GoodData is a privately-held company, but that’s not stopping it from crowing about its revenues — to a point.

The business-intelligence service provider (aka cloud-based big data company) plans to announce tomorrow that its first-quarter revenues in 2013 were three times bigger than the same period a year before. The company isn’t saying say exactly how big those revenues are except to note they are “double digits.”

We got a peek at a few more numbers:

• GoodData has increased its total number of customers from 8,000 at the end of Q4 2012 to 10,000 at the end of the first quarter.
• Also in that period, it closed seven annual contracts worth $250,000 or more.

But that’s as far as its quarterly disclosures go. There were no specifics about any other performance metrics from the quarter.

GoodData may be warming up for the kind of quarterly earnings disclosures that it might do at some future point as a public company — and founder Roman Stanek has stated his intentions for an IPO in the past. But it’s a pretty limited warmup for now.

This much we do know: The six-year-old company has raised $53.5 million to date in several rounds of funding, and employs about 200 people. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. And it’s really hard to find art to illustrate business intelligence or big data, which is why we are giving you this photo of small and big Datas.

Photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Teradata released the third State of Business Intelligence Survey today, which found that interest in big data analytics careers is on the rise. However, there is a significant gap between the number of students interested in these opportunities and the amount of hirable talent in the pipeline.

Working as a data scientist (or related position) requires taking a large data set, modeling it, and gleaning insights. As the hype surrounding big data continues, the demand for people with these skill sets is increasing, along with salaries. But just like top tier athletics, not everyone has the requisite talent or ability to follow a career in this field and there is a major, global shortage of data scientists. And despite the fact that two out of three students surveyed agree or strongly agree that there are job opportunities for them in data-savvy careers, only 16 percent are actually considering careers in this area.

Accordingly, employers still struggle to find potential hires. Analytics hiring managers reported that their largest needs for recent graduates are for IT or systems analytics (35%), program developers (32%), data managers (30%), and business analytics (22%). In the survey, one-third of employers identified a lack of experience as their greatest challenge, followed by insufficient business skills, insufficient technical skills, and a general lack of candidates. A lack of communication skills is also an issue.

Preparing students for real-world employment is partly the responsibility of the teachers. Forty-one percent of professors reported an increase in the number of BI or analytics courses at their university, but they also identified six areas where businesses can help them meet the challenges of creating qualified employees: providing large data sets, suitable cases, staying current with practices, technical support and training, realistic and meaningful experiences, and access to contemporary enterprise software.

The tech industry is a competitive job market and companies are always looking for qualified, experienced data scientists who combine technical expertise with creative thinking and communication skills. The responsibility does not lay only on the students, but on the universities, teachers, and companies that turn them from students into successful employees. A degree alone is not enough.

The survey was conducted by Barbara Wixom, an associate professor of commerce at University of Virginia’s McIntire School for Commerce and a research affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of management. The study was sponsored by the Teradata University Network, which includes 3,400 faculty members, 1,600 universities, and thousands of students. TUN is a free web portal for students and teachers working in this field.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

SiSense closed a $10 million funding round today for its “big data” technology that competes with giants like SAP and Oracle.

“We are seeing most success when we compete against the bigger guys who are too expensive or can’t scale to the terabyte [data] range we are going after,” said Bruno Aziza, SiSense’s marketing lead, by phone.

SiSense’s VP of Marketing, Bruno Aziza

Every company in the business intelligence and “big data” space will tell you that they analyze mountains of data and infer actionable insights that can inform a customer’s business strategy. SiSense’s messaging is no different. But according to Aziza, the competitive advantage is that SiSense won’t just ask for a sample of data — they want it all.

“We can use the entire data set,” said Aziza, meaning that SiSense will analyze all manner of structured and unstructured information, including emails, documents, and tweets. “That is really difficult to beat from a competitive standpoint,” he added.

In the past year, the company says it’s experienced a 520 percent growth in subscription revenues. Customers include household name brands like Target and Merck, as well as hot startups with a mass of customer data, such as Wix and Uber.

We reported on the Israeli company last month when its chief technology officer crunched 10 terabytes of data in 10 seconds using an off-the-shelf $10,000 machine. The team pulled off the stunt at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, which focused on “big data.”

Marketing lead Bruno Aziza said the company plans to use the funding to open an office in New York. SiSense will also ramp up its sales efforts, and it recently brought on a sales lead from networking giant Cisco.

The funding was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Opus Capital and Genesis Partners.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Now it’s leading the way in 2013 IPOs for startups, filing for up to a $150 million initial public offering.

“Our mission is to help people see and understand data,” Tableau’s prospectus says. The company offers products that nontechnical folk can use to create rich, interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Besides a public version, Tableau offers a variety of corporate and premium products which it calls an “alternative to BI,” or business intelligence.

Source: Tableau

Tableau cofounder/chief executive Christian Chabot

After receiving venture capital twice in its nine-year history — both times from NEA — totalling $15 million, Tableau reached $127.7 million in annual sales in 2012, more than double 2011 revenues and more than quadruple 2010 revenues. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 93 percent.

Tableau is profitable as well, although just barely: It’s IPO says it generated income of $2.7 million, $3.4 million, and $1.6 million over the past three years. The last number, for 2012, shows that the company was pushing hard for revenue at the expense of profit — sales and marketing expenses jumped from $30 million in 2011 to $62 million in 2012, and total operating expenses ballooned from $55.5 million to $112.8 million in the same period. Head count quadrupled from 188 in 2010 to 749 in 2012.

Don’t expect that to change quickly. One of the risks cited in the IPO prospectus says the company is still expanding quickly:

We expect expenses to increase substantially in the near term, particularly as we make significant investments in our sales and marketing organization, expand our operations and infrastructure both domestically and internationally and develop new products and new features for and enhancements of our existing products.

However, if the company can secure significant market share and reduce SG&A expenses as a proportion of revenue, Tableau could be wildly profitable. Gross profit on sales of its products was $117.4 million on $127.7 million of revenue, revealing a prime benefit of delivering your product via the cloud.

No firm date has been set for the IPO, but the companies stock ticker symbol will be “DATA.”

Competitors include established business intelligence giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well as startups such as Qlik Technologies, and Tibco Spotfire. And maybe even Google.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, told VentureBeat last year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Powerful mobile devices have swarmed into workplaces, and they’re not going away. Pesky employees ignore rules and use their own smartphones for work while CEOs are commanding IT managers to make bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies the norm.

The mobile device field is wide open. Although Android is the dominant smartphone operating system overall, companies appear to be choosing iOS devices over Android as of late, according to a recent Good Technology report. The iPad still has a lot of sway with executives, but we could see a shift toward Windows 8 tablets since they can run some legacy apps that enterprises rely on. Microsoft also just announced that businesses could buy its high-profile Surface tablets in volume if they want.

At VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit on April 1, one of the six main themes will be “What’s next for enterprise?” So we took this opportunity to spotlight a few startups that are already thinking about and tackling this theme.

