CIOs and line-of-business executives also told us they needed to change the way they worked. Business users yearn for instantaneous insight into their business and the ability to manage dynamic market changes without burdening IT, while IT wants to focus more on the strategic direction of BI environments and less on building ad-hoc reports. For some time, we’ve called this emerging market trend “The New BI.”

Defining the New BI

The New BI produces quick BI wins that are elusive with legacy systems. This means that deployments take days or weeks, not years to deploy. With business user self-service, the New BI puts affordable, secure and easy-to-use analytic reports and dashboards into the hands of business users and empowers them to make timelier decisions with minimal IT involvement.

The New BI extends beyond the enterprise and provides business insight to the entire supply chain because it is delivered via SaaS and collaboration-driven. It provides powerful and scalable enterprise class service. And the New BI is on-demand and in the Cloud.

The New BI transforms the market

Now, Howard Dresner, one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, validates what we’ve seen. Findings in his new “Wisdom of Crowds” Business Intelligence Market Study™ reveal a dramatic shift away from traditional on-premise Business Intelligence software in favor of solutions from “Emerging” BI vendors, such as PivotLink. The study of 457 business and IT professionals ranks 15 leading companies’ products, with PivotLink users confirming a 100% recommendation and other top ratings as compared to peers and the overall sample.

© Dresner Advisory Services, LLC

PivotLink was the only pure Software as a Service BI vendor ranked in the study. Vendors were grouped into three categories based on general market profiles: “Titans,” “Established Pure-plays” and the “Emerging” vendors group combining SaaS, open source, visualization tools and desktop tools.

Wisdom of Crowds maintains that between 2006 and 2007 there was an inflection point when companies large and small shifted from traditional, on-premise business intelligence solutions to those offered by a set of emerging BI vendors, like PivotLink, because they offered greater technical innovation, customer support, and overall value. [See Figure 21 – Vendor Deployments Over Time]

The New BI offered by PivotLink is a clear alternative to the costly and complicated deployments required by the on-premise solution providers. If companies are seeking quick BI wins, a deployment measured in days, not months or years, is one of several key indicators of success.  Wisdom of Crowds indicates that increasingly businesses recognize this distinction, and the PivotLink advantage.

Customers win with the New BI

Wisdom of Crowds also indicates that customer satisfaction today is greater with “Emerging Vendors.” Customers scored emerging vendors consistently higher than Titans and Pure-Plays in every category, particularly in key categories such as sales experience, value for price, technology, tech support, consulting and whether the vendor would be recommended. [See Figures 27, 29, 31]

As the only pure SaaS BI vendor to be ranked, PivotLink scored higher than all “Titans” and “Established Pure-plays” in overall-value. PivotLink achieved a 100% score from respondents who would recommend the company. No “Titan” or “Established Pure-play” received similar endorsements. Pair this score with PivotLink’s 100% renewal rate among existing customers last quarter, and it’s clear that the company is setting the standard for value among SaaS BI vendors.

Business users driving more BI deployments

Howard’s study also notes a sharp increase in functional alignment, stating that “business users appear to be growing in influence,” particularly in North America. [See Figure 7 – Business Intelligence Adoption by Function/ Time] While “Emerging” vendors are gaining an initial foothold in smaller organizations and among business users, the study highlighted the dramatic scalability of deployments among some “Emerging” vendors.

Detailed findings cite a significant number of PivotLink deployments over 1,000 users and in organizations with more than 10,000 employees. Conversely, the study sample indicated that Birst and Good Data deployments were limited to less than 100 users in much smaller organizations. [See Figures 23 and 24] Howard also notes that he was unable to rank Birst, Good Data and other emerging vendors “due to small numbers of completed surveys.”

Legacy BI vendors have forced unfair compromises between the business side of the house and IT – one of the hot debates at this year’s Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. We’ve found that SaaS unites these environments: IT is more inclined to embrace a solution that makes business users more effective without diminishing IT’s crucial role and guidance in data governance and management. PivotLink allows IT and business users to be successful at what they do best.

For instance, with the latest 4.3 release of the PivotLink platform and the new PivotLink ReadiMetrix product family, with initial analytical applications for Sales, Marketing and Human Capital Management, PivotLink and its partners are helping business users at Taleo and Internap achieve quick BI wins.

Through these efforts, PivotLink’s driving the next wave of innovation in BI. Howard sums it up best, noting “As BI 3.0 unfolds, the market should keep a close eye on ‘Emerging’ companies that are a great source of innovation in the market.”

We salute Howard for taking a fresh look at the Business Intelligence market with this study, and we thank our users who spoke volumes about the success they’re achieving with PivotLink.

To learn more, I recommend registering and tuning in for Howard’s take on the study in a webinar on June 16 at 10 a.m. PDT.

In the meantime, I’d enjoy hearing any anecdotes or use cases that you’ve encountered that show how the New BI is taking off in your patch. Just drop me a line or post a comment.

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.

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.

• 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 !