Featured Content What does it take to deliver intelligent forecasting and pipeline management solutions? Read more about the innovative technology powering the Cloud9 platform in this technology brief

The adoption of CRM systems has given sales organizations access to more data about the current state of opportunities and activity than ever before. However, effectively managing the sales forecast and pipeline requires knowing more than just the current state. It requires being able to see changes, trends, and patterns in order to assess the pipeline and identify risks in time to make decisions and take action. However, existing tools for sales organizations are not designed to provide this insight-providing it requires a new approach to storing and using data.

Cloud9 developed its smart data repository to enable data analysis that goes beyond what can be provided by typical CRM systems and business intelligence tools that rely on traditional databases:

• Rather than just storing the current state of data, it detects and tracks the full history of changes
• Rather than just presenting stored data, it enables powerful analysis of changes, trends, and patterns

Time-Versioned Database

With the databases typically used by CRM systems, whenever data or metadata changes all record of previous values is overwritten. The smart data repository that serves as the system of record for Cloud9 solutions solves this problem with its unique versioned-database technology. When a data value is changed, instead of overwriting and/or removing the previous data, the system creates a new logical version of the data with the new value appended. This makes changes to the data cumulative rather than destructive, giving the time-versioned database a built-in native time dimension.

To capture and store this information efficiently, Cloud9 has developed replication technology that automatically examines source data, determines its structure and content, and then replicates just the changes in schema and data to the Cloud9 data repository. The data repository then optimizes the representation of all data versions so that the storage required grows only with the actual size of the changes to the data.

Change Analytics Engine

Storing historical data is only useful if that data can be easily processed and accessed in meaningful ways. The Cloud9 smart data repository provides queryable access to all versions of data in the database via both industry standard and custom interfaces. Current and historical versions of data are available with constant overhead, efficiently supporting analytic applications using that data.

Cloud9 solutions utilize the data repository’s support for processing these change analytics to uncover patterns, trends, and predictive models that would be impossible to find in typical CRM systems or business intelligence tools.  For example, Cloud9 solutions can help organizations use historical data to build predictive models that they can use to assess the risk in the current sales pipeline, identifying opportunities in the forecast and pipeline at highest risk.  This gives sales teams information that they can use to address risky opportunities proactively in order to turn those opportunities from risks into closed opportunities.

The same data access and analytic processing is directly available to customer applications created using the Cloud9 Analyst Toolkit.  Advanced queries such as those with demanding joins or complicated predicates, predictive modeling using diverse analytical techniques, or a wide variety of other approaches to accessing and interpreting data can be used by sales analysts for additional insight into their data.