Whether the concern is making BYOD actually work, beefing up security, or taking business intelligence mobile, these six startups are reshaping the landscape of mobile enterprise.

Armor5

Rather than install software on devices, Armor5 has come up with a different solution for BYOD. Its software connects to a company network through an existing virtual private network (VPN), virtualizes data and cloud applications, and generates a URL for employees to access content safely from their smartphones or tablets. This way, your employees always have secure access to your company’s stuff — without the risk of storing that stuff on their devices.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Armor5 emerged from stealth mode in February. It has collected $2 million in funding thus far from Trinity Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and the Citrix Startup Accelerator.

Domo

Domo offers up a business intelligence dashboard that can be viewed from any device (so its creators claim), particularly mobile devices. The company says its software is easy-to-use and cloud-based, so you can see real-time data coming in and make important decisions off that data. Domo has been a little shy about unveiling its full offering to date, but it already has more than 100 enterprise customers and is coming out of private beta this year.

Domo is located just outside of Salt Lake City in American Fork, Utah. It recently raised a whopping $60 million in funding from GGV Capital, Greylock Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Founders Fund, and others, bringing its investment total to $113 million.

Enterproid

Enterproid’s Divide platform takes a rather literal approach to BYOD in that it “divides” your personal and business life through software. Essentially, you can install Divide on iPhones or Android phones and know that your work and personal things are completely separate. Maybe most importantly for employers, the info inside Divide is secure and can be deleted at a moment’s notice by the company if something fishy is going on.

On the iPhone, there is a single “container” that looks like an app; your email and business apps live inside that container. On Android, Divide offers different “profiles” you can switch between, and you can have two entirely separate sets of home screens and apps.

New York City-based Enterproid launched at Demo Spring 2011 and has raised $13 million in funding from investors including Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and NYC Seed. The company has more than 75 employees.

MobileSpaces

San Francisco-based MobileSpaces takes yet another approach to BYOD by placing a strong emphasis on employee privacy. Its software lets Android phone owners mark all applications they use for work and only those apps can access business data and systems. The company is testing an iOS version of the product as well, which will be ready by mid-2013. MobileSpaces has raised $3 million to date from Accel Partners, and the company told us it will have its formal launch “soon.”

“If you ever leave the enterprise, they reserve the right to your data,” David Goldschlag, MobileSpaces CEO and a former VP at McAfee, told us in August. “We are enabling the enterprise to comfortably let its apps run and coexist with personal apps.”

Mocana

Mocana is looking to solve the biggest problems with mobile enterprise security in two ways. It has solutions for connected devices and mobile apps. Specifically, it installs on-premise software that creates an interface between your data and connected devices; the interface lets you monitor device usage or encrypt data. However, on the app side, the company only provides services on the application-level for apps that are developed in-house. (So you can’t hook it up with an app like Google Drive or Box, for example.)

San Francisco-based Mocana has raised $32 million in capital from investors including Trident Capital, Intel Capital, Symantec, Shasta Ventures, and Southern Cross Venture Partners.

Roambi

San Diego startup Roambi is also trying to solve the business intelligence problem on mobile with its popular iPad and iPhone apps. The company takes data from all kinds of sources and visualizes it in flashy ways so execs can make better real-time decisions. It also offers a product called Flow that makes it easy to design, publish, and share colorful reports on the iPad. It has raised more than $50 million from investors including Sequoia Capital.

Roambi’s CEO recently wrote a guest post us for us about how companies can unleash the power of “little data” with mobile devices.

Top photo: Businessman on phone in coffee shop via baranq/Shutterstock

Five years ago, though, analytics was an Excel spreadsheet from accounting, or a complicated application that corporations spent millions on and business analysts pulled data from with blood, sweat, and tears. We’ve already come a long way, but in just a few more years, a full 25 percent of analytics capabilities will be embedded within business applications, according to Jaspersoft, which powers 130,000 apps with embedded business intelligence features.

But we’re not there yet.

Even though analytics is already a $34 billion industry, only 25 percent of workers have access to BI tools — mostly due to costs that are still too high, and complexity, which is still too great.

More data, and the solution, in the infographic below:

photo credit: pmarkham via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Corporations are increasingly turning to leaner, more flexible alternatives to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business intelligence. According to a statement from Anaplan, the legacy systems “are not providing the forward-looking analysis and planning that high-performing companies need.” Anaplan’s technology integrates with enterprise systems and data. Its HyberBlock engine processes data and provides insights that businesses can use to model their operations and plan for the future. The solutions also include in-memory processing and virtual data sets that can lead to better business decisions.

2012 was a significant year for Anaplan. The company grew the customer base by 500% percent and revenues by 800%. The new funds will be used to scale the product and attract more Fortune 500 companies as clients. Current clients include Diageo, Whole Foods, and McAfee.

Meritech Capital led this round, along with existing investors Shasta Ventures and Granite Ventures. It brings Anaplan’s total capital raised to more than $47 million to date.

Photo credit: dullhunk/Flickr

But let’s face it: That train is in the station. What’s next?

Also see: Forrester’s top 10 mobile trends for 2013

Analyst Bryan Hopkins gave us a peek into what Forrester thinks is next, and much of it builds on those four horseman of disruptive change. “We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technolog[ies] create platforms for future disruption,” he wrote this morning in a blog post.

Here they are, in four groups:

End user computing technologies

1. Next-generation devices and UIs
   New sensors and new user interfaces. Think Leap Motion
2. Advanced collaboration and communication
   Think social inside, like Yammer or other social-inside-the-enterprise solutions
3. Systems of engagement
   Real-time data, in everyone’s hands. Think Roambi

Sensors and remote computing technologies

1. Smart products
   Thing that can sense, react, and communicate. Think operating system for places and buildings
2. In-location positioning
   GPS and in-building location sensors
3. Machine-to-machine networks
   Background intelligence on people and things. Think ReelyActive

Process data management technologies

1. Smart process applications and semantics
   Real business processes are a lot messier than your flow charts. Smart process apps know that.
2. Advanced analytics
   Smarter, more predictive data. Think Cloudera’s Impala tool for Hadoop
3. Pervasive BI
   People need business intelligence that comes every hour, not at the end of the month
4. Process and data cloud services
   Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability. PaaS, BaaS, etc. 

Infrastructure and application platforms

1. Big data platforms
   Infrastructure to handle big data and high speed … and use all that data you’ve been uselessly storing
2. Breakthrough storage and compute
   Yes, hardware may still be necessary, even if you’re never going to be like Google
3. Software-defined infrastructure
   Software that dynamically routes your networking and data center capabilities
4. Cloud application frameworks
   Technologies for deploying and running distributed apps in the cloud, like, perhaps, a multi-continent-spanning database
5. New identity and trust models
   New federated trust and identity models for a changing world of jobs and careers … and maybe even killing all usernames and passwords

An interesting thought for executives:

If you want a good look at the future of end user computing technologies and sensor and remote computing devices, check winning Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns in the technology and gadget categories. And for a picture of the future for the last two groups above, process data management and infrastructure and application platforms, look at Google and Facebook.

photo credit: ginnerobot via photopin cc

Zettaset, a company that helps its customers deploy Hadoop, the open source computing framework that can process large data-sets, has closed a $10 million funding round.

