I was very pleased by the extremely bullish outlook on cloud computing voiced at SaaSCon, especially by representatives from some of the larger companies. More than one speaker indicated that the market has reached a tipping point, where the maturity of services and software offered, combined with the current economic climate, are making the cloud much more attractive to large companies. Some, like Bob Sala, CEO of Distribution Marketing Advantage, stressed that moving to the cloud is now a strategic imperative.

Sala delivered a compelling presentation about his company’s SaaS journey. DMA is a $3 billion, privately-held company with 85 warehouses that is an alliance of North American regionally-owned and operated food service distributors. DMA members serve multi-unit restaurant and institutional operators in the United States and Canada. Chain operators like P.F. Chang’s, Hyatt, The Melting Pot and about a dozen others are served by DMA’s food distributors. [Full disclosure: DMA is a PivotLink customer and partner]

“We distribute food products to chain restaurants in the 50-250 store space,” Sala said. “The chains require standard distribution services, standard pricing, centralized reporting and a central point of contact. DMA exists because we are able to replicate a national distributor with 12 of the best regional distributors in the business, a portfolio of national accounts management tools, and talented people.”

Sala stressed that DMA is a supply chain logistics company, not a technology company.

DMA's SaaS ecosystem is Cloud-to-Cloud and uses PivotLink for real-time business insight.

That said, DMA began operating its business in the cloud when it implemented its order entry system in 2001, long before SaaS was even known as SaaS. Since then DMA has implemented all its systems in the cloud, including data warehousing, custom hosted applications, business analytics, CRM, expense reporting and network services. Their ecosystem of more than 13 integrated SaaS applications contrasts the BI integration woes in Doug Henschen’s article in Information Week that cites findings from Howard Dresner’s Wisdom of the Crowds study.

“We have been able to out-maneuver our larger, less nimble competitors using SaaS technology,” Sala said. “Moving to SaaS has become more of a strategic decision and less a capital decision for DMA.”

With pre-tax margins of 2 percent, DMA does not have much room for error. “SaaS gets us up and running faster than our competitors,” Sala said. “With PivotLink, a Chili’s store manager can see the results of particular shrimp promotion in 13,000 restaurants, by store, by units, over-time, and get it in a graphical report.”

With nearly a decade’s experience working with SaaS, Sala offered his philosophy on how to choose the right SaaS vendors and partners.

7 Guiding Principles for Selecting
Integration Friendly Application Partners

1. Commitment to products, services innovation aligned with our technology vision: Fit is first and foremost, according to Sala.
2. Commitment to protect data confidentiality and respect for data ownership: Confidentiality is extremely important, because it provides DMA, and other businesses, with competitive advantage. Sala does not want his vendors to use or re-purpose any of DMA’s data.
3. Provides cost effective, scalable solutions: DMA intends to keep growing, and its technology infrastructure needs to scale.
4. Financially viable and have experience hosting: Sala asks to see every vendor’s financials if they are a private company, and isn’t inclined to work with inexperienced SaaS vendors.
5. Provides high service levels (up-time) backed by service-level agreements: Systems downtime kills profits and service-level agreements assure that outages will be kept to a minimum.
6. Flexibility approach to customized/ professional services with exclusivity: DMA insists on exclusivity agreements on custom solutions built by systems integrators because they don’t want the solution to be re-packaged and sold to its competitors.
7. SaaS 70 Type II Certification: Only the highest security certification will do for DMA’s solutions.

Have a question about DMA’s approach? Let us know. We’d like to hear your take.

Read about DMA in Robert Mitchell’s Computerworld article “SaaS Takes on Business Intelligence” or learn more in the case study or DMA’s website.

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!

1. Analytic requirements should be part of your SFA deployment

Thinking ahead to how your analytics needs will look 1-year out from your SFA deployment will help you get your business processes and data quality issues addressed up front. I remember distinctly seeing this best practice executed by a Fortune 500 CIO. He defined very well his analytic requirements and created a usage analytics dashboard to make sure all SFA users were diligently populating the key fields with the right data to help future reporting. His team was then able to quickly take action to gain insight into their business, and take action to drive results.

2. Take an integrated view of your business

Every company needs to manage and grow cash, customers, sales, product and people. Looking at Pipeline analysis is useful, but looking at all the factors that affect Sales is much more impactful. For example,

• To better analyze your target/addressable market, integrate D&B, or D&B-like data, with your sales and marketing data to help you align the right marketing resources
• Integrate hire date information to look at ramp rates and compare with benchmarks from CSO Insights to help model and forecast more realistically
• Integrate Bookings, Billings with Discount information to highlight sales process issues and sales, customer service and finance coordination opportunities

3. Beware that migrating pre-existing Excel reports into your new Analytics system is risky

Asking your Analytics vendor to replicate your Excel report may appear to be a logical way to get started, but it can limit the power of your analysis. It would be like using an iPhone just to make calls. Consider developing a broad list of sales KPIs / sales metrics, and the different ways you’ll want to look at them. You will accelerate your success by creating this framework ahead of time. For example,

• If you are in a high growth business you may want to compare the performance of new vs. seasoned reps to uncover training opportunities. Is there a pattern of competitors and type of deals that new reps lose when compared to deals lost by seasoned reps?
• If you are in a finished goods business you may want to dig deeper into returns and cancellations or analyze average days from opportunity open to book, ship, bill and collect
• If you are trying to sharpen your view of the ideal customer, you can start adding more attributes to your SFA to analyze win-rates by account and deal attributes.

At Dreamforce next week, PivotLink will be showing off a new Salesforce.com analytics solution that makes it easier, faster and more affordable for you to get to the insights that matter the most to your business. Visit us at Booth # 1012 and visit our Dreamforce 2009 page to learn more.

Traditional tools – “Your fathers BI” – are not suited to the needs of business executives and managers in this new environment. Gone are the days of large CAPEX-consuming IT projects that take months or years to deliver business value and the days when IT tolerated their role as glorified report writers for business executives. On-demand business analytic (BA) tools will replace “your fathers BI” and play a major role in delivering insights that help organizations manage costs and discover new competitive advantages at the speed of business.

I was speaking with a customer recently that offers solutions for online merchants. Wendy LaHaye, Vice President of Products & Professional Services at Order Motion, made a good point about how on-demand BA solutions can drive performance-enhancing initiatives. She said, “The key to success in today’s challenging economy is not lots and lots of raw data – it’s the ability to understand that data so you can make effective decisions, manage costs and find opportunities to unlock value that might have otherwise been overlooked – in a timely fashion.” She chose the PivotLink solution because it makes timely business information readily available to a large base of various users, in a way that is highly relevant and useful to each.

The “new normal” requires a faster, easier and more cost-effective way for decision makers to securely access relevant data and take analytics into their own hands. This shift will help bring down organizational stove pipes within a company and the boundaries between supply chain partners so that sharing information and insight becomes more dynamic and fluid. The concept of dynamic insight is something that IT analyst Merv Adrian touches on in his BeyeNETWORK blog.

At PivotLink we’re building the leading on-demand BA solution that helps companies keep pace with the “new normal.” We are the only SAS 70 Type II certified SaaS business intelligence solution, which puts us well ahead of the competition in providing customers with the highest standards of safety and security. Over the past two years we’ve experienced phenomenal growth – a testament to the fact that business users are yearning for new tools to help them improve business visibility and manage through the challenging economy. We deliver On-demand BA solutions to over 15,000 paid subscribers who generate over 1.5m analytical reports every month. Moreover, I am confident that adoption of PivotLink’s solution will accelerate as more and more businesses catch on to the “new normal”.