Bime with QueryBlender Lets Companies Mine Their Own Business, Mix and Match Data Sets to Turn Questions into Valuable Insights

DEMO FALL 2011, SANTA CLARA, CA, September 13, 2011 — We Are Cloud, the “ICT European start-up of the year,” today announced the release of Version 3.0 of Bime, the global and elegant business intelligence (BI) service for the age of cloud computing, at DEMO Fall 2011.

With Bime V3.0, even small and medium-size enterprises can mine their own business with a powerful cloud BI service that turns big data into big dollars, fast. For the first time, its unique QueryBlender allows users to connect the dots between disparate, live data sets — no matter whether they reside on a local drive or are streaming through web services around the globe.

With QueryBlender, Bime is the first cloud BI solution that unlocks the power of federated databases, so users can query dozens of sources and make sense of them – regardless of query language, file, and meta data formats. QueryBlender lets users mix and match virtually any information, from legacy spreadsheets and large relational databases to live data streaming in from Google Analytics, Google Apps, salesforce.com, or Amazon Web Services.

“For the past three years, we have been working with our customers from China to the Americas and Europe to build a BI solution that gives straight answers to hard-core business questions,” said Rachel Delacour, We Are Cloud co-founder and CEO. “Bime is easy to use, fast to deploy and so affordable that every manager and knowledge worker can tap into the sea of data we’re all swimming in. Bime V3.0 lets everybody shine new light on their data so they can make better decisions faster.”

Bime V3.0 is a pioneering BI service born in the cloud and built for the cloud. It runs in any browser and lets users within minutes explore, visualize, publish and share important insights from their enterprise and the Web at large. The new product makes collaborative decision-making for a mobile workforce and global organizations a snap.

“Everyone is awash in data, but starved for information,” said Nicolas Raspal, CTO and co-founder of We Are Cloud. “With We Are Cloud, you can ask almost any question and see an answer in milliseconds. Our customers can effortlessly work with any type of data, no matter what the format or the location — that’s the key competitive advantage they want. We deliver business intelligence at the speed of thought.”

Co-workers and external partners get an instant read on important developments and trends through live dashboards and widgets they can access on the go. Dashboards and widgets can be emailed or embedded on any web page, while owners retain full control over who can access the data visualization and for how long.

Bime V3.0 requires no large downloads, no time-consuming set-up and no tedious uploads of data sets. Companies can tap into the power of cloud BI without giving up control over their data, yet are able to perform sophisticated calculations fast, thanks to a proprietary in-memory OLAP calculation engine. Bime V3.0 scales with each user’s individual requirements. They can choose to seamlessly upload data into its Déjà Vu distributed cache, or work on millions of data sets by harnessing the power of the most powerful database stacks and cloud computing platforms, from Google and salesforce.com to Hadoop MapReduce.

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. To find out more, visit: http://bimeanalytics.com.

About DEMO:

Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.

Media Contact:
Andrea Heuer
Heuer Media for We Are Cloud
press@wearecloud.com
+1-917-886-5113

I have touched down in San Francisco for the Dreamforce ’11 event.

Here are some numbers, in no particular order:

• 40,000 people…who had the same idea as me
• 2 times as many people as last year
• 3 buildings (the Moscone center) dedicated to the event
• 1 entire neighborhood of San Francisco, taken over by Dreamforcers
• 500 meters is the distance from which you can see the Dreamforce signs, telling you that you’re heading in the right direction
• (At least) 5 DJ, mixing throughout the day
• 100m (at times, a lot more) of queuing to get a coffee or to get into the conference
• 3 Oracle teams with their branded balloons that were strategically squatted in front of the Moscone center, telling people that they are still the number 1 in CRM
• 100+ tonnes of food, catering to all tastes and beliefs
• 80,000+ mobile devices (probably more!)
• 1 WiFi network, which held up well despite the mass of people using it
• 100+++ smiles on the faces of Salesforce representatives (I don’t know how many of them there are, but they are everywhere) who are dedicated to the organization of the event
• 100+ events that are born out of DF’11 (for example, I went to MOMA, a DreamSimplicity networking event)
• 1 John, a Salesforce guy that dances ALL the time, especially to Blondie, in order to show me where my next session is
• 1 billion possible business deal combinations…

Well, I must admit, that this is where all the action is. Next year it’ll be us! However, no Platinum Partner package for us ($300,000). On this side of the Atlantic they are good at this stuff. Thumbs up from me!

