In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!

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 !

Tracking your online data with Bime

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

Earlier this week the British government approved plans for the first domestic high speed rail network, scheduled to be in place by 2026. For some this upgrade was long overdue and certainly Britain appears to be lagging behind it’s European counterparts, handily from Bime HQ in Montpellier in the south of France we are able to get the high speed train up to Paris in just over 3 hours (597km).

The announcement gave us the opportunity to compare some high speed rail networks worldwide. Using Bime we were able to take some general statistics from the Guardian Data Blog on the distance of current and planned high speed rail lines and add some basic population and land area information to create some visualizations comparing high speed rail networks in different countries.

As always, in Bime dashboards are interactive for viewers, click the link or the image to view and play around with the data.

View the dashboard here

“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 !

Try out Bime for yourself with the 10 day free trial of the premium version.

In this months newsletter:
• Customer testimonial – Erasmus Research Institute of Management
• Dashboard of the Month : ERIM (Erasmus University) – Performance Profiling
• 11 quick and easy tips to light up your dashboard
• And all our best wishes for a wonderful 2012 !

Read it here!

About our customer Wilfred Mijnhardt & the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM):

Wilfred Mijnhardt (left) is executive director of the Erasmus Research Institute of Management, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The institute is the joint initiative of the Rotterdam School of Management, the international business school at Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics. ERIM is a community of around 350 researchers in the field of management. Wilfred himself has been at the Institute for 12 years and has helped build the organization from scratch into a research institute with a worldwide reputation. ERIM is consistently ranked among the top 3 research institutes in management in Europe and top 25 worldwide.

About the Erasmus Institute’s needs :

The institute produces lots of data to disclose and much of this data goes into publications like an annual report which is viewed primarily by academic stakeholders but also by business and a wider societal audience.

ERIM strives for academic excellence and impact by targeting top journals in management research. Wilfred wanted to show with dynamic and web-based analytics that ERIM had effectively brought the field of management research at Erasmus University to a top international level, covering a perspective of 10 years. He wanted to produce dashboards with statistics and intelligence to gain insight into the scope of their academic performance pattern with KPIs such as the number of publications, selections on the top publications, per countries, per field of research etc.

Displeased with the blandness of the school statistics profiling reports, Wilfred looked for a way to bring his data to life! With so much data from a range of different sources, Wilfred needed to get his dashboards set up. He needed a solution which was then user friendly and quick & easy to use, which offered a variety of visualizations and dashboarding tools to extract the true potential from his data. As Wilfred notes, the ability to share his dashboards and for his users to be able to interact with the data, was also of optimal importance:

“Visitors to the website, especially our academic peers, would like to play with the data and experience the transparency of our performance system, not just look at it”

Wilfred commented that the combination was the key, the process of: obtaining the data from multiple databases, analysing and processing this data, and then displaying it through effective visualizations. All three needed to be efficient to fully leverage the true value of the data. It was the combination that delivered the magic.

Internationalisation in 2010 (zoomed in on Europe), taken from the ERIM Input Dashboard

Why Bime ? How has Bime responded to Wilfred’s needs ?

With much talk in the industry about the potential of using analytics to track school profiling reports, Erasmus were keen to be the first movers within the academic and university market. The Institute is very proud of their academic results and publications and was keen to implement a modern solution which could fully exhibit their data. Bime was suggested as the solution to fit their needs by our Dutch partners, KJP Consultants. Wilfred comments that the “liveliness of the visualizations in Bime was the initial trigger”.

In continued and “very pleasant” co-creation with Bime, the institute now puts out a dynamic annual report with trends and analytics. The dashboards represent data for input, output and productivity at this institute and are drawn from multiple databases holding Erasmus’ research information systems. At time of writing they have produced 6 years worth of dynamic annual reports and have plans to soon expand this to cover a 10 year period, all of which are available to view at any time online on their website.

In a break from traditional dashboards, the dashboards take several seconds to load because they update with real-time data and are not static.They provide updates and interactive features for the viewers in the context of the website. One of the main advantages Wilfred has found is that stakeholders can interact with the dashboards to fully explore the data. This helps reassure them about the information organization, that performance measurements systems are in good shape at the company and also fully shows off the data. Wilfred is impressed with the strong range of visualizations available in Bime and in particular makes use of the publishing options, which allow ERIM to embed the dashboards in reports and emails as well as sharing them with stakeholders, fellow academia and the world, on the institute website. Working in conjunction with the website, the dashboards allow users to learn a lot simply by scrolling the dashboards, providing “a very rich insight of company performance over the years”.

Erasmus Research Staff, taken from the ERIM Input Performance Dashboard

What about our Bime partner KJP Consultants ? What help did they provide Wilfred ?

After first signing up for Bime, Wilfred worked closely with KJP Consultants and was in dialogue with Bime HQ in France, to make Wilfred’s vision a reality and KJP provided conclusive support to fully explore and optimize the functionality of Bime. KJP particularly assisted Wilfred to fuse his many databases in Bime and in harnessing the post-processing power of Bime. From a technological point of view KJP helped Erasmus take multiple data sets and create a chain of information, connected by Bime to provide an overview of all the Institute’s data. Wilfred describes KJP as the “bridge” between the analytics and the corporate world. He added that it was a fantastic help to have a local Bime consultant and the KJP team provide “great support” and have “huge empathy” for the customer.

International Articles, ISI Highly Cited Classification, taken from the ERIM Output Dashboard

Did Wilfred realize his vision with Bime ?

Erasmus share their dashboards online, through their website, available here. Wilfred has received a lot of positive feedback particularly from fellow professors and from the academia network worldwide. Users enjoy how the dashboards present live analysis and how they are extremely collaborative, with many users asking Wilfred how he creates such dashboards. The institute is proud of their cutting edge research and are now pleased to have an innovative tool to mirror their research and to inform their stakeholders.

Erasmus currently has plans to utilize the analytical power of Bime to do more data crunching and use BIME as a presentation layer on top of some of the more technical academic software such as SPSS and STATA and make the results more user-friendly with Bime.

View ERIM’s Input, Output & Performance dashboards here.

Thank you to our customer Wilfred Mijnhardt for accepting this interview and to our Bime partner for Benelux, KJP consultants. November 2011.