We will give you the debrief on the event next week: what part does SaaS BI have to play for example… Without doubt there will also be plenty of talk about the ‘hot’ topic of the moment ‘Big Data’. Here is the agenda for the summit

See you soon !

Contact Rachel Delacour on rachel@wearecloud.com

A report from Gartner released this week shows that more companies are turning to BI in the cloud as an alternative to the traditional on-premise solutions. Nearly one third of organizations either already use or plan to use cloud or software-as-a-service solutions to augment their central business intelligence (BI) functions.

Of 1,364 IT managers in the Gartner survey almost a third (27%) already utilise or plan to improve their BI options with cloud based solutions. A further 17% said they already have or plan to completely overhaul their current BI functions and replace it with a SaaS solution.

SaaS-y BI

Saas products hold many advantages over traditional on-premise solutions which are often associated with long lead times and a demand for highly technical expertise. Cloud solutions don’t have these problems and can compliment existing IT infrastructure whilst still providing powerful functionality. Cloud solutions offer wider access and sharing capabilities, allowing users to dig into their data whenever and wherever they need to. A SaaS pay-as-you-go pricing model provides more flexibility and low capital expenditure. James Richardson, research director at Gartner said:

“Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions. SaaS- and cloud-based BI is perceived as offering a quicker, potentially lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternative, though this has yet to be proven.”

As GigaOm reported earlier today, “the momentum for SaaS is strong”. Such advantages have lead legacy solutions to start offering their own SaaS offerings, however users need to be wary as some vendors are attempting to ride the cloud wave by merely re-branding existing apps without offering true cloud functionality, known as cloud washing. Bime is a true cloud BI, solution born and built in the cloud, incorporating all the best and most current technologies into our solution to harness the advantages mentioned above. We gambled on the cloud a long time ago and although BI has been slow in its uptake of cloud compared to other sectors, this latest Gartner research shows that the clouds are forming around BI !

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2012

On another Gartner related note we will be attending the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit taking place on 6-7 February in London. We’d love to see you there so if you are also attending get in contact !

That’s our main prediction for 2012. Speaking at the end of last year our CEO and Co-Founder, Rachel Delacour commented:

“Experts called 2011 the year of the cloud and are now predicting that 2012 will be the year of Big Data. Companies are realizing that they have a lot of information on their hands and will need tools to mine it, make sense of it and monetize it. So how will they be able to do this? The answer is cloud computing and SaaS’ BI.”

Here are our top 5 predictions for cloud computing and cloud BI in the coming year:

1. Go deep for cheap:
What will really matter for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) in 2012 is the fact they can for the first time mine their own business like the big guys, and do so quickly and cheaply! SMBs can use powerful, high-end tools delivered via their desktop browser or onto their tablet for just a few dollars a month to see what’s happening with their HR, their sales, their social media engagement. Those SaaS tools give a one-man shop or a 50-person outfit almost instantly the same firepower as a whole department with its own IT staff inside a multinational.

2. The best default we ever had:
Cloud computing is finally becoming a standard that’s not only good enough to run your business, but now it’s stable, reliable, secure and powerful enough to be the default choice. Take our cloud business intelligence service Bime: It lets you connect to almost any data source you’ll ever need, no matter if the numbers are sitting in an old Excel spreadsheet on your laptop, on a mainframe at your supplier, or on a Google or Salesforce web server half a world away. A community manager, a sales person or a single web analyst can connect the dots, tens of millions of them, blend old data with live data, and turn the scary Big Data thing into visualizations and dashboards that make the blind see and the lame decide. In 2012, a BI widget on your iPad or Android phone will be worth a thousand emails.

3. Data will be your best sales person:
While everyone from a CEO down is busy keeping the company running, collaborative BI will become every company’s best ambassador. Your clients — and even prospective clients — will be able to interact and collaborate with your company through live dashboards created from ‘Big Data.’ They show them all the necessary information and reports, without having to come to you first. Why does it matter? It saves time and money and it provides a quick and efficient customer service experience.