The organization is particularly impressive. They have an answer for everything. I think they are overwhelmed by the number of participants though, as the biggest problem is having to wait in line to participate in sessions, even though you’ve paid your entry.

I’ll relay more of my findings/opportunities tomorrow. Well, I’ll try, as my schedule fills up pretty quickly, what with all the partnership opportunities I am spotting!

See you soon.

PS. The 31st (today) is my birthday. Theoretically, spending it away from home should be sad, but Metallica are playing tomorrow during the keynote opening a geeky thing which kind of makes up for it. Thumbs up once again!

We would love to use this opportunity to meet all of you. If you are attending Dreamforce ’11, or will be in the surrounding area at the time of the conference, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us to organize a meet-up!

You can get in touch via rachel at wearecloud dot com.

What is Dreamforce?
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s annual user & developer conference. ”More than just a typical user conference, Dreamforce brings together all the leaders in cloud computing to collaborate, connect, and inspire. Every year attendees feel the excitement as they learn how the next wave of cloud computing can help their businesses soar.” Read more here.

Where is it?
Dreamforce ’11 takes place at The Moscone Center (North, South, and West buildings) and the adjacent Marriott Marquis and Intercontinental hotels in downtown San Francisco.

When is it?
August 30 – September 2.

What are the scheduled events for DF?
Preview the Dreamforce agenda here.

See you in SF!

This was the first ever Visual Decision Forum, so the turnout of 170 was pretty good. Well done to the Décideo team (Philippe Nieuwbourg) for this initiative which echoed current hot topics in the BI technology space – datavis and more globally, the Big Data phenomenon (the fact you need good datavis in order to cope with Big Data!).

Datavis – the nickname for the official term Data Visualization – is nothing new for our American friends, who have been practising datavis for a long time now.  Actors in the BI space have jumped on this discipline as it was necessary  a) to modernize data analysis, and b) to find new ways to communicate.

At Bime/We Are Cloud, we are proud to have understood the importance of datavis right from the start, and we have built Bime with this fundamental principle in mind : maximum information, in the minimum amount of space, thanks to established graphic techniques and Rich Internet UIs that vastly improve the reading and understanding experience.

It seems that the big traditional BI players are only suddenly throwing themselves into this niche simply to support their marketing spiels…but better late than never! Anyway, I could not comprehend the level of interest in “Jump” (JMP by SAS) which actually seemed to encompass the opposite of what was being preached about datavis. No big deal though, the forum needs sponsors in order to be able to take place, which I totally understand. Next year I hope to have more opportunities to see practical workshops, such as the one run by Claude-Henri MELEDO, who showcased some work by Jacques Bertin…the French “cartographer” who is practically unheard of in France, but pretty well known in the USA…[editor's note] always precursors without knowing it, the French…

I particularly liked the round table about Data Journalism, with input from Caroline Goulard (Dataveyes) et Alain Joannes, author of the book “Data Journalism”. The session was about strategies for the digital future and the daily flow of information, and how it has never been so necessary than it is today to structure data, in order to create explicatory graphic visualizations that are able to sum up pages of data in a few pixels.  A lot of new economic models were put into perspective for more informative “story-telling” in order to “energize data” (the baseline used by one of the main players present, and rather well put!).

So, well done again for the initiative, the event came at a good time considering the current literature circulating in the BI space.  I think that the workshops will probably mature next year, and those from the school of Stephen Few will also be hosting some sessions… (our team is a big fan of S.Few and E.Tufte… 2 big names in the datavis world).

It would be interesting if the event could organize some sort of competition around the visualization of a particular dataset, such as the ones organized regularly by Nathan Yau, on his awesome blog FlowingData (which is where the image above came from)…the proof is in the pudding!

See you next time,

Rachel.

Here are a couple of photos from the prize-giving!

Rachel Delacour, CEO of We Are Cloud, receiving the trohpy

The awards dinner

And here’s the official ICT Spring Luxembourg video:

ICT Spring is a worldwide two days event in the heart of Europe which brings together more than 1,500 ICT executives from Europe, America, Africa and Asia.

