In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!

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 !

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.

Why is the cloud so comfortable for SMBs?

SMBs have much smaller IT budgets than the larger companies and thus, in many cases, simply can’t afford a large initial CapEx outlay. Cloud solutions do not require the IT personnel or infrastructure of traditional IT solutions and can often compliment any pre-existing IT, perfect for the 42% of SMBs which don’t have an IT department and those with little IT infrastructure. SMBs often have less bureaucracy and more flexibility and requirements are likely to fluctuate. With true cloud based solutions (SaaS), the number of licenses can be adapted each month with no long term commitments. SMBs are more susceptible to cash flow problems but with SaaS they are able to pay-as-you-use. Similarly cloud solutions are highly scalable and licenses and users can easily be added as the company expands. Unlike many of the larger companies SMBs aren’t burdened by pre-existing legacy infrastructure and thus migration to the cloud is usually much simpler.

Returning to the infogaphic 98% of those questioned said technology was key to success and this in part seems to explain the increase cloud adoption as companies leverage the benefits of cloud computing to try and gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the competition.

Within the BI sphere true cloud solutions have opened up the market to SMBs, making BI a viable economic option where they may have previously been priced out. With the ease-of-use and pricing, Bime is perfect for SMBs and allows them to get true value out of their data.

Need more convincing? View our testimonials from both SMBs and larger companies alike and try it for yourself with a 10 day free trial !

BONUS INFOGRAPHIC 1!
On a similar theme Mashable recently published an infographic based on a survey commissioned by business technology company CSC to find out businesses’ “motivations behind their move to cloud computing systems and its effects on their businesses”. One of the most interesting statistics is that SMBs face less workforce resistance to cloud adoption (perhaps because as mentioned earlier, they are not burdened by legacy infrastructure and so are more open to new ways of doing things). Find the full infographic below.

BONUS INFOGRAPHIC 2!
This final infographic, produced by NovelASPect, again illustrates some of the advantages for SMBs adopting cloud computing. They quote an interesting figure from CRN that SMB spending will reach $100b by 2014.

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

Forrester Research are some of the best in the business for keeping check of this rapidly changing industry and providing market leading BI analysis and insight. They recently conducted a survey of BI vendors (in which we participated) and now they are conducting a survey of BI users in which you can express your expectations and your plans for implementing BI.

Forrester state the objective of the survey is “to help our clients understand business intelligence software vendor pricing and licensing differences, as well as attempt to see if there are some clear patterns in the total cost of ownership between different vendor products.”

The survey only takes 10 minutes and for completing the survey you receive a complimentary copy of the final report, so you can see if you have a typical SaaS adopter profile!

TO PARTICIPATE IN THE SURVEY CLICK HERE

Jeff Kaplan delivered a 35-minute webinar through these five application categories. You get an overview of the top vendors in each market and criteria you can use to determine if a move makes sense for you in the short term. Watch it here:

He says that people may be surprised at seeing business intelligence and analytics on the list, but that the cloud is perfect for collecting and collating data, which can then be used later to make good business decisions. He also says that there are a number of SaaS solutions in the BI and analytics space and that it’s important to find the one that suits your needs, as each one has its own focus. The final slide was particularly useful, detailing the Steps to Success:

About J.Kaplan: Jeff is founder and managing director of THINKstrategies, the independent strategic consulting firm dedicated to helping enterprise IT decision-makers and technology solution providers achieve their business objectives by leveraging the value of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud computing and managed services. His Cloud Computing Showplace is the leading vendor-independent online directory and best practice resource center in this rapidly growing marketplace.

Each submission has its own discussion forum. As you read our submission, please share your thoughts with the community through comments. We will be able to refine the submission based on your feedback. We want our proposal to evolve and improve during this stage. Your comments will help draw attention to our submission and show the panel that you are interested in discovering the content we are proposing.

Session Description
Cloud technologies are alleviating business intelligence headaches, enabling companies to act in real time on years of data for a fraction of the IT budget. With the increased data from social media communications the move to cloud data has to be well timed and driven by executives.

What knowledge will an E2 attendee gain or benefit from your session?
This panel provides insights on the nimble way people do business, no longer relying on trial and error but utilizing all data, including social media, to provide answers to business queries. A holistic look at traditional on-premise systems, cloud-based SaaS, partnership growth and aggregation of increasing social stats.

Format and audience
The session will be a panel format, and its intended audience is those at an intermediate technical level. The principal speaker would be Rachel Delacour, our CEO.

Our additional proposed panelists would be: Laurent Gasser, Revevol CEO – Ram Menon, executive vice president of marketing for Tobco – Jeff Kaplan, THINKStrategies – Paul Taylor, Financial times – Ben Worthen, WSJ.

What do the experts say?

Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies, states in an article on cloud washing:

Rising adoption of these ‘on-demand’ service alternatives to traditional, on-premise software and systems is attracting a widening array of established ‘legacy’ vendors who too often are simply rebranding or repackaging their existing products and not fulfilling the real potential of today’s best SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions.

Cloud washing is “an exercise in which the vendors are attempting to convince IT and business decision-makers that they are keeping pace with the latest innovations in the marketplace but are actually falling short”.

We have always been proud that Bime will never fall in this category. Born in and built for the Cloud, Bime is the result of 4 years R&D carried out by a team of BI experts and computer science PhDs. We gambled on the Cloud years ago and then spent years incorporating the best and latest technologies into the tool. This has paid off as Bime has become the intuitive and powerful tool it is today

Customer feedback and the latest industry innovations

JK also goes on to say “leading SaaS vendors enhance their solutions regularly based on customer feedback and the latest industry innovations” — something we pride ourselves in doing here at Bime HQ.

We constantly monitor new technology and when it can enhance the application we will always do our best to incorporate it. Likewise, when a customer has a suggestion or improvement, we always listen.

Our lines of communication are very open — we talk to our customers via the website live chat, the customer support site and via email.

The majority of our clients’ suggestions have been implemented in the product — meaning Bime has all the features you want, not only ones we think you will find useful.

Be cautious

We are not saying that legacy apps can’t be successful in the Cloud — just bear cloud washing in mind when searching for a SaaS solution. Be careful of legacy vendors offering hosted versions of their applications — often these are simply modern versions of the old app, which aren’t as scalable as true, multitenant SaaS solutions. In some cases it may mean that you’re not necessarily reaping all the benefits of a pure-cloud service.