ICapella

iCapella Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports and dashboards from a wide range of data sources.
History
The product was originally created by a company called Ariel Corporation as a replacement to their Ariel Alerts add-on to Crystal_Reports. There were legal issues with the companies approach to distributing crystal reports via their own alerting application so a new solution was created using components from Data_Dynamics to provide an end-to-end report design and distribution system.
In 2008 the company along with all intellectual property was sold to Cranes_Software for a sum reported to be around £1.4 million. All development resource was shipped to India and the UK work force was re-allocated from software development to implementation and support.
At the time of the sale the company had sold it's software into a number of colleges and manufacturing companies, with a client base of around 80 customers.
Versions
1.X 2004 - A .NET implementation of the old Ariel Alerts web site with a new reporting system in place.
2.X 2005 - A much more stable implementation with integrated Dashboarding and Charting.
3.X 2006 - A refresh of version 2.X with a new look and feel added to the web front end.
4.X 2009 - A complete re-write of version 3.X using the add-ons from DevExpress_Reporting
Critical reception
Version's 1.X and 2.X were plagued with software bugs due to a rapid development lifecycle, however implementations were still on-going and a small customer base had been built up. Version 3.X was recieved as a much more stable system and the company was successful in building up a solid customer base leading to the sale of the company to Cranes_Software
After purchasing the company cranes pushed for a product launch in 2007 however following the transfer of development services to India the software suffered from a lack of development and small usability bugs krept into the system. The decision was taken to re-write the software using a different reporting component and version 4.X was created, critically moving to from Data_Dynamics to DevExpress_Reporting meant existing reports could not be upgraded or ported over to the new system and the company were only sucessful in upgrading 4 of their 80 clients to the new system.
In 2009 Cranes_Software took the decision to put their UK subsidiary into liquidation and moved all support for the software to India.

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