4. Land of the rising cloud:
This trend of instantly empowering SMBs is not just limited to the U.S.. China is embracing cloud computing on a massive scale. The country’s more than 42 million small and medium size businesses, large government industries and government agencies have begun testing the power of computing delivered over the internet, helped along by a government push to establish cloud computing centers in all provinces. We expect that in 2012 China will become an important player in this area, with a large unmet need for affordable and nimble tools to mine any business between Beijing and Guangzhou.

5. Everyone will be the ‘Chief Data Officer’:
While large companies are dealing with ‘Big Data’ by hiring Chief Data Officers, cloud BI will enable SMBs to turn every single employee into a data chief. Using a tool such as Bime frees employees from waiting for their IT experts to give them access to data when and where they need it. Mining your business will be as effortless as flipping a light switch, and it will mean customized questions and answers, not plowing through pre-determined reports and visualizations.

We’ll come back to our predictions later in the year for a de-brief on how we got on !

Happy New Year !

Six Steps To Negotiating A Better BI Deal – Use Forrester’s Approach To Help You Get More For Your Money”.

The report is summarized on the Forrester’s website:
“Many business intelligence (BI) vendors do not publish list prices. Some do not even provide list prices under a nondisclosure agreement to their customers and prospects. Plus, BI pricing and licensing models differ greatly from vendor to vendor, keeping many BI software buyers from having a frame of reference when evaluating proposals from BI vendors.

To help organizations know whether they are getting a good deal from their BI software provider, Forrester assembled a list of industry-average BI deal prices for typical small, mid-size, and large enterprise business scenarios. Extrapolate and adjust these averages to fit your deal specifics and then use them as the starting point for BI contract negotiations.”

Bime was among 25 vendors interviewed and vendors were divided into 5 different categories including cloud BI (4 vendors in total including Bime).
Here are a list of the BI vendors interviewed: Actuate, Altosoft, Attivio, Bime (We Are Cloud), Birst, Endeca, GoodData, IBM, Information Builders, JackBe, Jaspersoft, LogiXML, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Pentaho, QlikTech, Quiterian, SAS, SpagoBI, Tableau Software, and Tibco Spotfire.

Boris Evelson especially liked the price transparency of the public cloud vendors, the most reactive of all the actors: a sign of the new wave of agile BI of these actors.

More information here…

We Are Cloud, creator of the SaaS Business Intelligence solution ‘Bime’, announces the conclusion of their second round of financing.

With the philosophy ‘Mine Your Own Business!’, Bime continues to offer all types of businesses the possibility for unparalleled analysis of their data, at low cost, online, from any browser, at any time. We Are Cloud have just concluded their second round of financing in 18 months. Apart from the initial investors, this second invitation has been accepted by members of SIRS Business Angels, as well as other investors from France, Sweden, the United States, and Singapore. After this latest increase in capital, the board of directors of We Are Cloud is made up of Didier Taupin, Jim Lysinger, and Jim Huzell.

Thanks to this injection of capital, We Are Cloud can increase its commercial visibility. The company’s commercial strategy relies on an internal team for the European and American markets, notably the USA, and reselling partnerships, notably in Asia-Pacific. In addition, further system innovations will be released at the end of 2011 and start of 2012 to continue to improve the Cloud-BI platform. Bime is already available in French, English, Dutch and Chinese. The mobile version of Bime is in testing, due for release by the end of 2011.

According to Rachel Delacour, co-founder of the business, “our market presence continues to grow. The benefits of the Cloud, our technical choices, and our pure Cloud-DNA, multi-tenant infrastructure, allow us to attract more and more businesses of all sizes. We are securing clients from all over the world, as the cloud has no borders.”

About Bime:
Bime is truly global business intelligence service that lets companies shine new light on their data and make better decisions faster. It’s global cloud BI at the speed of thought. Bime gives companies of any size — from a small shop to a department in a multinational enterprise — instant access to powerful tools that help them discover the value of their data sources large and small in an intuitive, visually stunning and fun way: across databases, across devices, across countries and across languages.