The Mountain View-based startup develops software to securely integrate “big data” into customers’ existing environments. The company uses all manner of buzz words to describe its “robust and secure turn-key” technology, but its value for database analysts and developers is to help them manage a large volume of messy data.

New investor in the company, Highbar Venture’s John Kim, said the company is positioned to be the “big data management platform of choices for businesses of all sizes.” But the company faces stiff competition from venture-funded startups like Datastax, as well as incumbents like Dell-owned Quest and EMC.

Founded in 2007, the company was originally called “GoToMetrics”, and was billed as a modern “business intelligence” tool. This term subsequently fell out of favor in enterprise circles. Now a “big data management” company, the goal is to help customers break down vast stores of internal and external data from myriad sources, such as SQL, Twitter, Oracle and RSS Feeds. The technology can spot trends and find patterns in the data, and inform business and marketing strategies.

The company will use the additional funding to bolster its sales and marketing efforts to gain more enterprise customers.

Zettaset’s second round was led by Highbar Ventures, with additional investment from Brocade, Epic Ventures, and storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Roman Stanek

I’m a serial entrepreneur, accustomed to taking risks. Yet, I was never drawn to the more glamorous, winner-takes-all nature of the consumer startup. Which is why I’ve built multiple business-to-business (“B2B”) software companies, with steady, yet predictable outcomes.

Things have become a lot more interesting now for B2B entrepreneurs. With the consumerization trend gaining speed, SaaS and cloud B2B companies look more like consumer startups: They’re exciting, customer-focused — and for the victors, translates into big money. As a result, investors are flocking to B2B-focused startups capable of disrupting the IT landscape, attracted by increasingly large IPOs and buyouts (Yammer, for example, which was recently acquired for over $1 billion by Microsoft, or Workday, with a current market cap of $8 billion).

However, despite the similarities, B2B-oriented startups have to contend with challenges that consumer-focused startups just don’t face. These include:

• Building products with the security, scalability and performance that businesses require.
• Facing high recruiting and retention costs for engineers and sales people.
• Convincing customers their products or services will enable them to save more while gaining a competitive edge.
• Re-assuring business customers that the startup will be around for the long haul.

Here are my three fundamental tips for startups, which are based on the lessons I have learned during my career.

Spend big on engineers

Long before a company can even dream of customers (and revenue), it has to spend — and spend big. It needs to hire an army of highly expert developers who understand business needs and are proficient at building modern, B2B-hardened platforms and apps that meet stringent corporate demands. This level of skill and experience isn’t easy to find, and those who possess these know their worth.

Competition to hire these engineers capable of building scalable apps and platforms is especially fierce in the San Francisco Bay area, where startups go head-to-head against behemoths like Twitter, Google and Facebook. Because of that local competition, a number of  companies prefer to recruit from other technology centers such as Austin, Portland, Ore., and Boulder, Colo., which offer substantial talent pools of  talented engineers.

Personally, I prefer to recruit from my home country, the Czech Republic, which boasts a good combination of technical talent and business acumen.

And one more point: It’s been my experience that the best way to entice talented developers is with the promise of incredibly interesting projects in a successful company. After all, great engineers — like great artists — want their work to be seen.

Invest in a sales team with the right skill-set

It also takes skill and experience selling into businesses’ often-labyrinthine purchasing departments. That’s because the sales rep has to know who inside a company has the authority to buy, understand how customers work with suppliers, and recognize how new services need to work with customers’ current products. Perhaps more important, they also have a deep understanding of customers’ industries, the problems they need to solve to better compete, and their biggest concerns. In fact, there’s a correlation between the complexity of the solution, its price point and the need for a sales organization.

That’s why today’s B2B-focused companies — startups included — still need dedicated sales reps who can demo a product, explain its value proposition, offer competitive positioning and know how to navigate customers’ different purchasing processes. And if you’re thinking cloud-based services don’t need a fully functioning sales organization, think again. For proof, consider Salesforce.com, which reported 4,700 new employees between January 2010 and August 2012, primarily in sales -— and those hiring numbers are proving to be even more robust as Q3 hiring data emerges.

Getting good sales people means showing them you’re on the right side of a simple decision tree: What’s my chance of success? Is the company good? Will I have an easy life or a tough life selling the product? Are the products selling well?

In short, recruiting a great sales organization means you have to show them the potential of making great money selling great products and services.

Demonstrate you are investing for the long run

Next, you need to convince customers they can rely on your company’s staying power. B2Bs instinctively try to buy from a small number of trusted vendors and being added to that list can be a major challenge. After all, no one wants to bet on a supplier — no matter how impressive its technology — that could disappear in a year or two. Clearly, I believe that the founder’s and management team’s experience running companies and solving problems play a huge part in this. But I also believe that a startup is judged by the company it keeps: namely, its investors and board. In Silicon Valley and the world at large, investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Sequoia automatically confer a badge of honor that implies a startup’s star quality, stability and, yes, staying power.

That’s why B2B-focused startups need to be extra careful when deciding on investors. Sure, the size of the check matters — but even more important is the investors’ ability to bring in the board members, experienced management, customer connections and business networking best suited to the B2B market. The folks at Andreessen Horowitz, for example, help their portfolio companies meet potential customers and industry superstars, contact the media and even recruit top notch hires. That, along with their cachet, certainly attracted me, and I’m fortunate that they decided to invest in GoodData.

Building a successful startup is never easy. That’s especially true in the B2B market, given the upfront costs, experience and expertise needed just to meet customer requirements. But for those going into this market with the right funding, support and insight, the rewards can definitely outweigh the pain. Personally, I’m hooked on B2B.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP.

Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek

Career success image // Shutterstock

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

So you’ve got an idea for a “big data” application, but building it seems to be a nightmarish prospect.

A startup called Continuuity, which raised $10 million today, has struck a chord with developers who are struggling to build big data apps on top of Hadoop. Continuuity promises to make it easier by offering a suite of tools that extend across the various stages of software development from “prototype to production.”

In a nutshell, the company makes it easier to build, scale, and deploy Hadoop apps both in and outside the firewall. Continuuity’s AppFabric hosting platform is built on top of Hadoop and related technologies.

The founding team of seven engineers had previously built Hadoop and HBase (Hadoop’s NoSQL database) deployments at technology giants like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook.

This is one of several young companies that claim to unlock Hadoop’s untapped potential. For instance, Platfora recently launched a product to help its users “make Hadoop amazing” by crunching raw data and turning it into actionable business insights.

Hadoop is viewed as an unruly problem child in certain traditional circles and has been criticized for failing to integrate well with traditional business intelligence (BI) applications.

