What About Reports?

Cloud9 integrates a robust set of reports and reporting options into each of the applications that comprise its Pipeline Management Suite to extend and enhance their core functionality.

Cloud9's reporting is also very flexible, supporting Web, mobile, email and Excel delivery options. And all Cloud9 reports are powered by the company's "data warehouse in the cloud" on-demand analytics platform, which automatically captures the full Salesforce schema (all standard and custom objects and fields) with full history, daily refresh and real-time "what's changed" visibility. Additionally, operations teams can customize, extend and define entirely new reports using the Cloud9 for Excel visual query builder.

While Cloud9's reporting capabilities are powerful and deep, the company believes that reporting alone is not enough to drive pipeline performance. Cloud9 uses reporting to extend the core functionality of its pipeline management applications, and believes that reporting on its own is not sufficient as a pipeline management solution. A quick look at the history of business intelligence and the emergence of on-demand business intelligence will show why this is true.

Reporting and Business Intelligence

Reports are the original foundation of BI, going back decades, and for years, inch-thick reams of green bar paper printout were all that business users could get. Eventually, these reports moved onto PCs and, more recently, into Web browsers.

But reports, for all their increasing accessibility, can be problematic as well. Reports are static, drown users in data, make it hard to see the forest for the trees, need expertise to interpret and quickly drift out of date. As business has become more dynamic, teams more distributed and competition more fierce, reporting alone no longer delivers the value that companies were looking for from their BI investments.

In response, the BI industry developed more and more powerful tools, and sold them to IT organizations that could manually configure them to meet the specific needs of the business. But customer success with these BI tools has been hampered by their complexity. Companies have limited configuration skills and experience, lack business and functional best practice knowledge, face significant budget/personnel constraints and face ongoing challenges with end user training and adoption.

Business Intelligence Applications from Cloud9

The on-demand revolution - using the Internet to serve business users directly without requiring IT support - requires a different way of thinking about business intelligence and reporting: Powerful, easy to use BI applications, delivered as an Internet service and pre-configured with domain expertise and best practice knowledge.

Cloud9's applications deliver unprecedented visibility into the key management, performance and planning processes within the sales organization. Our Pipeline Accelerator and Forecast Accelerator applications, with their filter, time, as of, hierarchy, what's changed, watch list and other capabilities, would require literally thousands of reports to reproduce using traditional approaches. Our platform's proprietary "what's changed" processing, however, hides this complexity, automatically detecting and presenting in a single screen the most important business changes and hot spots for easy review, escalation and resolution.

Cloud9's Extended Reporting

From time to time, businesses may require additional views of their team's status and performance to deal with critical, infrequent and/or unexpected situations. To address this need, each Cloud9 application comes with a growing library of extended status, planning and performance reports that are task specific, universally available and portable.

These supplemental reports fall into the following categories:

  • Detail Drill Downs
  • Historical Trends
  • Comparison and Benchmarking
  • Exceptions and Outliers

When even this extended reporting capability is not enough to meet business needs, Cloud9 also empowers operations teams to customize, extend and develop their own unique reports using the Cloud9 for Excel visual query builder.

Cloud9 reports leverage and extend the best practices and unique capabilities of its business intelligence applications and platform, highlighting key changes, supporting end user personalization, maintaining full security and more. Cloud9 reports are available anytime and anyplace - embedded within Salesforce or other CRM applications, viewed natively on the Web, scaled to fit a mobile device, delivered by email or accessed directly through Excel or other desktop applications. Together, Cloud9's pipeline management applications and Cloud9's intelligent reports deliver the dynamic, 360-degree view that is critical to the success of your business, and ours.