About We Are Cloud:
We Are Cloud is the creator of Bime, a pioneer solution of cloud BI, born in and built for the cloud. Bime delivers simple-to-use yet powerful BI, analytics, data visualization and dashboarding in a software-as-a-service application, making data analysis fast, easy and low-cost. We Are Cloud was founded in 2009 in Montpellier, an academic R&D hotbed in the South of France. The company has received several rounds of angel funding. We Are Cloud has been recognized as a trailblazer in the cloud BI field, most recently as “Best European Start Up of the Year” at ICT Spring 2011 in Luxembourg and “Best Cloud Application” by the Cloud Computing World Series Awards in London. Bime is also part of the last Gartner’s who’s who publication about Interactive Visualization for Analysis and Dashboarding. To find out more, visit: http://bimeanalytics.com.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

We think so too. Why not combine the two?
BI = hot, SaaS/cloud = hot.
SaaS BI = on fire

Here is a more detailed breakdown of some of the survey results:

• BI/analytics % respondents: 39%
• Productivity/collaboration % respondents: 36%
• Sales % respondents: 34%
• Financial % respondents: 28%
• Social media % respondents: 27%

• 57% of respondents anticipate that their data volumes will increase over the next 12-18 months by 25%
• The biggest things standing in the way of fully harnessing data were: insufficient integration, data quality maintenance and network/system performance maintenance
• 56% of respondents feel that easily connecting applications and data will allow staff more time to work on other business initiatives
• 42% of respondents plan to incorporate cloud solutions to address integration needs.

Instead of giving you a long-winded written summary of the report, we’ve decided to pick out some of the more interesting numbers!

Some background numbers:
325 organizations taking part in the survey
24 of those were using only SaaS BI, and
42 were using both SaaS and on-premise BI

Here are some of things we found interesting:

• 26% of organizations surveyed are planning on implementing SaaS BI in the next 24 months
• Aberdeen’s research shows that on average, organizations that use SaaS BI are more likely to be able to adapt to changing business needs faster – this translates to an average of 15 days for ‘time to build a new dashboard’ – which is less than two-thirds of the time it takes using solely conventional BI.

Organizations using SaaS BI can evolve faster (Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2011)

• Organizations using SaaS BI also tended to find that lack of IT resources was less of a barrier to BI adoption, in comparison to conventional BI users. The numbers: 30% of companies say lack of IT resources is a barrier to adoption, against 43%, for SaaS and conventional users respectively.
• Self-service users stats: the research showed that users that used uniquely SaaS BI had a decent 45% of users classed as “self-service users” (rarely or never have to get help from IT professionals to meet analytical and reporting needs) against a smaller 38% for traditional BI-only users. See the graph below.

SaaS increases self-service BI users (Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2011)

• Note about completeness of data: Organizations that use both SaaS and traditional BI perform just as well as those that use conventional BI only – but SaaS BI alone lagged in this measure. Why is this? The study also found that SaaS BI users are demanding when it comes to information timeliness – 44% (SaaS only) and 42% (both) against a mere 27% (conventional only) – for the need for management information within 1 hour of a transaction. This higher frequency of data refresh understandably puts a strain on data collection and aggregation – it seems that SaaS BI users require information much faster than traditional BI users, who might be more content with longer timeframes for obtaining information.

Key Takeaways

• Based on data from various pieces of Aberdeen research, they concluded that in 2010 around 13% of surveyed organizations were using some form of SaaS BI. For 2011, this figure is much higher, at around 20%. This is a pretty significant jump, and one consistent with the overall trends we are seeing generally in cloud adoption today.
• It’s in the data – the generally shorter average times reported by SaaS BI users that are required to create and change reports and dashboards, show that providing the flexibility that empowers the individual manager tends to reduce bottlenecks and time to decision, creating a smoother workflow and less resource wastage.

Source (including ‘fast facts’): SaaS Business Intelligence: Driving Agility through Self-Service, Aberdeen Research.

