Tracking your online data with Bime

Small Businesses & Marketing Infographic (source: SEO.com)

The article, entitled “Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser“, discusses the new class of SaaS (or Cloud) application vendors and why they are racing ahead at great speed while the rest of the enterprise apps market ambles along with limited growth.

The author covers many of the common benefits of a SaaS solution, including multi-tenant architecture and the ability to be able to scale easily, the positive changes in which software is now evaluated and purchased (e.g. transparent pricing, free trials, flexible licensing etc.) and better UIs and UXs (user interfaces and user experiences).

But the points which caught my eye the most, and which are less commonly identified in typical “Benefits of SaaS” articles, were the ones concerning the typical SaaS company workforce.

It’s simple: the Internet generation simply gets the web

“Most of the people working for SaaS companies are children of the web”. Basically, employees in SaaS companies are often from the generation that grew up with the Internet – they understand it, they are comfortable using it, and for them, how best to leverage it in order to build a successful app and company is simply common knowledge.

We notice this trend at Bime HQ – the average age of the team is under 30, everyone has grown up with and has a natural fluency with the online world, and we all want to create the best Cloud BI app in the world. I am sure a lot of SaaS start ups could say the same thing.

In our specific industry (SaaS Business Intelligence) we try to have the best of both worlds on our team.

Let me explain more fully:

• 2 co-founders: aged 32. These guys come from the first generation of modern Internet users, and have a wealth of experience and knowledge in business intelligence. Mix these together, and we have a great compromise – extensive BI expertise supported by a modern and collaborative delivery model (SaaS) which gives users a better data analysis experience.
• Managers: aged 40. Bringing both sales and management experience to the table, we wanted to incorporate young senior managers in key positions.
• Sales: Bime and many other SaaS apps are being sold to new types of consumers, and therefore require a new way of selling. The tools we use to give demos of Bime require a hands-on knowledge of the web (e.g. Web Conferencing software) and the product itself is so new, that the team need to be very comfortable with such innovative technology. As a result, the average age of our sales team is around 28.
• Web marketing: a relatively new discipline which has become a core activity of any SaaS organization. There are no geographic barriers in online marketing, and therefore no barriers to communicating with the world. As the job type is relatively new, and the mode of communication must be reinvented each day, the average age of our web marketing team is 22. Thanks to growing up alongside modern technology, these guys can easily master various online tools which are indispensable to their everyday job.
• Dev team: these guys have studied the newest technologies, know the latest programming languages and understand how to use these to deliver the best user experience possible. Some of the technologies they used to build Bime from scratch are so new they are not even being taught in classes yet! The engineers are a mix of ages, each one bringing something different but equally valuable to the table: at the younger end of the scale we have engineers with an average age of around 24, and at the older end we have Nicolas (co-founder) and our PhD Mathias who together average just over 30.

As Derek identifies, SaaS companies often recruit exceptionally bright, young talent, and it’s partly the culture of innovation and being able to contribute to the success of the app that attracts these types. The satisfaction of using new technologies to create even newer and better ones is more than enough to attract this web-savvy talent.

The way SaaS companies are structured is yet another testament to the strength of the apps they produce – who better to create the software you need than those who have native experience with the industry? This kind of experience is not particularly teachable – and this is exactly what Derek identifies as the thing, beyond the web browser, that makes SaaS companies a disruptive force in enterprise software.

Without a doubt, the younger generations have a more natural ability to quickly master new technologies. We have arrived at the point now where those who are highly proficient in all things web, Internet, SaaS and Cloud are joining the workforce, and we are excited to be a part of this.

Of course, this is our organization and our opinion. What do you think? Have you had the same experience in your SaaS company? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser

This time we have taken home the EU award for “Best Start Up of the Year” at ICT Spring.

Don’t forget — today we are presenting at 11h45 in Workshop 1. If you can’t make the presentation, then stop by our stand, located at A06 in the Cloud & e-hosted solutions section. We look forward to seeing you!

The press release is below.



We Are Cloud / Bime wins Best Start Up of the Year at ICT Spring in Luxembourg

Wednesday, 29 June 2011, Luxembourg.

We Are Cloud has won the EU award for “Best Start Up of the Year” at ICT Spring. The prize awards a less than 5 year old firm for its innovation, its dynamism, its influence and its growth potential in the close future.

The jury is made up of European ICT media and bloggers.

“Bime cloud BI was born in the cloud and built for the cloud, so any user can perform sophisticated analysis on almost any data source right within the browser and share insights with the world to turn data into dollars,” says Rachel Delacour, CEO of We Are Cloud. “We are honored that the judging panel selected us as Best Start Up of the Year, and this award is a testament to the enormous progress we have made since Bime’s inception”.