“Continuuity is poised to disrupt the market by merging big data and cloud to introduce a new application development opportunity for all developers,” said Mike Dauber, Principal at Battery Ventures, the firm that took part in the funding. He praised Continuuity for its lofty mission to “become the center of gravity for the Big Data application development ecosystem.”

In addition to Battery Ventures, investors in the round included Ignition Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, and Amplify Partners. Battery Ventures’  Roger Lee will be joining Continuuity’s board. The Silicon Valley-based startup closed a sizable $2.5 million seed round in January and has been focused on building out the product ever since. With this infusion of capital, the company will roll out an aggressive go-to-market strategy and expand its team of developers.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

For Pentaho, the  startup that claims to be the first business intelligence (BI) provider to shift its focus to  ”big data”, the bet is paying off.

The Orlando, Fl. based startup has secured $23 million in third-round funding, bringing its total funds to $55 million. It will devote the resources to its expanding its sales and marketing efforts, and will continue to invest in its analytics toolset that competes with  players like Tableau and QlikView.

In January, the company announced it would move its open-source business intelligence capabilities to the Apache license to make them more compatible with Hadoop, a mainstay of the big data movement. Hadoop, an open source computing framework, is offered under the Apache license, as as are most of the NoSQL databases that can process vast volumes of businesses’ structured and unstructured data.

It’s a similar story across the big data space — companies are experiencing unprecedented growth and are raising massive funding rounds with ease. Pentaho has found its niche with consumer tech and e-commerce companies; it is currently used by the likes of BeachMint, Kiva and Travian Games.

“Pentaho has a proven big data strategy with over 300 percent increase in big data sales for the first nine months of 2012 over the same period in 2011,” said Quentin Gallivan, chairman and CEO at Pentaho in a statement.

The round was led by New Enterprise Investors with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Data analytics company iJento has raised $8 million. It takes a multichannel approach to “customer intelligence” by analyzing data across multiple domains, devices, and channels, including offline sources, and consolidating it into actionable form. The combination of big data with business intelligence gives brands insight into customer behavior, which can be used to ramp up engagement, strengthen marketing campaigns, and drive sales. Clients include Allianz, Cheapflights Media, FT.com, LV= and Tesco Bank. The investment was led by MMC Ventures, Nauta Capital, and Oxford Capital Partners. iJento has office in London; Portland, Oregon; and Sydney, Australia. This follows an $8 million Series A from last year. Read the press release. 

In traditional circles, Hadoop is viewed as a bright but unruly problem child.

Indeed, it is still in the nascent stages of development. However the scores of “big data” startups that leverage Hadoop will tell you that it is here to stay.

Cloudera, the venture-backed startup that ushered the mainstream deployment of Hadoop, has unveiled a new technology at the Hadoop World, the data-focused conference in New York.

Its new product, known as “Impala”, addresses many of the concerns that large enterprises still have about Hadoop, namely that it does not integrate well with traditional business intelligence applications.

“We have heard this criticism,” said Charles Zedlewski, Cloudera’s VP of Product in a phone interview with VentureBeat. “That’s why we decided to do something about it,” he said.

Impala enables its users to store vast volumes of unwieldy data and run queries in HBase, Hadoop’s NoSQL database. What’s interesting is that it is built to maximise speed: it runs on top of Hadoop storage, but speaks to SQL and works with pre-existing drivers.

“If you ask questions, you will get answers ten times faster,” Zedlewski explained.

These answers or “insights” can mitigate risk and inform strategy for a company’s sales, marketing and business development teams.

Travel booking site Expedia is one of the companies that is using Cloudera’s new product to manage four pedabytes of company data.

“We are able to work on one single platform for big data rather than many disparate systems for archiving, ETL and analytics,” said Jeff Prather, Director of Global Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Platforms at Expedia.

“This evolution of Hadoop has enabled us to reduce our latency by 50 percent and produce a new real business insight service not previously viable,” said Prather in a statement.

Cloudera burst onto the scene four years ago. It was among the first to capitalize on the growing popularity of the open source Hadoop framework. (Fun fact: Hadoop was invented by independent programmer Doug Cutting, and shortly thereafter was brought to Yahoo. It was named after his son’s top elephant.)

“The reason why people are attracted to it [Hadoop] is because it’s scalable, extremely flexible, easy to get started with, and inexpensive compared to what else is out there,” said Zedlewski.

Cloudera’s founders used Hadoop for the purposes of data analysis and business intelligence. For developers, Hadoop is free to download under the Apache software license, but the company sells a broad spectrum of technical support services.

The Silicon Valley-based company has signed on business intelligence partners to test the product, including Tableau and QlikTech. (Learn more in our inaugural list of top “big data” companies). It will bring in revenue through this new product by charging customers for support services.

Cloudera has 400 employees and has over $76 million of venture funding in the bank. Cloudera’s chief scientist, Jeff Hammerbacher, conceived and led Facebook’s data team.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

NEW YORK: Platfora, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed “big data” startup, unveiled the product it has been baking for over a year at the Strata conference today.

The Silicon Valley-based company publicly launched its technology that crunches raw data in Hadoop, the open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.

For years, data was contained in structured columns and rows, and stored in relational databases. Today, companies are dealing with large volumes of unwieldy data. Every big data startup worth its salt will tell you that once it’s processed, this unstructured data contains potentially valuable insights.

Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO

In a phone interview, Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO, made a similar case: “Businesses want to know if they can derive business intelligence from Hadoop [and] the answer is yes.” Werther told me that the startup’s first customers (there are 10 companies signed on to the beta) are struggling to manage petabytes of corporate data in the form of texts, emails, reports and so on.

He explained that Hadoop is a feasible solution but can only really be of use to a small cadre of developers. ”We want to make it possible for everyday business users to interact, analyse, and drive Hadoop,” he said.

Werther says it’s the speed of deployment that makes Platfora unique. “People can visualize and ask questions about data within hours,” he said. “There is no six month cycle time to make Hadoop amazing.” In addition, there is an analytics component; users can visualize the data on an HTML interface.

Werther claims that the closest competitor is the “status quo” — the companies that still rely on traditional data warehouses. However, there are a number of other startups that claim to bring Hadoop straight to your desktop, including Datameer and Karmasphere.

Platfora has over $12 million in first-round venture funding in the bank from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture wing, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

The army tells recruits to “be all that you can be.” While in the military context, this statement relates to physical prowess and leadership skills, InfoArmy applies the same principal to business intelligence.

InfoArmy is a marketplace where researchers, analysts, or anyone with the requisite skill set can make extra money by writing competitive intelligence reports. The startup has raised $17.3 million in its second round of funding to “recruit a global army of researchers to build the largest and most comprehensive database of business intelligence reports in existence.”

These fightin’ words come from chief executive Jim Fowler, a veteran of the BI industry who is using his training, experience, and expertise to strike fear into the heart of the enemy. I mean incumbents.

As it stands, business intelligence reports come from large companies like Reuters, Forrester, Gartner, and Dun & Bradstreet. They take operational data, considering factors like company size, traction, revenue, expenditures, and turn it into actionable information.

