I have directed so many potential customers to my competitor’s websites (idashboards , visualmining) just because InfoCaptor provides only desktop dashboard solution. My leads were very surprised and amazed by my action to point to other vendors and promised that they immediately switch if I had a web based solution.

Since InfoCaptor designer is based on Java, there is a way you could deploy on webserver and launch it via jnlp and lot of time I will spend enormous amount of time with my customers just to configure everything for them.

The desktop solution has been channelized into multiple sub-products such as Excel Dashboards, Access dashboards, Database documentors etc. So Infocaptor designer is going strong and healthy on desktop as lot of individual solo operator companies find it extremely economical and beneficial.

After so many customers turned down because of the lack of web based solution, the birth of web dashboards was imminent.

But why PHP?

I have previously worked with PHP and liked the simplicity and beauty of it. After a brief research it became apparent that PHP is the platform to go with.

Being truly a PHP based solution, the other benefit it provides is the possibility of providing BI plugins for lot of open source projects such as wordpress, joomla, drupal, bugzilla etc.

I am still a single person company with few part time programmers but I do lot of outsourcing on and off. It is way cheaper to hire a PHP programmer on getfreelancer and elance than say a Java developer. One of the goal for InfoCaptor web based solution is stay economical for the common business. With the availability of open source tools this dream is going to be an absolute success.