About us

Syntes, an Italian LLC, is a spin-off of Levera Srl, a business intelligence software implementer founded by ex-Deloitte and Touche IT consultants in 2002. It was founded by Riccardo Zulian to conceive, develop and distribute user centric self-service business intelligence software.

“We were convinced that business intelligence had to be done better; that there was no reason you had to have a PhD in computer science to do use the software; or to spend six plus figures on licenses which would then gather dust in the corner. We suffered through solutions that weren’t flexible, or had poor performance or required software shaped companies rather than being a company shaped software. And we continued to hear one common request; more of a whine actually. How can I get it into Excel. Because the end of the process for existing business intelligence projects was really the beginning of the process for actually doing business intelligence within an organization.

We wanted to create something which was radically new on the inside but completely familiar on the outside. So we started laying down specifications and creating prototypes until we had something we thought was pretty good. We called it Vizubi.”

The Syntes core team has been working together for over ten years, first implementing other tools like Cognos, Business Objects, Board and finally QlikView. A few new members were brought on board to augment skills in specific areas like international marketing, product support and project management. Customers include large and medium sized Italian companies from various industries (manufacturing, retail, energy) and various government agencies including the national health care system (ASL).

Products are developed using the Scrum framework of software development with sprints (development cycles) typically of 8-10 days. Each sprint typically involves the addition of a specific functionality and the creation of support assets (video tutorials, help files) for those functionalities as well as resolving bugs which have emerged since the beginning of the last sprint. The sprint also includes a heavy series of tests (including testing for resolved bugs) at the end of the sprint cycle.

We typically give partners a copy of each sprint’s release a week or two before we release it to the market. The new functionality added in each sprint is part of a development roadmap which is modified in response to user feedback and other environmental factors. We also work with partners on perfecting our product development path to ensure that we deliver products that are appropriate for the market.

We develop for the Windows OS in the Delphi programming environment. The Vizubi engine was developed and implemented entirely in house and external components are used only for non-critical parta of the application.

In addition to Vizubi, Syntes also markets NPrinting and NScheduler which have been on the market under different trade names for several years (the first release was in 2006). They are used to enhance QlikView projects and were developed as a result of users asking for functionality to complement QlikView. They are currently used by over 150 companies mostly in Italy; about 1000 seats for these products have been sold world wide. Because of good user response it was decided to sell the products as stand-alone software directly to end-users and re-sellers.

For more information about NPrinting and NScheduler, go to the NProducts website: http://www.nprinting.com