We are a small team at BR Systems, and we build XLTable — an OLAP server that lets Excel PivotTables query ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks and other warehouses live, without exports. The company that owns and develops XLTable is registered in Astana, Kazakhstan, and is a resident of Astana Hub, the country's international tech park.
People ask us about this choice fairly often, usually in the form "why Kazakhstan?". This post is the long answer: what the tech park actually gives a small product company, what the country is like as a place to build software, and what we managed to build there.
What Astana Hub is
Astana Hub is an international technology park for IT companies, launched by the government of Kazakhstan in 2018. A company that is accepted as a participant gets a special regime for its IT activities:
- Tax incentives. Participants can be exempt from corporate income tax and VAT on qualifying IT income, and from part of the payroll taxes for employees. Since January 2026 these rules live in the new Tax Code, and the conditions got stricter: relief depends on the type of income, and at least 90% of income has to come from the approved IT activities. If you consider joining, read the official FAQ and talk to a local accountant — do not plan on the old rules.
- Simplified hiring of foreign specialists. Participants have an easier path to bring in engineers from abroad than a regular company.
- An ecosystem. Events, acceleration programs, a blog with an audience of local IT people, and introductions to large Kazakh companies and government agencies that are looking for technology partners.
None of this replaces a product or customers. But for a small team it changes how far each dollar of engineering budget goes.
Why it mattered for us
More of the budget goes into engineering. For a company of our size, payroll is most of the cost. Lower taxes on IT income and payroll mean that the same budget pays for more development time. This is the plain, unglamorous reason, and it is the most important one.
A clean home for the intellectual property. The Kazakh company is the rights holder of XLTable. Licenses, contracts with international customers and our English-language license terms all go through it. Having one clear owner of the code and the trademark makes conversations with partners and enterprise legal departments much shorter.
Visibility in a market that is actively modernizing. Kazakh banks, retailers and government bodies are rebuilding their data platforms right now, and many of them still run Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS) and Excel-based reporting. Astana Hub gives a small vendor a way to be seen by these teams: we publish there, take part in its programs, and meet local integrators.
The country
A few things about Kazakhstan that surprised colleagues who had never worked with it:
- Things work digitally. Registering a company, signing documents with a digital signature, banking, paying taxes — almost all of it is online and fast. For a founder this means less time on paperwork.
- One time zone, UTC+5, in the middle. Our working day overlaps comfortably with Europe in the afternoon and with Asia in the morning.
- A strong engineering tradition. Mathematics and engineering education is taken seriously, and there is a growing community of data engineers and analysts in Astana and Almaty. Many of them are bilingual or trilingual (Kazakh, Russian, English), which matters when you serve customers in several regions.
The people
For a product like ours the hardest hires are people who understand both sides: how SQL engines and columnar databases behave, and how a finance department actually uses a pivot table. That combination is rare anywhere.
In Kazakhstan we found exactly that.
What we value most is not the CV but the attitude: people who take a vague customer request, turn it into a precise data model, test it on real volumes and own the result.
What we built
Excel can talk to OLAP cubes in Microsoft Analysis Services over the XMLA protocol. When a user drags a field in a PivotTable, Excel sends an MDX query to the server.
XLTable answers Excel the same way Analysis Services does, but stores no data itself:
- it receives the MDX query from the PivotTable;
- translates it into SQL for the specific warehouse — ClickHouse, DuckDB, Greenplum, StarRocks, Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake or Databricks;
- the warehouse does the aggregation, and XLTable returns the result to Excel.
There is no cube processing at night and no copy of the data: every PivotTable is a live query, and columnar databases answer in seconds on billions of rows.
The model is code. A cube is defined in a SQL file — ordinary SELECT statements with markup for measures, dimensions, hierarchies and row-level security. The file lives in Git, goes through code review and is deployed via CI/CD. "Revenue" is defined once and means the same thing in every PivotTable, for every user, with their access rights applied.
The same cubes for AI assistants. XLTable includes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. An AI assistant does not write SQL against raw tables; it queries the cube, uses the same measures and dimensions, and the same access rules apply. So the answer to "how did revenue change by region this quarter" matches what a person sees in Excel. It works with cloud models and with local models deployed inside the company's network.
One of our customers, a retail company, moved its corporate analytics from PostgreSQL to ClickHouse and XLTable. According to the author of the case study (Habr, in Russian), the data load went from 6–7 hours to about 1 hour, and analytics refresh went from once a day to six times a working day.
If you are thinking about Astana Hub
A few practical notes from our experience:
- Check the 90/10 rule before you apply. If a large share of your income is not IT products or services, the tax incentives will not work for you.
- Budget for a local accountant who knows the tech park. The rules changed in 2026 and will keep changing.
- Use the ecosystem, not only the taxes. The blog, events and corporate programs are the part most foreign founders ignore, and for B2B they are worth more than the savings.
- Hire locally for the hard roles. We did not move to Kazakhstan only to save money; we found people there we could not find elsewhere.
Try it
XLTable has a free desktop version you can connect to your own warehouse: xltable.com. Documentation and the changelog: xltable-olap.readthedocs.io. If you are an Astana Hub resident building a data platform, write to us at bk@xltable.com — we are happy to share what we learned.
Bogdan Kalinovsky, CEO of BR Systems
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