Last week, as part of an express N.American tour, Rachel attended the Interop Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas as a speaker. Hosted in the famous Mandalay Bay Hotel, the event brought together players from SaaS / IaaS / PaaS / telecom. etc.

We presented alongside Ju-Kay Kwek, Product Manager of Google Big Query… Why?… Because we were one of their first BigQuery partners (the official BigQuery launch was a week earlier).

Using Bime’s front end business intelligence and analytics over BigQuery allows the possibilty to immediately analyze huge volumes of data in the cloud. We did live demonstrations, showcasing the combination of BigQuery and Bime to create queries on a dataset of 450 million lines, online, on the fly and all in the cloud. Each query took around 3-4 seconds to execute (without any prior aggregation).

Find below our pitch in the event programme and some photos of the event. You can read Rachel’s full report on the event on our French Blog.

Big Data Analytics and BI in the Cloud
Location: Lagoon D
Google has used Big Data, analytics, and massive computational power to create a data-driven and agile business. With cloud services like its recently launched BigQuery product, it is enabling, for many businesses, Google-scale data analytics on billion-row data sets for the first time. This session will focus on why Google developed these technologies and how Google products like App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery can give you simple, reliable and effective tools to leverage the power of data. It will also look at real-life use cases, their business impact, and what businesses can learn from this.

Speaker - Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager, Google
Speaker - Rachel Delacour, CEO, Bime

Upcoming US & Canada Dates

7-8th May: Interop – Enteprise Cloud Summit – Las Vegas – We will be presenting with Ju-Kay Kwek from Google.

8-9th May: Meetings – Seattle

10th May: JusticeBC Data Dashboard Project Recognition Event – Vancouver

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2-10th June: French Tech Tour – Silicon Valley

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27-29th June: Google IO – San Francisco

Big Data allows users to upload their data to Google and perform business analytics in the cloud. Google are offering up to 2 terabytes of storage and provide processing on up to 1000 queries per day. As Google state in their blog post, the release of Big Query is:

“….an important milestone in our effort to bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud”

We share this vision and are excited about the potential of bringing cloud based analytics to the masses. Earlier this year both our CEO, Rachel Delacour and Big Query Product Manager, Ju-Kay Kwek spoke on this topic at the GigaOM Structure:Data event in March.

Harnassing the power of Big Query users can create data visualizations and dashboards in Bime based on millions of rows of data. This creates exciting oppurtunities for smaller companies who have large data needs but do not want to make the large investment in the required infrastructure. As Rachel Delacour, said during her presentation at GigaOM Structure:Data:

“small businesses can relax about the skills gap”

Read the full GigaOM article on Google Big Query here.

In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!

As part of an Open Data initiative, Patrick Buisson, Marketing Manager of Europages wanted to make this data available to all their users online. Much of it has gradually been made avaialable to users: the visits by country, the keywords used, the searches by industry etc. Europages looked for a cloud based tool to make their customers by business sector data available (in the spirit of online and dynamic accessibility). Europages realized this aim choosing Bime.

The number of views and clicks on listings in each business sector are now displayed on the Europages website in an interactive embedded Bime dashboard. Users can quickly identify the minimum, average and maximum returns for Europage customers in each business sector across different subsription packages. Using the interactive clicker at the side they are able to find their specific industry and can quickly find out the possible ROI they could expect from one package to another. The visualizations show customer data from a rolling 12 month period and can easily be kept up to date to reflect the latest customer trends.

An example of the visualizations created can be viewed on the Europages website http://corporate.europages.co.uk/measure-your-return-on-Europages.html.

VIEW OTHER BIME CUSTOMER USE CASES HERE

Cloud Adoption by SMBs

Small-businesses seem set to adopt cloud services in a big way over the next few years. In the US last year the SMB cloud services market grew by 25% to $15.1 billion. According to the same SMB Insights report, summarized on smallbusinesscomputing.com, worldwide this figure is set to reach $68billion by 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 26%. With SMBs usually characterized by their strict budgeting, the low capital expenditure and high scalability of cloud services allow SMBs compete with their much large competitors. Additionally smaller companies are three times less likely to ever set up their own servers. Again, the low maintinence, low infrastructure approach of cloud services suits SMBs. No longer needing to worry about regular server updates, this frees up the IT team to concentrate on innovation.

Small Apps the oil in the engine

Using ourselves as an example from our HQ in Montpellier we now have customers across the globe. Taking a snapshot from a short period of our web traffic this morning, we had website visitors from 71 different countries (see below Bime visualization below). In the office we utilise several cloud apps, Bime (of course) to analyze our web analytics, marketing and financial data, Salesforce for CRM, Dropbox for storage and Google Apps (soon to be trying out Google Drive) to name but a few. Using these apps and with the help of our partner network we are able to serve customers in 5 continents and because of their scalability, as our company grows so do our apps.

Website Visitors from a short period this morning. Google Analytics data visualized in Bime.

We recently came across this great infographic from Mavenlink providing a nice summary of some of the applications that allow small businesses to function (although we would like to see BI / analytics tools as a category, incrasingly a vital part of the SMB app landscape).

Small Business Apps

To illustrate this best we can run through a quick example:

What will happen to my profits if my courier costs change ?

In Bime to execute ‘What If’ analysis we need to first define our global variables, the values which will change to create the ‘What If’ scenario. Therefore we have 2 Global Variables, ‘Domestic Courier Cost’ and ‘International Courier Cost’. Both variables will be used to model percentage change, so they have a default value of 1, a maximum of 2 (a 100% increase) and a minimum of 0.01 (so, 1% of the present cost).

Next we can use the global variables to define some calculated measures and work out our costings. Firstly we can use the global variables as a multiplier in our posting costs e.g.

Domestic Postage = SUMX(Postage Cost)*VAR(Domestic Courier)
International Postage = SUMX(Postage Cost)*VAR(International Courier)

Then, we tell the system to apply the different rates, domestic and international, appropriately:

Variable Postage = IF ([Location]=”Domestic”) THEN SUM(Domestic Postage) ELSE SUM(International Postage) ENDIF

Finally, we factor the variable into our calculation of profits:

Variable Profit = SUM(Sales Amount)-SUM(Cost Goods)-SUM(Variable Postage)

We are then able to create some visualizations using the ‘What If’ scenario and using the slider in the right hand column, change the cost of the domestic and international couriers on the fly and predict how this will affect profits.

TRY IT NOW by clicking the image below and moving the slider at the bottom of the right panel!

For a full list of the 15 companies selected and for more information visit the French Tech Tour website.

In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!