This information can be used for a number of purposes. Venture capitalists may refer to these reports when investigating potential investments, and marketing teams use this kind of data to make strategic decisions. The legacy providers, however, are expensive and can be slow to update their offerings. Fowler saw an opportunity to make an impact.

“If you look at the business intelligence industry, there has been very little innovation and we are employing the effort and wisdom of the crowd to disrupt it,” he said. “If I am 90 years old and there are tens of thousands of people in developing countries making a living off this platform, who were given a chance to go and use their brains instead of their backs, that will be incredibly satisfying.”

In the few short months since launching, InfoArmy has amassed 3,500 registered researchers on six continents. These people are tasked with specific company assignments and reference multiple credible sources when filling out the research fields. Before a report is published, it must be approved by a senior researcher or “officer” to ensure quality.  Each one costs $100 and researchers keep half the proceeds from each sale. Reports will be updated each quarter so they stay current.

There are 2,000 reports available on InfoArmy and this hefty funding will be used to grow as quickly as possible.

“We have three steps on our road to global domination,” Fowler said. “10,000 [reports] is the next step, where can sell unlimited use subscriptions to VC firms, sales teams etc. After that, we want to reach 100,000. We believe that is critical mass when we terrify incumbents. If we get to 1 million, we will be international juggernaut in data business.”

Fowler was previously the founder of Jigsaw, a data-as-a-service platform that crowd sourced contact information for business professionals and companies. It sold to Salesforce for $142 million in 2010, but Fowler said just couldn’t resign himself to a life of leisure and doing daily yoga classes with his wife. Instead, he self-funded InfoArmy into existence.

“I made all the money that I’m going to need for my life with Jigsaw,” he said.  “This is not about money, this is about wanting to create something really big and meaningful. Getting people to work at these information-style jobs is going to make the world a better place over time. We also value transparency of information, which is a always good for society. What this company will do is inject a layer of transparency on private companies that heretofore has been a domain of public companies. It will force a great level of accountability.”

Right now, InfoArmy concentrates on private, venture-backed technology companies, but it is starting to expand into other verticals, as well as global markets. It focuses on companies with high growth potential and their competitors. The $17.3 million Series B funding round came from Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, and adds to Fowler’s initial $2 million Series A.

“There was no way I could have raised a round of funding like this at this point in Jigsaw’s life,” he said. “Raising money is a lot easier the second time around, as is hiring, but there is a lot more pressure. Now, I am not a first time entrepreneurs and supposed to know what I am doing.”

Whether he is addressing widespread unemployment, keeping private companies honest, or avoiding daily yoga sessions with his wife, Fowler is leading a squadron of information professionals into a future he sees as better. Read more on VentureBeat.

Out of ideas for a fresh and creative advertising campaign that will resonate with your customers?

BIScience, a Tel Aviv-based startup that pulled in its first round of funding today, has found a way to inspire your next online ad strategy. In a nutshell, it’s an intelligence tool that lets sales and marketing professionals as well as media buyers spy on the competition.

Founded in 2009, the Israeli company was originally intended as a business intelligence and analytics tool. However, its AdClarity product (pictured, left), which offers a birds-eye view of the competition, resonated best with customers.

Its technology monitors over half a million Internet pages in eight regions across the world to unveil competitors’ online advertising campaigns.

“This is a cut-throat competitive business,” Orey Gilliam, the company’s CEO, told me. “Players will not allow their competitors to see what they do without seeing what their competitors do – it will turn into an intelligence arms race.” Prior to joining the company as its chief executive, Gilliam was the Israel-based lead executive for AIM, AOL’s messaging tool.

In the competitive intelligence space, which is relatively untouched by innovation, competitors include InfoArmy (a startup with the founder of SalesForce-owned Jigsaw as its CEO) and dominant player Dun & Bradstreet.

With the funding, the founders plan to invest in research and development and to expand to new channels like mobile and video. Currently in beta, the company will launch its media intelligence tool in New York next month.

Today, BIScience pulled in $3.5 million in first round funding from CyHawk Ventures and Moscow-based venture capital firm Bright Capital.

Image via Shutterstock

Most experts agree that a traditional database can’t support the rapidly accelerating mess of unstructured and structured data contained within the enterprise. However, where this consensus falls apart, is on the right approach to tackling the “big data” problem.

In the ongoing battle between the NoSQL and SQL databases, Splice Machine is one of the few young companies that has come down firmly on the side of the latter. Today, the San Francisco startup has raised $4 million in first round funding for its SQL database build on top of the open-source Hadoop Distributed File System.

According to its founders, popular NoSQL databases like HBase and Cassandra Hadoop, can handle large volumes of data that do not fit neatly into structured tables, rows and columns. However, they are not equipped to support the full spectrum of business intelligence (BI) products.

If their solution works, it’s every enterprise investor’s dream. Customers will receive all the benefits of NoSQL (flexible schema for unstructured data, scalability), as well as a close integration with their SQL BI tools and favorite data visualization services like Tableau.

“The NoSQL community threw out the baby with the bath water. They got it right with flexible schemas and distributed, auto-sharded architectures, but it was a mistake to discard SQL,” said Monte Zweben, the company’s CEO in a statement.

With experience at both Oracle and Nasa, Zweben may have the right background for a big data founder. He worked at the NASA Ames Research Center as the Deputy Branch Chief of the Artificial Intelligence Branch, where he dedicated his efforts to the Space Shuttle program. He went on to co-founder Blue Martini Software (which experienced a successful IPO in 2000); prior to that, he was a vice president and general manager at PeopleSoft, acquired by Oracle in 2005.

The company’s closest competitor is Drawn to Scale, a Berkeley-based startup with a SQL database for Hadoop. It  has just shy of $1 million in venture funding in the bank.

Splice Machine’s first funding round was led by Silicon Valley firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Birst, a Sequoia-backed business intelligence startup, rolled out a new feature today that targets data warehouses and makes potentially juicy data accessible to business users.

The new product, known as Distributed Business Analytics, combines structured data from data warehouses and any potentially useful departmental data (spreadsheets, lists and files) and stores it in one central place. Currently, companies have one data warehouse and dozens of departmental databases that remain independent of each other. The product, available in 30 days, promises to change that.

Peters told me he was inspired to start an analytics company when he realized that most valuable data doesn’t currently exist in the cloud but is stored on-premise, typically in a data warehouse. Peters told me that data will eventually move to the cloud, but we’re not there yet. He likens the process to jumping into a pool of icy water — “scary at first, but you get used to it.”

Business Intelligence has been accused of being bound by old technology. Companies are increasingly dedicated to the task of exploring the value in their unstructured data, such as emails, tweets, videos, and documents. When asked about innovation from Big Data startups like Datameer, he said: “Data isn’t useful until you can count it, graph it, structure it.”

BI vendors from Oracle to Qlikview will tell you that with their solution, companies can truly harness the power of their data. Birst’s CEO claims his solution is cheaper and more flexible than most; “overall it will probably cost you one-third less.”

