Highlights from the 2010 Pacific Crest Technology Conference : SaaS as a Catalyst for Business Intelligence and Analytics

February 27th, 2010

qgallivan

This week I was on a panel discussing the growing state of Cloud Computing and the SaaS BI market.  The panel consisted of moderator Nabil Elsheshai, Senior Analyst of Information Management Software and IT Services at Pacific Crest along with Bill Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning; Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft; Scott Weiner, CTO of Cloud9, and myself.  I want to share some key themes and observations from the event particularly because they set the tone for the next evolution of BI.

The criteria IT uses to buy BI has shifted, resulting in a new approach to BI decision-making.  The era of high risk, complex and time consuming implementations is giving way to a new era of quick BI wins defined by specific business use-cases that are implemented in days, not months or years, with no CAPEX spending and extremely fast time-to-value. At PivotLink we’re seeing this shift in buying criteria being driven by both IT and the line of business.  IT needs to deliver a faster turnaround on BI solutions for high priority business projects and do so with limited resources. SaaS BI is a perfect augmentation strategy for legacy BI implementations. By enabling IT to better support the business with highly secure, easy-to-use tools and right-time data – all  without breaking the bank or bringing on new resources - SaaS BI is the best tool for these high value quick BI wins!

Distributed data management is driving the need for SaaS based BI in the cloud. The panel talked extensively about a reality that most companies face today – managing data that sits both outside their firewalls and inside their on-premise applications. BI in the cloud is the natural place to integrate and analyze data for SaaS to SaaS applications and SaaS to on-premise applications. A good example is the use of SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, and Taleo for sales and human capital management as well as on-premise ERP for financial and other business applications. The sales and manufacturing executives gain deeper insight into demand forecasting from the mash-up of data from the sales pipeline system (SFDC) with data from the on-premise ERP system. Similarly, the marketing leader gains a 360 degree view of marketing campaign effectiveness across lead generation and cost per lead from the mash-up of data from SFDC with data from Marketo with data from on-premise financial systems. 

Enterprise 2.0 increases and accelerates collaboration across companies, supply chains and business partners. SaaS BI allows companies to break down silos across departments and strengthen relationships with trading partners by sharing insight, not just data. Outdoor retailer REI uses PivotLink to share analytics and dashboards within their ecosystem of vendors in order to minimize stock-out situations. This is a good example of how Enterprise 2.0 capabilities can bring people and content together quickly, integrate them into existing business processes and drive faster decision-making across an organization’s value chain. 

Insight as a Service is the new BI greenfield. The need to turn reams of data into actionable business information has never been more imperative because dynamic insight and decision-making are so fundamental to achieving quick BI wins. Insight as a Service (IaaS) provides a faster, easier and more cost-effective way for business users to securely access relevant data, develop insight and achieve quick BI wins – all within the same application environment. To that end, PivotLink has developed pre-built analytical applications based on industry best practices and KPI’s. These solutions accelerate time to insight by delivering the data and metrics business users need to their desktop.

The old dog will not hunt in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 world. The panel had complete consensus on the fact that the traditional BI stack (complex and cumbersome star schemas, cubes, OLAP tools, heavy handed ETL) cannot effectively suport the new world order of dynamic decision-making, collaboration, distributed data management and quick BI wins. The Enterprise 2.0 world embraces change and thrives on the vast amounts and types of information streaming into the enterprise. This trend (which is quickly becoming the new normal) exposes companies to even more data sources that shift how data maps and relates to one another – which directly impacts the tools and decision-making processes end users require to be effective. 

Overall, it was a great session and highlighted the market’s need for truly innovative technology approaches to business intelligence – ones that deliver on the promise of fast implementations, end user self-service and unburdening IT.  And as you can imagine, since PivotLink has pioneered a unique columnar database, a no-transformation-required ETL engine and lightening fast in-memory analytics, I couldn’t agree more with the rest of the panel on this matter!

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The New BI …. is about to get really interesting !!

February 12th, 2010

qgallivan

Imagine being able to help your executive team anticipate and address hotspots in your business, spending less time chasing data and building reports and more time measuring the precise aspects that matter most to you; collaborating online with communities of experts (colleagues, customers, suppliers); discovering insights that allow you to improve profitability, capitalize on growth opportunites and innovate faster! Now you can do this quickly, cost-effectively and without burdening IT. This is the New BI – an emerging paradigm for analytics designed around the way people really work, share information and make decisions. All powered by solutions from PivotLink and PivotLink partners.

