One of the really exciting things about Cloud9’s recent announcement of its Performance Management for the Front Office roadmap has been talking to customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders about the power of the Cloud9 Analytics platform. That being the case, I am equally excited to start a series of conversations in this blog about the unique aspects of the Cloud9 Analytics platform.When we started Cloud9, our mission was to deliver powerful analytic applications as a service over the internet. As a SaaS vendor, the company’s offerings have to satisfy the expectations of line of business managers, the typical SaaS buyer. The fast growing SaaS marketplace, exemplified by companies like cloud CRM provider salesforce.com, has set a high bar for SaaS offerings: they must be packaged applications, domain and role aware, delivering near-immediate time-to-value, while requiring no IT staff or skills.
Despite the fact that SaaS vendors of transactional applications are finding great success, no vendor before Cloud9 Analytics has ever successfully delivered analytic applications that meet these characteristics. The Cloud9 Analytics’ platform architecture was designed specifically to do so, and was shaped by five key requirements:
- Automated Data Warehousing
- Lazy Analytics
- Mass Customization
- Zero Administration
- Cloud Scalability
Delivering analytic applications with a true SaaS model requires innovation is both the methodology and mechanics of data warehousing. Simply applying traditional on-premise models does not work. Cloud9 Analytics has developed a novel data warehousing methodology, Versioned Replication, and a set of proprietary technologies that together deliver automated data warehousing and serve as the foundation to the company’s analytic applications. More on our approach to automated data warehousing in my next post.
