Analytics has changed the way that organizations do business. Starting with the fi
rst spreadsheets, continuing through the evolution of Business Intelligence, and now with the intense focus on analytics for Big Data, extracting more value from the constantly increasingly amount of data available continues to pay dividends.
More recently, Cloud has been one of the biggest disruptions in technology, changing the way that organizations think about not just their IT infrastructure but also the services that they build on top of their infrastructure.
Bringing these two together opens the door to a new wave of innovations. In particular, analytics in the cloud makes it possible to bring the value of analytics to parts of the business where traditional solutions were too complex or too expensive to be applied before. Nowhere is that more true than in sales organizations. Although spreadsheets and traditional BI tools are widely used in sales forecasting and sales management today, sales management is still largely an art rather than a science. Why? Because although the analytics that sales organizations need is more than just a set of reports and dashboards, getting that analysis has been too complex or expensive to be practical. That’s the gap that Cloud9 is filling for sales organizations with its cloud-based analytics solution for forecasting and pipeline management.
The Cloud Analytics Summit in Silicon Valley later this week will be looking at how people are using cloud solutions to get insights into their data. Several Cloud9 customers will be at the conference, including Doug Harr, CIO of Splunk, who will be speaking on a panel about analytics in the cloud. Splunk has been a customer of Cloud9 for a few years, and can provide some great insight into what they’re doing with analytics in the cloud including with Cloud9. I’d encourage you to take a look at his recent blog post and hear what he has to say at the Summit, and then take a deeper look at what Cloud9 is doing that makes it a tool that companies like Splunk have turned to for their sales organizations.
-Jon