The New BI is in the cloud and benefits from the inherent advantages of this computing model (affordable, agile, quickly deployable, high bandwidth, “always on”, extend more kinds of data to more users). Most importantly, the New BI isn’t shackled behind the four walls of an organization. It goes well beyond and helps individuals extend their network far and fast enough to get timely insights and answers to their operational and strategic questions. The New BI goes beyond analysis and reporting and ventures into the realm of true collaborative decision making. Web 2.0 social tools wrapped around the New BI have the ability to quickly collect and spread knowledge, connect people who would otherwise have remained unaware of each other, harness their collective intelligence and enhance individual decision making.

Three key forces are driving the trend towards the New BI: 1) the explosion of  more and various types of information in our day-to-day work lives, 2) a new generation of digitally savvy employees and 3) a blurring of the distinction between technology used in our personal and our work lives. With dynamic flows of information coming at them each day, users need new ways to access and analyze it and then relate it to their decisions and actions. Secondly, those who grew up with personal technology – Millenials, Gen Y – are changing the culture of the workforce. The emerging workforce prefers information in multimedia to words, the collective intelligence of individuals and they rely upon online resources such as social networks, expert communities and bloggers for strategic information. As people become increasingly used to sharing and collaborating outside the office (e.g. Facebook, iPhone, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) they are coming to expect their work places to become more open and collaborative as well. Many companies today are organized into separate regional product-line and functional “silos”, making it hard for people to share information beyond their immediate colleagues. As a result valuable information and insight ends up being siloed or simply not shared. Even worse, opportunities for innovation don’t surface.

The New BI enables organizations to leverage information in valuable new ways including connecting employees who need information with the experts who have it, enabling the best ideas to emerge organically and using those ideas to catalyze innovation. As the New BI gains traction, it will transform the way companies organize and manage their information assets and ultimately empower individuals to re-design their decision making processes to make not only more timely decisions, but more confident and creative ones. 

At PivotLink we give business people tools that allow them to access, aggregate and analyze the information they need to improve understanding and decision making and ultimately do their jobs better – without burdening IT.  PivotLink customers such as the North Face, DMA and OrderMotion have already had success with the New BI to speed up knowledge-sharing both internally and across the extended supply chain, in turn breaking down silos. The New BI is a more efficient and effective business intelligence paradigm. It is positioned to help users know more, do better and thrive. Stay tuned, it’s about to get really interesting !

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Gartner on the Security of SaaS BI. Analyze this!

February 10th, 2010

Ajay Dawar

A week or so ago Gartner released the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms and commented on SaaS BI. Below is a relevant excerpt that needs some expounding:

“In the economic downturn, interest in SaaS solutions has increased in the past year, although it is still a small fraction of the overall market.” It continues “…. Moving BI off-premises may not suit all organizations and all use cases, especially those dealing with highly sensitive data. Many firms are evaluating hybrid options for deployments leveraging both private and public clouds, as well as a combination of on-premises and off-premises solutions. But firms that find the SaaS value proposition of more rapid, lower-cost deployments attractive should evaluate SaaS as an option.”

Let us look at a few of Gartner’s points that deserve a close look:

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What’s Happening at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market Show?

January 18th, 2010

terie

PivotLink will be exhibiting and presenting at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Show in Salt Lake City, Utah this week – January 21st -24th.

Retail automation systems combined with data from the web are yielding more information than ever. On Thursday, January 21, 2010 PivotLink and the North Face will present a session entitled Retail Analytics – How to Get the Numbers That Matter. Sarah Jones, Retail Floor Space Management Manager at the North Face, will discuss how she uses PivotLink’s On-demand Retail Analytics and Reporting solution to turn mountains of data about customers, merchandise and operations into knowledge that provides blue sky visibility into what sells, to whom, why and empowers the North Face to stay ahead of the pack.

Increasingly, top outdoor retailers (and PivotLink customers) like the North Face, REI, Rossignol, Smartwool, CamelBak, Bauer, Timbuk2, Brooks, Fleet Feet, Thule and VF Corp. are bypassing erstwhile ERP systems and tapping into their business via on-demand BA. They understand that it’s essential to analyze the data they collect in near real-time, make business intelligence accessible to more users and enable everyone throughout the retail supply chain to make effective decisions. Doug Henschen’s recent article in Intelligent Enterprise highlights how PivotLink’s SaaS-based BI solution enables ski and snowboard equipment maker Rossignol to track sales and maneuver through the winter retail season.  Jim Hunter, V.P Operations & CFO Rossignol North America points out that they chose PivotLink over an “aging home-grown ERP system” to keep a firm grip on the numbers.

Stay on top of the latest trends in outdoor retail and see PivotLink live from the show floor  this week at the outdoor retail industry event of the season.

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What’s New for SaaS BI in 2010

January 8th, 2010

qgallivan

I’d like to expand upon my final 2009 blog post that identified 5 key trends that will shape the SaaS BI market and consequently our customer’s success in 2010.

