Technology

The Third Generation of On-Demand Change Analytics is Here

From day one, Cloud9 Analytics has pursued its vision of delivering powerful, easy-to-use performance management applications to line-of-business managers as services over the Internet. To achieve this, Cloud9 has developed a set of innovative, patent-pending technologies and techniques that deliver the scale, economics and security required. This unprecedented combination of capabilities has established Cloud9 as a trailblazer and leader in the on-demand performance management market.

First generation offerings of the Internet Bubble era did little more than enable businesses to migrate traditional business intelligence tools to dedicated servers in a hosting service's data center, allowing the physical maintenance of their business intelligence infrastructure to be outsourced, but doing nothing to improve on the costs, implementation cycles or complex end user tools.

More recent second generation offerings have enabled multiple businesses to share the resources and costs of the server hardware, providing more competitive pricing options, but still relying on legacy technologies with the same long implementation cycles and complex end user tools.

Cloud9's third-generation Change Analytics platform is the first to be written from the ground up to support a true SaaS (software as a service) model. Cloud9 customers can be up and running within a day of sign up, enjoying all the benefits of a self-healing, zero maintenance infrastructure and the power of rich business intelligence applications with zero time to value.

Performance Management Applications

Cloud9's performance management applications - starting with Cloud9 Dynamic Pipeline Management solutions - are designed with non-technical business users in mind. Unlike traditional business intelligence tools - which offer static views of data, require training and must be configured by users for every new business request - Cloud9's performance management applications embody deep domain knowledge and best practices about the business functions and processes they target. The result is complete pipeline visibility anytime and anywhere - including critical real-time "what's changed" information. In addition, configuration, role-awareness and end user personalization allow the applications to be easily adapted to the needs of unique business practices and user communities.

Change Analytics

Business managers can't afford to spend time reading through long static reports or do manual "stare and compare" analysis to judge the performance of their teams. Nor should operations have to "live in Excel", manually assembling data to drive the efficient operation of the business. Yet this is state of the art for many organizations today.

Cloud9 leaps past the report-oriented business intelligence status quo with an innovative approach we call "Change Analytics." Cloud9's on-demand performance management platform and applications automatically capture, measure and detect important changes and variances in business operations, and present these changes to users in the language of their business, enabling businesses to take a "detect and correct" approach to management and continuously improve their business performance.

Power and Ease of Use

The combination of deep domain knowledge, Change Analytics and rich Web technologies enable Cloud9's performance management applications to deliver both unrivaled power and superior ease of use. While traditional Web applications interact with users through standard HTML pages, which quickly become frustrating to use, Cloud9's Web applications employ Adobe's rich Flex™ Web technologies and careful design to deliver the power and immediacy of desktop applications for the best user experience.

Anytime, Anywhere Access

Today's mobile professionals are not tied down to a single computer or location, and Cloud9's performance management applications provide them with the anytime, anywhere access they need to critical business information and collaboration. Whether embedded in Salesforce or other CRM applications, used natively on the Web, scaled to fit a mobile device, delivered via email or accessed directly through Excel or other desktop applications, Cloud9 provides the widest range of choices as only an on-demand service can.

Security

Security is a key concern for all businesses, and Cloud9 has earned the trust of some of the world's most demanding ones. Cloud9's "shared nothing" infrastructure goes beyond the protection offered by typical on-demand security architectures by providing each customer with a dedicated partition consisting of a metadata catalog and set of data schemas. Cloud9 never co-mingles data or metadata between customers.

As a close partner of CRM application vendors like salesforce.com, Cloud9's applications always capture and implement the full role hierarchy, user access control lists and data sharing policies established in the operational application. Cloud9 never bypasses these security policies through a "back door" to data, and no additional administrative set up or maintenance is required to deploy Cloud9 applications.

Cloud9's infrastructure and security policies have undergone rigorous testing and certification by Symantec, FusionStorm and salesforce.com for AppExchange partners. Cloud9 also employs secure data centers with robust physical access controls and 24x7 intrusion detection and monitoring systems, as well as dedicated response teams.