– View other Bime tips here

– Take a look at our other tutorial and demo videos here

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!