This is the San Francisco-based company’s first major product update since nabbing $26 million in its fourth funding round.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. The company focuses on user experience, so all the tricky, technical elements of big data are comprehensible to people outside of IT teams.

“Big data is a very fragmented enterprise space with a lot of noise, but we are different from everyone else,” said CEO Roman Stanek in an interview with VentureBeat. “We sell business solutions to business people. We offer an end-to-end solution and we tailor to consumers, rather than selling infrastructure to techies.”

Stanck emphasized that GoodData also sells marketing and sales services, so companies do not have to source business intelligence solutions from multiple vendors. The technology is embedded into the browser and run on a pay-as-you-go system, which benefits startups that lack the ability to shell out for expensive infrastructure or are hesitant to pay a large-up front fee.

Since the company was founded, over 6,000 customers  have adopted GoodData, and the company has seen dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year.

“The beauty of business intelligence is it is extremely horizontal, every company needs analytics,” Stanek said. “But we are not selling horizontal technology. We are investing in additional domains like enterprise and retail.”

The latest round of funding will go towards building sales and marketing. It was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners. The company received $15 million in 2011 and has raised $53.5 million in total investment. It was founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 and is now based in San Francisco. It has 180 employees.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Everybody wants big data, but nobody wants to muck around in SQL queries. And while Hadoop is a hot topic, most people have no clue what it really does, let alone have the skill to use it.

That’s where business intelligence tools like Bime come in. Bime, which just launched version 4.0 of its browser-based data mining and data visualization tool, promises to make diving into enormous databases as pleasant as taking a swim in a cool city pool.

Well, almost. You still have to understand a little about database fields and pivot tables, but in a demo I saw yesterday, Bime was remarkably simple — and fast — at turning a database with more than 400 million rows into pretty bar charts, pie charts, and network visualizations. Essentially, it’s a more user-friendly front end for whatever gigantic databases you already have, and it’s one that marketing managers and sales executives can use, without a lot of handholding from the IT department’s database gurus.

The data on the back end can come from Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Google Analytics, and more traditional data repositories, such as MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle.

Bime 4.0 adds support for Google BigQuery, a web service that lets you do queries against enormous data sets — databases with billions of records, for instance. The company also offers BimeDB, a hosted database that’s optimized for analytics, so companies can store their data with Bime as well as using it as the BI front-end.

Bime costs $60 to $240 per user, per month, depending on the options. For more details, check out this page of video demos that show what Bime does.

The company that makes Bime is called We Are Cloud, although it’s changing its name to BIME (in all caps, though I refused to spell it that way) to match its leading product. We Are Cloud has 15 employees and is based in Montpellier, France. It has raised several small rounds from angel investors in the U.S. and Europe but has not disclosed the total amount of its funding. We Are Cloud debuted in the U.S. at Demo Fall 2011.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business intelligence app-maker MeLLmo, the creator of ultra-hot business iPad app Roambi, has launched a new app-building platform called ESX that will let other companies tap Roambi’s ability to make data gorgeous and accessible.

Roambi ESX will give companies that sell data for a living a way to create co-branded iPad apps without hiring design teams. ESX will let business create specialized publications that include text, images, Roambi data visualizations, and video and then publish the whole thing to the iPad.

The target audience for the platform will be the many small and large firms that collect and distribute data, Quinton Alsbury, MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, told VentureBeat. Ideally, many research firms would want to offer an iPad application that enhances their data sets, but many of these firms don’t want to pay for the development costs or hiring a mobile team. If they decide to use Roambi ESX, Alsbury said, it makes their lives easier and could be a boon for sales.

“There are hundreds of thousands of small niche research shops, and many of those will find this relevant and important,” Alsbury said. “One day, many apps in the App Store will be powered by Roambi.”

Specifically, Roambi wants to go after these types of companies with ESX:

• Information Publishers: syndicated research, market analysis, economic trends
• Marketers: interactive marketing brochures, newsletters, consumer behavior reports
• Corporations: corporate responsibility reports, investor reports, sales reports

MeLLmo said it will not be releasing pricing for access to the platform and that “interested parties can contact a Roambi salesperson for more information.”

San Diego, Calif.-based MeLLmo raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital this past September. Alsbury said ESX will help the company take advantage of its momentum in the market and help the company expand beyond simply making striking business intelligence applications.

Photo credit: MeLLmo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If there is one application that personifies how Apple’s mega-popular iPad is transforming the enterprise, it could very well be the intuitive, luscious, and just-plain-cool Roambi, a business intelligence app that brings mundane data to life in unimaginable ways.

Roambi, which has attracted $30 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, lets you show your company’s SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce data on the iPad in bright charts and graphs. Each report is available for online or offline viewing, so you can always bust out your iPad for presentations or routine queries.

And unlike business intelligence players with iPad app support like MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos, or SAP BusinessObjects, Roambi does not tie you down to a single data source. “Roambi is unique because it is designed to aggregate across different data warehouses,” Forrester mobility analyst Ted Schadler told VentureBeat. “They pull it all into a single data dashboard for an executive.”

The Roambi app serves more than 230 large enterprise customers, charging $795 per user licence, and more than 4,000 mid-size customers with its Pro offering, charging $99 per user per year. Its large enterprise customers have purchased support for between a hundred and several thousand employees, meaning the company is bringing in strong revenue.

Roambi comes from San Diego-based development firm MeLLmo. The company’s founders originally picked the odd name to throw off the competition, but they are stuck with it now because all their contracts use the name. They try to make the best of their funny name and in some ways they are affectionate toward it — in the office, the guys are “MeLLMen” and the ladies are “MeLLmettes.”

A bold bet

Roambi stems from the day MeLLmo chief executive Santiago Becerra (left) stood in line to get his hands on the first-generation iPhone in June 2007. A lifelong fan of Apple products, Becerra had the time to stand in line because he had sold a startup eight months prior and was taking a break from work. He deeply identified with the idea of the iPhone and loved the concept of using a flat touchscreen display for interacting with applications and the web.

“I remember that first day of playing with the iPhone and the pre-loaded apps like the stock widget,” Becerra told VentureBeat. “It was truly different because it required no instruction manual. At the time, I asked myself ‘How long before business people will want to see data on this device?’”

Becerra was so excited about the idea of enterprise applications for the iPhone that he called up and pitched a few friends and business colleagues on the idea. A few people shied away from the idea, but he found a solid founding team that believed in it, including Quinton Alsbury, David Becerra, and Jaime Zuluaga.

Alsbury, now MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, loved Becerra’s idea from the start. He wasn’t as immediately bullish as Becerra was, but he was excited about the iPhone’s potential.

“It seemed obvious to anyone looking at the phone — there was no way that it would be relegated to just a consumer device,” Alsbury told me. “Apple being a computer company meant that they had everything they needed to make it a computing platform. It seemed obvious that the evolution of the iPhone would make it into a computing device. Motion and visual graphics didn’t exist in this form before.”

