for key metrics such as times or dates that it can use for comparison. Users can tweak the output and then select from a number of views that the platform generates to visualise the data.

The entire process can take mere minutes, Neat said, and provides interactive visual views of the data that lets users drill down and focus on key data points where necessary.

“We’re aiming to deliver insight, helping people understand the numbers rather than overwhelming them with large spreadsheets or big BI tools. We’re distilling it down to simple key performance indicators,” he said.

Roambi also provides basic mobile device management (MDM) tools that enable an administrator to lock a mobile device temporarily, or else wipe the Roambi application from the device to protect company data if it has been stolen.

The new Roambi Business service is hosted and delivered from Amazon’s cloud platform, the firm disclosed. On the client side, it supports the iPhone, iPad and iPad Mini. Licensing is $39 (£25) per user per month, but with a minimum purchase of 10 licences for one year specified.