Growing up together as high school friends in the seaside port town of Tampico, Mexico, KPI Online’s founders David Abdo and Sergio Garza knew one day they would start a business together. After graduating from Monterrey Tech University, Mexico’s premiere technical and business university, David founded a successful custom software development company that built business applications for companies throughout Mexico.

After joining forces with Sergio in 1996 they realized that the companies they were building custom applications for were having trouble getting access to the data in these systems. Their customers needed access to data to become more intelligent about their business and make decisions based on fact instead of gut instinct. They realized most of the large American software companies that sold reporting tools, such as Cognos, Crystal Reports and Business Objects, were too expensive for their customers and required too much intervention by technical resources to implement.

Driven by a desire to help companies become more effective, more profitable and smarter about their business, they invented their own business intelligence tool called Artus, and started a new company called Bitam, dedicated to building easy-to-use business intelligence products.

They were ahead of their time. They realized that business owners didn’t need reports, they needed access to the information in those reports in an easy to use manner. Corporate dashboards provided that answer, allowing their customers to see indicators on the health of their companies that they could check in a blink of an eye.

Fast forward to 2007, with the software as a service revolution well underway, David and Sergio noticed that small businesses in the United States experienced a similar problem: the inability to get access to data in a quick and easily consumable way to make intelligent and timely decisions based on fact.

That’s when they launched KPI Online, extending their philosophy of wanting to help businesses have easy access to key metrics on their companies without forcing them to rely on expensive technical personnel to implement the solution or build reports and dashboards.

Based on the same powerful solution that the larger companies use, but packaged in a way that is both affordable and usable for a smaller business, KPI Online’s web hosted model, pre-configured dashboards, and low monthly fees was the ultimate fulfillment of the vision to help small and mid-sized businesses in the United States, as well as back in their home country of Mexico.

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