Moscow Credit Bank found a replacement for the Tableau BI system in China

In 2022, many companies faced the question of what to switch to from BI-solutions of Western vendors who left Russia. The Moscow Credit Bank (MKB) also faced this. The company used the popular BI solution Tableau, but in March 2022 SalesForce, which owns Tableau, stopped supporting the product for Russian customers. At the same time, in December 2022, the ICD ended its subscription to Tableau licenses. [1] Alexander Dorofeev, director of the ICD, spoke about the operational migration to an alternative solution at the TAdviser SummIT conference on May 30.

It was necessary to replace Tableau as much as possible in terms of functionality, because users are used to working in a certain way and do not want to lose the value that they had. The transition speed was also critical, since licenses were already burning. And the budget was important - the cost, including user training.

From the presentation of Alexander Dorofeev

As a result, in May-July 2022, the ICD conducted pilots of several solutions on the market - both industrial and open source. As a result, the choice fell on FineBI - a self-service platform for business analytics from the Chinese manufacturer of BI solutions FanRuan.

FanRuan is headquartered in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province of China. In addition to offices in China, the company has branches in Japan and Singapore. The total number of personnel as of September 2022 was about 1900 people, of which more than half work in the R&D and the grocery department. According to the company, in 2021, FineBI held a share of 17.5% in BI's native market in China. In Russia, the vendor announced plans to build a full-fledged partner system and technical support service.

Example of a dashboard in FineBI in another company ^[1]

Alexander Dorofeev notes that the FineBI system is similar to Tableau. Accordingly, it is easier for users to switch to it. In addition, you can migrate to it very quickly.

But six months later, some nuances of the decision were revealed: "Tableau, but not Tableau." The first is that there is no community of developers in Russia as such. FineBI is not yet represented anywhere. And the transition still requires getting used to.

There is also no integration with Active Directory, which ICD is accustomed to: you cannot manage accesses through Active Directory. This is at least about the version implemented in the ICD. The product is developing, and the bank hopes that the possibility of integration will appear.

In addition, the ICD found restrictions on the number of characters in the SQL query and the lack of the ability to create several RLS models (there must be one global RLS model).

From the presentation of Alexander Dorofeev

According to data from open sources, in addition to ICD, FineBI has also transferred from large Russian companies to, for example, Bank Uralsib, NSPK, Tele2, Systeme Electric (formerly Schneider Electric in Russia). Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works is also in the process of migration.

See also

Information Technology at the Moscow Credit Bank (MKB)

Notes