Getting This Thing Started

The Sherlock story began over 20 years ago, in the pre-SAP days. Our founders were BusinessObjects customers when that world was still small. From the start, we recognized an important fundamental deficiency of BusinessObjects – the inability to make useful inferences on data adoption, growth, and user engagement strategies focused on satisfaction.

At that time, we were responsible for a near-petabyte data warehouse, a robust BusinessObjects universe, and scores of reports that serviced tens of thousands of users. Over the following decade, the user community grew – massively. Groups of more than 450 universe and content developers creating scores of content made it evident to us that something needed to change with how metadata was stored and analyzed.

Sherlock’s founders had an important question to answer: what was the real value of all of this great content and data to the businesses that produced it?

Meanwhile, content users were left to wade through an expanding quagmire of content they couldn’t begin to understand. Frustrated attempts to centralize and standardize metrics made it impossible to arrive at a consistent governance model.

Here’s where we nerded out. The challenge: making sense of obscure APIs and log data to interpret what all this metadata meant to answer that key question. We built Sherlock to address that challenge – to mine this valuable metadata, rapidly, and in the most usable way.

Fast forward to today. With a decade under our belt, our core mission is to continue evolving Sherlock – enabling real-time access to the metadata identifying users, their actions on the content that matters, and on the data that content depends upon. The Sherlock platform takes customers on this consistent journey to promote engagement with business leaders through deep understanding of metadata. This journey varies by customer. Sherlock provides the right ingredients to formulate an effective strategy to better manage data and analytics.

Sherlock’s capability, our expansion into a diverse set of data and and analytics tools, and our proven approach, has resulted in over 400 customers unlocking actionable insights into their complex data.