So Becerra, Alsbury, and the others talked about the idea until they finally formed MeLLmo as a stealth LLC in January 2008. Their goal was to create a touch-based data visualization app exclusively for the iPhone. But as they were just getting started, the team knew they’d have to overcome a host of obstacles, including convincing people their idea was sound. The biggest problem they had was that no software development kit existed for iPhone apps. The App Store didn’t even exist yet to distribute those apps.

From the outset, the team made two bets: One, that business users would eventually prefer using iPhones over BlackBerrys. And two, Apple would soon offer a distribution model for other applications.

Development and launch

The MeLLmo team started recruiting on the sly that January. Alsbury said the company chose the slogan “Bringing social networking 3.0 to web 2.0″ because, like the company name, it would not hint at what the company was building. Many developers and business folks saw the slogan and contacted the company about job opportunities. When the prospective employees came in, the team revealed they were actually working on a business app for iPhone. Some of the earliest prospects jumped at the idea and still work for the company today.

The most critical early hire for the company was Alex Schaefer, a part-time developer who created the popular app ApolloIM, which ran on jailbroken iPhones. Jailbreaking your iPhone opens the door to installing unapproved applications and using the phone on other carriers. Early in the life of the iPhone, jailbreaking was especially popular because Apple didn’t yet offer the ability to install apps, and people understood that the iPhone could do much more than it was allowed to do. Schaefer’s ability to work around Apple’s limitations was important for MeLLmo, since the team wanted to build an app without an SDK.

“[Schaefer] in himself is an interesting story,” Alsbury said. “He wasn’t even a full-fledged developer. He was a poetry major with two years of computer science. But we needed someone to take some of these early ideas and see what was even possible. We needed someone who could jailbreak and start messing around. When we hired him, we gave him the title of ‘iPro.’”

So about month before Apple released its first iOS SDK on March 6, 2008, MeLLmo was already hard at work figuring out app development and how its data visualization app would function. Becerra describes the earliest months of development as “difficult” because there were no rules and no playbook for creating these apps. There were only a few apps for the iPhone at that point, so designing an interface with touchscreen functionality was tedious.

“It was really a new paradigm,” Becerra said. “To us, the hardest part was to forget about the past and center on a new platform and new ways of thinking.”

The company remained in stealth mode until May 19, 2009. Just before coming out, the team met with bloggers, journalists, and analysts to preview the product, which MeLLmo expected to sell directly to corporations. They were met with lots of skeptical looks and some “well-known bloggers” told then it wouldn’t work.

“They told us we wouldn’t be successful unless we were on BlackBerry,” Alsbury said. “They said ‘No enterprise is going to buy software institutionally for the iPhone.’ They didn’t believe anyone would buy iPhone software.”

When the company finally launched Roambi for iPhone, many businesses complimented the intuitiveness of the design and realized that touch-based data visualization could add some pizzazz to sales calls, presentations, and meetings. Those businesses weren’t exactly lining up to get their hands on Roambi at first, but the response was generally positive. In fact, business users were slowly ditching their BlackBerrys in favor of more powerful and versatile iPhones and starting to find ways to use it for work and play alike.

“We were surprised how fast companies were buying into it at the beginning,” Becerra said.

Page two: How the iPad changed everything and where the company is headed next

Pages: 1 2

Big data startup Birst has raised $26 million in its fourth round of funding, with a goal accelerating growth and product development, the company announced today.

Birst is part of a relatively crowded field of business intelligence players including QlikTech, SAP, IBM, Oracle, GoodData, and Microstrategy. But Birst claims it only allocates “one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI,” while still being available as in SaaS form and on-premise. That sort of flexibility is quite attractive, and Birst can connect to multiple data sources, such as CRM, ERP, financial, and operational systems.

The new funding round was led by big dog VC firm Sequoia Capital with additional participation by prior investors Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.

“This is an extraordinary time for us,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst, in a statement. “We founded Birst to change the way the world used and interacted with BI and by pushing the envelope of possibility we are witnessing great success. This investment furthers Birst’s ability to continue to drive innovation and expand our solution to new markets and new audiences. We are thrilled to have world-class investors such as Sequoia Capital by our side.”

San Francisco-based Birst was founded in 2004 and has now raised a total of $46 million, including today’s funding.

Check out a video describing Birst’s dashboards below:

With the mountainous wastelands of data that dot the landscape of today’s business, we’re sure glad that business intelligence exists.  To those familiar with business intelligence, it’s tools such as Domo, Bime, GoodData, and Jaspersoft. For the uninitiated, it’s just another buzzword. Really though, it’s not difficult to understand: think of it as a dashboard of all your key business metrics all in a neat operations center-like screen.

So what makes business intelligence special? Humans can perform the incredible when interpreting the right data, as long as it’s presented in a useful way.

A recent infographic courtesy of DSquared Media calls out some interesting facts: Today, 86% of people will use some form of technology while shopping, or to assist in shopping. Around 49% of people used two pieces of technology while shopping in 2010. When it comes to business intelligence, 40% of companies believe they are better than 50% of their competitors, while less than 10% have no idea where they stand.

Business intelligence has even made its way into mainstream culture — decisions reached in the movie Moneyball were the result of BI. Not everything is fun and games though; initiating business intelligence before a corporate disaster will cost significantly less money and reduce a lot of stress on key players and those who publicly represent the company. However, most companies do not implement this method until after a disaster occurs, possibly causing significant damage to their reputation and costing them more than they ever planned to spend.

Are you already using business intelligence for your own shop? Thinking of doing so? The comments are yours.

Brian Wallace is the President of NowSourcing, a social media firm specializing in infographic design, development, and content marketing promotion. 

Infographic via DSquared Media (Click image to enlarge)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s new iPad was announced just hours ago, and while rumors might have spoiled the surprises, businesses that are considering the iPad will no doubt like what they see from today’s event.

A surprising amount of companies are using iPads, with Apple saying last October that 93 percent of Fortune 500 companies have deployed or are testing iPads. Considering that it usually takes forever for technology to be adopted in the workplace, the iPad has gained traction with CEOs bending IT departments to their will. No doubt we will see even more companies getting interested in the device with this new edition.

While the new iPad will include things like a higher-resolution Retina Display and a better camera, the real appeal for businesses will be with the device’s new 4G LTE wireless networking and A5X chip with quad-core graphics and dual-core processing.

Dan Kerzner, senior VP of mobile for MicroStrategy, said he expects that more powerful wireless data capabilities will easily be the most important feature the new iPad will offer. MicroStrategy offers a platform for building mobile business intelligence applications, with the iPad as a major emphasis.

“In business, fast is not fast enough,” Kerzner told VentureBeat. “Even if there is just a half-second gain, that can be the difference between using one device over another, especially in meetings.”

The other big upgrade that could help businesses who use intensive applications is the more powerful graphics processing from the A5X chip. One app that will see a nice boost from the new graphics chip is Roambi, which helps businesses visualize all of their data in incredibly cool ways.

