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 !

“In a very short time, suddenly true scalability for every IT service appeared within their reach.”

The choices for the list were evaluated partly based on the “social data flow”, a positive reflection of the buzz around Bime and the positive press we received in 2011. Scott writes extensively about Bime’s Deja Vu data cache, which allows users to host their data in the cloud allowing them to use it online, anytime.

To read exactly what RWW wrote about Bime and to view the complete list of top 10 enterprise cloud apps and services of 2011, click here.

SMBs will ride Big Data wave in 2012, we tell Mashable

A great end to the year, onwards and upwards for Bime in 2012 !

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 !

Why is the cloud so comfortable for SMBs?

SMBs have much smaller IT budgets than the larger companies and thus, in many cases, simply can’t afford a large initial CapEx outlay. Cloud solutions do not require the IT personnel or infrastructure of traditional IT solutions and can often compliment any pre-existing IT, perfect for the 42% of SMBs which don’t have an IT department and those with little IT infrastructure. SMBs often have less bureaucracy and more flexibility and requirements are likely to fluctuate. With true cloud based solutions (SaaS), the number of licenses can be adapted each month with no long term commitments. SMBs are more susceptible to cash flow problems but with SaaS they are able to pay-as-you-use. Similarly cloud solutions are highly scalable and licenses and users can easily be added as the company expands. Unlike many of the larger companies SMBs aren’t burdened by pre-existing legacy infrastructure and thus migration to the cloud is usually much simpler.

Returning to the infogaphic 98% of those questioned said technology was key to success and this in part seems to explain the increase cloud adoption as companies leverage the benefits of cloud computing to try and gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the competition.

Within the BI sphere true cloud solutions have opened up the market to SMBs, making BI a viable economic option where they may have previously been priced out. With the ease-of-use and pricing, Bime is perfect for SMBs and allows them to get true value out of their data.

Need more convincing? View our testimonials from both SMBs and larger companies alike and try it for yourself with a 10 day free trial !

BONUS INFOGRAPHIC 1!
On a similar theme Mashable recently published an infographic based on a survey commissioned by business technology company CSC to find out businesses’ “motivations behind their move to cloud computing systems and its effects on their businesses”. One of the most interesting statistics is that SMBs face less workforce resistance to cloud adoption (perhaps because as mentioned earlier, they are not burdened by legacy infrastructure and so are more open to new ways of doing things). Find the full infographic below.

BONUS INFOGRAPHIC 2!
This final infographic, produced by NovelASPect, again illustrates some of the advantages for SMBs adopting cloud computing. They quote an interesting figure from CRN that SMB spending will reach $100b by 2014.

The most recent meeting brought together the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA Grenoble), the Laboratory of Computer Science of Paris 6 (LIP6), the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (EMN), and Mathias from We Are Cloud, each of whom presented their work and current results.

The main architecture of the software service has now been defined and a road-map has been outlined which should see both the scientific and practical results provided in the coming months, so stay tuned to the Bime blog for future updates!

For a full list of We Are Cloud’s partners visit our Partners page.

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.

Cloud Computing – Perhaps the most talked about technology of the moment, Gartner predict that the cloud has the potential to make a “long term and broad” impact. Despite the amount of hype currently surrounding the technology, it is still in its infancy, with Gartner predicting the market will continue to develop in 2012 as enterprises move from trying to understand the cloud, to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds.

Big Data – Again, another term which has become widely used in 2011. Gartner notes that the size, complexity and speed of delivery of data has now exceeded the amount traditional data centres can deal with. Thus, this new data requires the development of new “exotic” technologies just to manage the volume of data alone and Gartner believes a range of new technologies to deal with the ‘big data’ problem will cause disruption in 2012.

In-Memory Computing – Gartner predicts a dramatic increase in the use of flash memory in IT systems. The increasingly large amounts of memory available are driving more in-memory platforms including in-memory analytics.

The full Gartner top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012 are as follows:
1. Media Tablets
2. Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
3. Contextual and Social User Experience
4. Internet of Things
5. App Stores and Marketplaces
6. Next-Generation Analytics
7. Big Data
8. In-Memory Computing
9. Extreme Low-Energy Servers
10. Cloud Computing

To read the full Gartner press release click here.

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.

Thanks for meeting with us Matt!