  1. Just like in 2009, SaaS BI will grow faster than on-premise BI.
  2. Business users will drive more SaaS BI purchases and demand more Insight as a Service (IaaS), i.e.  pre-packaged analytics based on industry best practices and self service capabilities.
  3. SaaS BI will drive more data mash-ups that integrate company data behind the firewall with company data in other SaaS applications for unified business visibility and reporting.
  4. Companies will look at how to incorporate the explosion of social media into their business information environments. Social media use in the enterprise will drive more adoption of SaaS BI.
  5. Customers will make SAS-70 Type II certification a non-negotiable requirement for security.

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PivotLink’s Break Out Year

December 21st, 2009

qgallivan

Before everyone leaves for the holidays, I want to take this opportunity to thank our customers and partners who helped make this a great year for us. As 2009 draws to a close, I’d like to share some of the year’s highlights with you and look ahead to 2010.

Company Momentum

While many industry watchers were uncertain as to what 2009 would bring, PivotLink had a break out year in every key metric considered as a leading indicator of viability and long term growth. We experienced record growth in new customers, paid subscribers and a dramatic increase in usage on our service. Although the weak economy made SaaS BI attractive, the fervent adoption by customers changed the industry’s position on SaaS BI from one of skepticism to that of cautious optimism. We are ending 2009 with approximately 15,000 paid subscribers generating nearly 2 million analytic reports on a monthly basis. This incredible adoption is a tribute to the power of the SaaS BI model and the value of the PivotLink service.

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It’s all about tracking metrics

December 11th, 2009

Ajay Dawar

Ray Wang just posted an awesome and insightful article about how to approach the use of software to improve business in these tight times. I especially loved the last 2 suggestions quoted below, because it captured the essence of SaaS BI – a byte sized approach to tracking metrics:

  1. Choose your entry points to add business value. It makes no sense to boil the ocean.  Today’s analytic solutions require bite-sized entry points.  Clients often start with analysis of metrics and KPI by department and work their way to cross-departmental initiatives.  Advanced customers focus on external entry points such as customers and partners.  (see Figure 1.)
  2. Define the metrics that matter. Begin with the end in mind.  This Coveyism always rings true in transformational activities.  Metrics should be aligned with your entry points.  Quantify the baseline and determine the effort.  Adjust your ROI targets to align resources with efforts to move the needle. (see Figure 2.)

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TDWI Webinar Q&A: Better Understanding SaaS BI

December 2nd, 2009

Ajay Dawar

It’s clear that the Business Intelligence community is trying to better understand SaaS BI. Case in point, we held a webinar with Wayne Eckerson (When SaaS BI and On-premise Worlds Collide, Nov 19), and another with Claudia Imhoff (SaaS BI – The New Framework for End-user & IT Success, Oct 29), both of which showed heavy attendance. Wayne and Claudia started their respective webinars by defining SaaS BI to clear the confusion around terminology, applications, strengths and weaknesses. As if to reinforce this, there were many questions from the audience during Q&A – many more than you would typically have for a webinar.

The analysts’ approach reflects the mind-set of the business intelligence community. Yet, Claudia and Wayne were each followed by a case study presentation where the VP of Data Management at a distribution company (DMA) and the CIO of a consumer products company (Shaklee) discussed how effectively they have been using SaaS BI for several years.  Their passion is undeniable.  It was this very dichotomy that set off the avalanche of questions.

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Reporting Tools Analyze Data Across Silos

November 24th, 2009

Ajay Dawar

While we were at Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user group conference) many companies stopped by to tell us about the challenge they are having in integrating sales data with other data for better business visibility. The real value of business analytics comes in combining data from multiple silos. This enables you to look across systems to get insight into customer profitability, sales productivity, quote-cash and other cross-functional but critical metrics. The visual below gives you an idea of how reporting tools that look across data sources can help you achieve your strategic goals.

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Its That Time of Year …Dreamforce ‘09 is Here

November 17th, 2009

terie

The PivotLink Marketing team has been busy getting ready for Dreamforce. As the conference kicks off, we wanted to invite our readers to meet the PivotLink team and our customers and find out how we’re helping them turn Salesforce.com data into actionable insights and how to make that information relevant to other areas of the business.

  • Our CMO Dyke Hensen will be speaking on, “Using Lead Nurturing and Scoring to Deliver More and Higher-Quality Sales Leads”, Wed Nov 18 at 3:30 PM.
  • Drop by booth #1012 for a demo and talk Sales Analytics, KPIs, On-demand BA, Data Integration.
  • Join us for a drink at the Marketing Cloud Party on Thursday night at the St. Regis  from 6-8 PM

We’ll also be making a big announcement at the conference, so stay tuned for the scoop !

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