“The innovations in processing speed and graphic capabilities unveiled with the new iPad will allow Roambi to raise the bar for mobile business apps even higher,” Quinton Alsbury, president of Roambi-maker MeLLmo, told us via e-mail. “We plan to take full advantage of this functionality.”

Another important development for iPad adoption in the business came at the end of Apple’s presentation today when it announced the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 would now sell for $399. That price point will make it easier to justify buying an iPad over a netbook or cheap laptop at the same price.

“A cheaper iPad 2 might be the hidden gem of the announcement today,” Kerzner said. “This is a great way to broaden the appeal of the iPad to many more businesses.”

Let us know in the comments below if your business plans to adopt the new iPad (or maybe even the iPad 2) as devices in the workplace.

Businesswoman using iPad image: Apple

Josh James, founder of business intelligence company Domo

Domo, which is building a dashboard for real-time business intelligence, has landed another $20 million without even trying.

The funds come from Silicon Valley-based Institutional Venture Partners, which also invested in Domo founder Josh James’ previous startup, Omniture. It brings the company’s total funding to $63 million.

“There’s probably three people a week that I turn down, who want to put money into our company,” said James, in an interview with VentureBeat. He agreed to accept IVP’s investment because the venture firm has a good track record and James has worked with it before.

“We thought it made sense to take additional money,” James said, but added: “We’re always trying to build the company in a way that we won’t need more money.”

The company is calling this second round of investment its “Series A-1″ tranche, to indicate that it has the same terms as its $33 million Series A round (but at a higher valuation). Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad.

Domo hopes to give executives and managers a single, customizable, sharable view of the business metrics that matter to them, delivering its product as an online service, similar to the way Salesforce.com, Omniture, Microsoft’s Office 365, and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions work. It will aim at collecting a slice of the estimated $10 billion annual market for business intelligence services.

James’ previous gig was Omniture. After cofounding the web metrics company, he led it to its initial public offering in 2006 and subsequent $1.8 billion sale to Adobe in 2009. He left Omniture in July, 2010.

Domo is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and currently employs about 100 people, mostly engineers, James said. However, once the product is ready to go, he plans to kick the sales organization into high gear.

“We will definitely be a sales-driven organization,” James said. “Right now we’re in the process of making sure the product is absolutely right, and then we’re going to sell it to every man, woman, child and retired person I can find.”

Photo courtesy Domo.

Bime is designed to be accessible to anyone, from a web analyst to a product manager, rather than being restricted to IT staff. 

BI tools can answer all kinds of questions for a small business from “Which sales are related to ad campaigns, social media activity and web traffic on my site?” to “When are my call centers most busy and how does that relate to my staffing schedule and budget plans?” Often the relevant data is stored in different formats and multiple locations. Daily sales numbers may be stored in a relational database, expenses in an accounting system or spreadsheet while traffic site data is retrieved from Google Analytics.

Bime 3.0 allows a user to create a query across all of these data sources in a web browser, regardless of the query language, file or metadata format. The user creates a business query by dragging and dropping the relevant data into a frame. Once the user is happy with the basic information he or she can turn the results into graphs and charts.  

Bime competes with products from GoodData, Cloud9, Birst, Qliktech and Tableau software. Bime 3.0 is, however, completely cloud-based and the company claims that it can connect to an unmatched set of data sources either locally or on a web server anywhere in the world. The business model is software as a service (SaaS).   

We are Cloud is based in Montpellier in France, was founded in 2009, has 12 employees and has raised $1 million dollars in angel investment.

We are Cloud is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

GoodData, a provider of online business intelligence software, announced today that it has raised $15 million in its second round of funding.

The company runs an online business intelligence service that tracks data from a number of sources — such as customer acquisition or customer relationship management software providers like Salesforce.com — and wraps it up in a neat, easy-to-digest package. It then gives business owners a number of analytics tools for that data, like projections for revenue and growth.

The funding was led by Andreessen-Horowitz.

The company’s chief executive and founder, Roman Stanek, has a pretty stellar track record — which was a large factor that led to Andreessen-Horowitz’ investment. Prior to GoodData, Stanek founded Java development company NetBeans, which he sold to Sun Microsystems. After that, he founded Systinet, which he sold to Mercury Interactive (Hewlett-Packard would go on to acquire that company in 2006).

“It starts with the entrepreneur and the team when we decide to invest in a company,” Andreessen-Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell told VentureBeat. “We think Roman is an exceptional entrepreneur who has assembled an exceptional team.”

Like other enterprise 2.0 companies, GoodData is taking a shotgun approach to gathering data through partnerships instead of building up internal tools. Box.net, another enterprise 2.0 company, fleshes out its cloud storage product by integrating applications from the likes of Salesforce.com and Google to make its software more useful for enterprise companies.

Likewise, GoodData plans to partner with as many enterprises that generate valuable business data as it can. O’Farrell said that has become a critical strategy for smaller companies and startups lately if they want to compete with enterprise supergiants like SAP and Oracle. And most enterprises are more open to partnerships now than they were a decade ago, he said.

“My vision is to support every single software-as-a-service application out there, I want to have an extensive library or app store of GoodData applications,” Stanek told VentureBeat. “Business Intelligence was very successful, we can connect to a data source within a matter of minutes and start analyzing it.”

Public trading markets have taken a significant beating lately and experienced a lot of volatility — but that isn’t deterring venture capital investing, O’Farrell said. Cloud computing companies in particular are gathering an enormous amount of interest thanks to the massive markets they attack with very little upfront capital costs, he said. Andreessen-Horowitz in particular will continue to invest in those companies, he said.

“Great companies will always be funded whether the market is up or down,” O’Farrell said. “If we see a great company at a stage where it makes sense for us to invest, market conditions would not deter us.”

Stanek said he expects to use the funding to build up its sales team. GoodData launched in 2009 and has raised $29 million to date.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

“Data around us is exploding, the need to make sense of it is bigger than ever. You need to have an analytic product,” said Brian Gentile, chief executive of Jaspersoft.

You would think that means the funding will go toward creating a new product or enhancing its current one, right? Wrong. When asked what the plan was, Gentile replied, “We’d like to say we are doing nothing with it.” In essence, Jaspersoft is tabling the funds to be used as an “agile agent on the balance sheet”.

“The funding allows us to look beyond our roadmap and make tougher build versus buy decisions,” said Gentile. This means Jaspersoft is looking to acquire. Gentile elaborated there are four key areas Jaspersoft may buy into as opposed to create products in-house.  In priority order they are:

1)    Advanced Reporting: The ability to provide reports on a company’s operation and production data.

2)    Advanced Visualization: Supplying visual representations of data, such as a sophisticated graph form.

3)    Data Movement: Streamlining the transfer of data from its original source and formatting it to be consumed by Jaspersoft’s analytics engine.

4)    Advanced Analytics: More intelligent analysis of data using a variety of techniques such as memory and predictive analysis.

Jaspersoft has received $58 million in funding to date with Quest Software, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, and Adams Street Partners. The company is based in San Francisco and has 140 employees.