The winners were unveiled during the European ICT Awards dinner and Ceremony last night (June 28th).

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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. We started because business intelligence was mostly just too hard: too hard to use, too hard to manage, too hard to buy and too hard to get right. 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.

To find out more, visit: http://bimeanalytics.com or contact Rachel Delacour, CEO and co-founder on +33467416064

About ICT Spring

ICT Spring is a worldwide two day event in the heart of Europe, which brings together more than 1.500 ICT executives from Europe, America, Africa and Asia and focuses on INNOVATION and its lifecycle.

http://ictspring.com

And here are this week’s new ones.

Getting Started

Navigation Overview

First full blown Bime implementation in The Netherlands at TFC

About TFC | Matching Capabilities

TFC is an experienced, proactive and involved company that has been bringing together professionals and clients for years, matching their personal and business expertise. We have the strong conviction that our clients deserve professionals who best match their assignment(s) and company goals. Like our professionals deserve assignments that best match their desires, capabilities and career. That is what we call ”Matching Capabilities”. See www.tfcnl.com.

About Bime and KJP Consultants

Bime | Business Intelligence Made Easy is an award winning SaaS service delivered by the French company We Are Cloud ltd. Bime is a user-friendly yet powerful service to connect and analyze data in any organization. Bime offers fast business analytics and data visualization capabilities that are simple, effective and affordable. For more information, please visit http://bimeanalytics.com.

KJP Consultants is specialised in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management. KJP Consultants sells, implements and supports Bime for the Benelux. See www.bimebenelux.nl.

An interview with Walter de Leeuw, owner of TFC Netherlands:-

What were your needs when you chose Bime™?

“I wanted keep more track of my business, needed more insight. In short, I wanted to convert my data (I already had a lot of data) to information, analyse that and then take steps to improve my business. Bime is a beautiful business intelligence solution to do that. It gives you a clear view, whereas otherwise you have the feeling you are in the dark. It also forces you to look at your processes and streamline them: it gives you direct insight into certain activities that have no added value.”

How has Bime™ responded to these needs?

“Bime Benelux implemented Bime very quickly, within a month. That was perfect for me. Also there are no assumptions, it is right into your face. So it makes certain subjects very clear. Since a lot of people think visually, Bime really helps them to analyse and take the apppropiate action. Also it is like “storytelling”: you can tell a story by looking at my Bime dashboards because I see what is going on. We implemented it both for management and employees. So the employees have their own dashboard, that helps them to steer their actions themselves. Because it gives them insight intowhat they are doing, what their results are. In the end it confirms to them that they are doing things in the right way. I think Bime is a real powerful and user friendly solution, especially for SMEs up to 500 employees.”

What level of added value has Bime™ brought to your job / your business?

“It made my organisation more scalable, effective and efficient. In fact it is the implementation of a lean project we did last year. It makes you aware and give you focus. And that is what I wanted. You can also say it gives the management and employees more rest. Because you can ask people certain things ten times, but now you can see the result yourself. And you should not pull out something that’s growing (changing) ten times a month, to check wether it already has roots. When you are able to look at it from a distance, that is better. It enhances my span of control and gives me the opportunity to grow without adding new managers.”

Read our other testimonials here: testimonials

Since we were short-listed under the “Best Start-up Company” category (losing out to Cloud Linux) in the Cloud Computing World Series Awards last year, we decided to go for it again this year and apply for the second time. A lot has happened in the past 12 months and we think Bime deserves to win any of the following categories: Best Cloud Application, Best SMB Product, Service or Solution; Best Enterprise Solution or Best Start-up Company.

Post Version 2

And that’s only the beginning: in the coming weeks we are coming out with more cool stuff like high compression rates for Déjà Vu snapshots, self-service pre-packaged reports / metrics through our marketplace, and native mobile access.

Here are some of our application notes.

Why do you need Bime?

“Bime helps our target markets facilitate their planning process, and therefore puts them and their organizations in the best possible position for deciding what to do next. Not only does it help organizations make more rational and targeted decisions, but will also keep them one vital step ahead of their competitors in the market.

How does it do this? For example, analyzing sales data might show hidden links within your customer base and so reveal how to better retain old customers and attract new ones. Mixing this with your financial data might then show that one group of customers cost a lot more than another, despite equal revenues, allowing you to further refine your targeting. More than increasing profits, well informed strategic decisions make the difference between the growth and collapse of a company, and Bime gives this opportunity to the organizations that use it. This is particularly important in a recession when organizations need to minimize outgoings and risk. It also enables them to plan savings in an informed and effective way.

