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.
We saw the market overwhelmingly demand more BI capabilities to be delivered via a SaaS model. This led PivotLink to raise more capital to close the functionality gap with mature on-premise offerings as well as to innovate in new areas. While Lehman Brothers and the rest of Wall Street were courting near death experience, PivotLink raised $10M. Starvest Ventures, a terrific new investor with a strong SaaS track record complimented an already strong investor group from Trident Capital and Emergence Capital. We are fortunate and blessed to have committed and strategic investors in our company.
Customers and Partners
We continue to see an uptake in demand across industries for on-demand business analytics solutions, with new bookings revenue up significantly over 2008. Some of our new customers this year include: CamelBak Products, VF Corp (Asia), DHL, Guardian Home Care Holdings, Inc., Party City, Phoenix Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Taleo, Novell, Timbuk2, Fleet Feet, PGP, Solar Winds, Internap, Global English and others. This continued adoption by small, mid-market and large customers is an undeniable testimony to the scalability of the SaaS model and it’s value to customers.
Customers are experiencing firsthand the extensibility of the PivotLink platform in gaining business insight and value across the enterprise.We had many customers who started using PivotLink for a specific use case like Sales Analytics, then expanded their usage to mash up data from other source systems like Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, HR and numerous other custom sources.
Our partner strategy in providing embedded business analytics with key SaaS industry providers generated terrific results in 2009. Over 30% of our new business came from working with partners.
Technology Achievements
PivotLink released several major product enhancements this year. As always, we focused on providing customer self service, easing IT’s burden and providing industrial strength performance and security. To enhance self-service, PivotLink provided secure access via the Google Gadget and also added significant user experience improvements. To ease IT’s burden, PivotLink added SAML 2.0 compliant single sign on capabilities to augment the existing capabilities of combining data sources. Our partnership with Boomi now provides automatic data connections to over 70 different applications, without sacrificing the on-demand aspect of the solution and allowing PivotLink to focus more on advanced business analytic capabilities.
Security has been the #1 concern in the market. PivotLink has achieved what many consider a gold standard in this area. In mid-2009 PivotLink achieved the SAS-70 Type II certification for it’s entire service – not just the data center. As soon as that happened, we saw an uptake in business from public companies and companies with private data covered by regulations like HIPAA.
Buzz and Accolades
In September we made the Information Week cover story – The New BI is Here. This came due to the support from customers like Ken Harris, CIO of Shaklee. Throughout the year, customers supported us in numerous webinars, white papers and articles on a wide variety of SaaS BI business and technical topics. We also received prominent coverage throughout 2009 from many of the leading publications, pundits and bloggers who cover our space. PivotLink continues to be a company to watch, with the company honored once again among “The Hot 100: The Best Privately Held Software Companies” by JMP Securities, and readers of Consumer Goods Technology Magazine ranked PivotLink among the top BI providers in the CPG market for the fourth consecutive year.
What’s Next in 2010
At this time of year, nearly every analyst posts his/her predictions about the key trends for the year ahead. I’m happy to say that on-demand business analytics is top of mind for many of them. As the CEO of PivotLink, I get a first hand view of thousands of business transactions. Here is a list of 5 key trends that I predict will help shape our business and our customer’s success going forward.
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 In a non-negotiable requirement for Security.
I’ll dive deeper into these trends in January’s blog post. Until then, I wish you all a happy holiday season and a healthy and prosperous New Year.
Quentin