ICT spring focuses on INNOVATION and its lifecycle. Start-ups are the stars of the show — coming from all continents, 80 startups will be invited to present the last innovations and tomorrows services used by professionals and consumers, and Bime is one of them. The keynotes and speakers are very promising.

We’ll be there with a stand and a workshop! If you have any questions prior to the day, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Rachel who will be hosting both: rachel at wearecloud.com. For your diaries: our workshop will take place on the second day (29th) at 11.45am in Workshop 1!

Where to find our stand

Keep up to date via our blog or via twitter: Follow @wearecloud

We hope the organizers will make the content available to the public at some point, since we won’t be able to attend this year. We’ll try and blog the event anyway to keep you updated!

The Program

My favorite sentence? this one: “cloud computing is a natural evolution for IT”

Here is a quick debrief:

Who?

There were less than five exhibitors, among them VMWare, GoodData, 3Tera…The Cloud Expo was the perfect image of what is occuring in the Cloud economy: many providers, from cloud to SaaS and some curious end-users.

I wish delegates from Amazon or Google or even Microsoft were here.

Each speaker made great efforts to educate us about the “cloud computing thing”. Every session was understandable even for non-technical attendees.

Main Topics?

Security first!

It has been developed many times through different angles: from a technical one to a legal one (David Snead)

During the keynote, Roman Stanek took time to tackle fears and reminded us that today, traditional IT security is less secure and can’t fight against people’s negligence, nor computers lost by employees.
He even highlighted that no internal IT could ensure amazon’s SLA level (EC2: 99,95%, S3: 99,9%).

To avoid the darker side of cloud computing, Stephen Foskett gave some pieces of advice, like choosing one’s cloud provider with 3 criteria in mind (CIA): confidentiality, integrity, accessibility.

What happens if they lose your data? You must consider more than just a refund: is it worth your loss?

According to Guy Bunker: standards need to be driven by customers, not by vendors.

User experience: every speaker insisted on a better user experience: cloud infrastructures enable reliable backups and redundancy, and they change the IT role to concentrate on strategic IT problems.

They all claimed that, yes, you could trust your cloud provider because of their long term viability…but why will they have a long term viability? Because of the economies of scale experienced every day by both parties: providers & customers.

David Hacanek from VMWare reminded us that everybody is already using hardware from the cloud: by using your iPhone or Blackberry, you don’t care where the infrastructures are, or why your operator made this or that technical choice.

You already agreed to consumption based pricing. You already access it using standard internal protocols. You’re satisfied that it’s powered quickly ans as required, and you have enjoyed lower prices (compared to 5 years ago) due to shared infrastructures.

Considering problems of latency, speakers focused on the emerging ideas of “Map reduce” and process parallelization for better performance.

Innovation:

With the cloud economy, more and more startups will appear. Now they can delay the time for VCs because they don’t need as many investments as before to test their software on a bigger scale, for example. Our startup We Are Cloud is one of those examples. We saved on infrastructure labor. We can deal with unpredictable demand, without CAPEX. It’s great for innovation and above all, it means a better time-to-market.

First Keynote:

An On-Demand Business Intelligence vendor opened the cloud expo. We are accustomed to OnDemand CRM and Project Managment solutions, but not particularly to BI, that’s why it was a great experience for all of us.

Organization:

Syscon organized this event. They did some great work. Nevertheless, I still don’t understand why we couldn’t have access to internet for free on the first day (we were at the Hilton hotel, we are in 2009 and it was the cloud expo…)

French people and cloud computing:

There were few attendees from France and only two speakers represented us (Louis Nauges from Revevol and Jerome Bernard from Elastic Grid).

Louis Nauges is really passionate about cloud computing and I particularly recommend his sessions to startups who are crafting something related to the Saas industry. You can’t help but be motivated by his speech!

Goodies:

-There were less than 5 girls there…so please next time, allow your female engineers to come!

-Have a look at this cool video from VMWare…a great video to help you understand some cloud benefits.

Our next “cloud computing event”? Maybe the Cloud Camp in France.

Where? At the CNIT – Paris La défense

Why? To test Bime, to speak about Cloud Computing, Business intelligence, Data Visualization and more.

See you there!