Our target markets need tools like Bime to bring visibility into the organization and help link different aspects together. Without Bime, organizations run the risk of overlooking vital information fundamental to their survival in today’s difficult economy.”

What makes this product significantly better than the competition?

“Attractive price and pricing model – the SaaS model means you can pay for only what you use. Simplicity of use – Bime is designed with the business user in mind, so no prior IT expertise is required like a lot of traditional BI solutions. Bime has more great features – we won’t list them all but they include: the ability to perform “what if” analyses directly from the dashboard, large data connectivity, the choice between the SaaS or on-premise version, advanced customization options for charts and dashboards, drill through, decompose and focus directly from the dashboard and loads more. Bime has little/no installation or set-up cost, there is no download required, and it provides unique sharing capabilities.”

These words are extracts from a recent review of BIME by Steve Dine, a famous Business Intelligence analyst at B-Eye-Network.

The review is really good but Steve Dine has some remarks about missing features and big enterprise adoption.

As he mentioned, we first target the SMBs. One of our key goals was to keep the software as simple as possible while providing as much power as we can. ETL for example is a complex process for the end user. That’s why -for now- we didn’t want to bring the complexity of ETL in the mix. For now, we bypass it offering a unique feature: mixing data from different data sources in memory. Taking data from a relationnal database and from a salesforce.com account and mix them without ETL process? Yes, you can do that in Bime and it only takes you a fraction of the time of the development on an ETL process.

We try to find innovative way to simplify common business analytics tasks and also create some innovative capabilities you won’t find anywhere else (just have a look at the What-if Analysis feature). It also means that sometimes it is hard to go through the check list feature of traditional business intelligence solution.

I bet that large companies will actually jump faster than expected. In our case, some have already done it…to be fair, not as a worldwide corporate choice but as a lightweight, rapid fire business intelligence solution which, more than often, overcomes the old corporate BI solution’s promise.

Calculated Members & Calculated Measures

Imagine you can extend your datasets with computations and groups on the fly. Do you have turnover and cost measures? Let’s calculate your margin with a calculated measure. Do you want all the customers above a given profit threshold in one group, and to be able to create another group containing all the others? Calculated Attributes to the rescue!

Swap visualizations in dashboard

A feature that was on our do-to list for too long. Now you can drag & drop the different visualizations in the dashboard and rearrange them in an iGoogle way.

Top & part-to-whole filters

You can now convert all your results (even in a dashboard) to display the part-to-whole contribution. You can also combine it with a top X filters.

Comments

Bime is very useful for communication. So we just added the possibility to add comments on top of EVERY visualization.

Color customization

You can now choose the colors when you use visualizations with color coding.

Sql Builder

For the RBDMS connector, you can now generate automatically the SQL when you select all the data in one table.

Various corrections

Grand Totals, In Bime desktop zoom chart caused an uncaught exceptions, search in attributes of the pivot table, autobuild on Salesforce.com connections, multi chart was buggy when too much categories.

Goal: generate high quality leads, increasing conversions of leads, achieve subscription revenues and volumes

Your everyday responsibilities:

*Online ad development:

Create and place ads and inserts on related sites and publications

Test, monitor and adapt keyword strategy and landing pages

Analyze conversion path / user journey and recommend next steps

Profile leads generated/conversions and recommend next steps

Time and budget management to ensure deadlines are achieved and investment is allocated in the correct places to demonstrate and maximize ROI

*Managing and developing web content:

Produce training and support materials for existing users

Explore all possible opportunities to raise customer/market awareness

Produce additional ad hoc marketing collateral

*Email Marketing:

Planning, implementing, tracking and optimising B2B marketing campaigns

Create targeted list selections via database manipulation

Drive usage for trialists and subscribers

*Press releases

*Monitor and report on competitor activity and significant market trends

*Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin:

Develop constructive relationships with key contacts within BI, SaaS, Data visualization and Cloud Computing B2B fields (Forums, blogs) and use these to benefit the business commercially (identify partnership, possible evangelists)

Knowledge & Skills Required:

- Experience work across a variety of media including: SEO, PPC (Adwords) and Web Analytics (Google Analytics)

- Up to date on all the latest technologies

- Demonstrate innovation by constantly seeking to improve existing methods by introducing more effective marketing techniques and procedures.

- Analytical thinking, creative thinking, strategic thinking

- Good people skills, ability to build relationships, good communicator and influencing skills

- Self-starter who can work independently, decision-making, taking initiative

- Flexible, ability to multitask

- Knowledge in the Business Intelligence, SaaS, Cloud Computing or RIA would (of course) be appreciated

Location: Montpellier, south of France

You can contact me for more details (rachel (at) wearecloud.com).