We did follow the proceedings live on Twitter though (almost as good as being there) and saw that people really liked our tagline: “Mine Your Own Business”.

To hear the tagline being broadcast proudly on stage by Rachel herself, you can watch the 6 minute presentation below.

Bime with QueryBlender Lets Companies Mine Their Own Business, Mix and Match Data Sets to Turn Questions into Valuable Insights

DEMO FALL 2011, SANTA CLARA, CA, September 13, 2011 — We Are Cloud, the “ICT European start-up of the year,” today announced the release of Version 3.0 of Bime, the global and elegant business intelligence (BI) service for the age of cloud computing, at DEMO Fall 2011.

With Bime V3.0, even small and medium-size enterprises can mine their own business with a powerful cloud BI service that turns big data into big dollars, fast. For the first time, its unique QueryBlender allows users to connect the dots between disparate, live data sets — no matter whether they reside on a local drive or are streaming through web services around the globe.

With QueryBlender, Bime is the first cloud BI solution that unlocks the power of federated databases, so users can query dozens of sources and make sense of them – regardless of query language, file, and meta data formats. QueryBlender lets users mix and match virtually any information, from legacy spreadsheets and large relational databases to live data streaming in from Google Analytics, Google Apps, salesforce.com, or Amazon Web Services.

“For the past three years, we have been working with our customers from China to the Americas and Europe to build a BI solution that gives straight answers to hard-core business questions,” said Rachel Delacour, We Are Cloud co-founder and CEO. “Bime is easy to use, fast to deploy and so affordable that every manager and knowledge worker can tap into the sea of data we’re all swimming in. Bime V3.0 lets everybody shine new light on their data so they can make better decisions faster.”

Bime V3.0 is a pioneering BI service born in the cloud and built for the cloud. It runs in any browser and lets users within minutes explore, visualize, publish and share important insights from their enterprise and the Web at large. The new product makes collaborative decision-making for a mobile workforce and global organizations a snap.

“Everyone is awash in data, but starved for information,” said Nicolas Raspal, CTO and co-founder of We Are Cloud. “With We Are Cloud, you can ask almost any question and see an answer in milliseconds. Our customers can effortlessly work with any type of data, no matter what the format or the location — that’s the key competitive advantage they want. We deliver business intelligence at the speed of thought.”

Co-workers and external partners get an instant read on important developments and trends through live dashboards and widgets they can access on the go. Dashboards and widgets can be emailed or embedded on any web page, while owners retain full control over who can access the data visualization and for how long.

Bime V3.0 requires no large downloads, no time-consuming set-up and no tedious uploads of data sets. Companies can tap into the power of cloud BI without giving up control over their data, yet are able to perform sophisticated calculations fast, thanks to a proprietary in-memory OLAP calculation engine. Bime V3.0 scales with each user’s individual requirements. They can choose to seamlessly upload data into its Déjà Vu distributed cache, or work on millions of data sets by harnessing the power of the most powerful database stacks and cloud computing platforms, from Google and salesforce.com to Hadoop MapReduce.

About We Are Cloud:

We Are Cloud is the creator of Bime, a pioneer solution of cloud BI, born in and built for the cloud. Bime delivers simple-to-use yet powerful BI, analytics, data visualization and dashboarding in a software-as-a-service application, making data analysis fast, easy and low-cost. We Are Cloud was founded in 2009 in Montpellier, an academic R&D hotbed in the South of France. The company has received several rounds of angel funding. We Are Cloud has been recognized as a trailblazer in the cloud BI field, most recently as “Best European Start Up of the Year” at ICT Spring 2011 in Luxembourg and “Best Cloud Application” by the Cloud Computing World Series Awards in London. To find out more, visit: http://bimeanalytics.com.

About DEMO:

Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.

Media Contact:
Andrea Heuer
Heuer Media for We Are Cloud
press@wearecloud.com
+1-917-886-5113

Thanks for meeting with us Matt!