In this month’s newsletter:

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A vast amount of data

The Currency Cloud has been growing rapidly, resulting in significant increase in the number of customers and transactions that generate a vast amount of data. The company needed the ability to harness this data in an effective way for business and management reporting in order to monitor, as well as expand services and grow its business. The Currency Cloud chose BIME (We Are Cloud) for its business intelligence (BI) needs, because it realized the tool would deliver the flexibility and scalability the company required. BIME was also a perfect fit in that not only could cope with company’s business requirements and challenges, but could be implemented in a quick and straightforward way.

“We were looking for a tool that would be easy to implement and use for our existing data requirements and would deliver the flexibility and scalability needed to cope with the ‘known unknowns’ we knew we would encounter in our BI and management information requirements.”

Nasir Zubairi, Director of Product Marketing at The Currency Cloud

As a cloud SaaS business the company had a good understanding of the benefits of utilizing agile cloud SaaS vendors, which they knew would be less taxing on resources in terms of support and system management. Based on the correlation between their immediate business needs and the awareness of what an innovative SaaS company could deliver the final decision was easy for them, comments Mr Zubairi : “With SaaS we knew we would be filtering down to some cutting edge solutions. Bime emerged a clear winner. We were and continue to be very impressed with the usability and the array of reporting and analysis tools”.

“We feel more like a partner than a customer”

According to Mr. Zubairi: “Working with BIME has been a real pleasure. We feel more like a partner than a customer”. BIME has given The Currency Cloud the ability to ‘mine their own data’ as a way to meet its original BI needs, and help deliver a competitive edge over its competitors. The company can now deliver enhanced services to its customers, Mr.Zubairi explains :

“Data mining not only benefits us internally, but also enables us to strengthen relationships with clients by identifying trends and suggesting improvements in the way they use our service based on an analysis of their usage metrics (transaction numbers, source, timing, quote conversion, login conversion). We morph from being just a service provider to adding real value to our clients through a consultative relationship”.

As well as using BIME for transaction metrics, The Currency Cloud also analyze their financial data (transaction margin, cashflow) and settlements data (errors, delays beneficiary type).

“The increase in efficiency is significant”

No longer do employees need to spend time planning and prioritizing their reporting requirements : “Nearly everyone in our business interacts with Bime in some way. Everyone sees the value of the information they have access to as a result of Bime and how easy the reports are to interpret”. BIME has provided The Currency Cloud with a tool that gives the company a winning proposition, allowing its employees to spend more time nurturing : “Where previously we had to prioritise and schedule reporting requirements, we can quickly and easily build new reports to meet new needs. The increase in efficiency is significant – we can spend more time on growing the business equipped with useful information, rather than running a race with one arm tied behind our back.“

About The Currency Cloud:

Established in 2009, and launched in 2012, The Currency Cloud is a cost-effective, transparent end-to-end Foreign Currency (FX) Payments Automation Service, which is changing the face of the global payments industry. The Currency Cloud was set up to address concerns surrounding international payment processing, secure payments and money conversion. The Currency Cloud is able to resolve these issues by offering an end-to-end, low cost, secure transfer service that has no parallel in today’s market. Today, the company has 21 staff, the majority are based in London, UK and others in Malta.

http://www.thecurrencycloud.com/

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View more BIME customer testimonials HERE

BEIJING, CHINA — May 29, 2012. BIME CHINA, a pioneer in powerful cloud business intelligence, today announced a partnership with China Mobile, the leading mobile services provider in Mainland China with the world’s largest mobile network and the world’s largest mobile customer base. BIME China also participated in The 4th China Cloud Computing Conference at the China National Convention Center which took place 23-25 May.

BIME CHINA, the award-winning cloud BI platform, is now fully integrated into China Mobile’s Big Cloud Platform to provide SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) business intelligence solutions to Chinese enterprises and government agencies. Compared to traditional BI products, BIME is more flexible and more practical, because users do not need specialized knowledge, and deployment of the product does not require expensive IT resources. BIME also provides mobile versions to users of iPhone, iPad, Android mobile phones and tablets.

“Mine Your Own Business”

The 4th China Cloud Computing Conference is sponsored by the Chinese Institute of Electronics and is recognized as the world’s largest cloud computing conference in terms of the number of participants, technology solutions presented, and range of industries represented. The breadth, depth and scale of this year’s conference sets a new record, further highlighting the rising importance of cloud computing in China. BIME CHINA will share application experiences and use cases from Europe and the United States to demonstrate that every enterprise can “mine their own business.”

“The country’s BI market has tremendous potential”

“As a global SaaS BI supplier, we are extremely honored that BIME has been completely integrated with China Mobile’s Big Cloud platform to provide users in China a cloud based BI service,” said Rachel Delacour, CEO and co-founder of BIME (We Are Cloud), based in France. “The China Cloud Computing and the country’s BI market has tremendous potential, and we are ready to share our advanced technology and experience with Chinese users.”

Greaman Wu, General Manager of BIME China, said: “The China Mobile Big Cloud platform is our key partner in China. Thanks to its superb resources, management and capabilities, it will provide high-quality public cloud services to a huge number of Chinese SMBs and institutions. While cloud standards in China are not unified and the adoption of SaaS is not consistent, we believe that our win-win partnership with China Mobile will lead the way for the introduction of valuable and innovative SaaS BI technology to thousands of organizations in China.” Rachel Delacour added:”Traditional BI vendors have limited cloud capabilities when it comes to technical flexibility and ease-of-use. Our main target customers are both SMBs and the traditional customers in areas such as telecommunications, finance and government.”

Powerful BI software designed for everyone

BIME has from the start been focusing on powerful BI software designed for everyone – from the IT expert to the business user. It is an analysis tool that is easy to use with extremely powerful analytical capabilities. BIME allows users to connect and dive into data sets in any browser, no matter whether the data reside on-premise or on a web server. Users can answer difficult business questions through intuitive visualizations and securely publish or share results with dashboards. Bime helps users answer the key business issues quickly to help them make faster decisions — regardless of whether they are using a PC, notebook, a tablet or smartphone.

About BIME:
Founded in 2009 in Montpellier, a hotbed of academic R&D in the South of France, BIME (We are Cloud) powers the first pure cloud BI service for the age of Big Data. BIME delivers simple-to-use yet powerful data analysis, visualization and dashboarding as a fast, easy and low-cost service. The company has been recognized as “Best European Start Up of the Year” at ICT Spring 2011 and “Best Cloud Application” by the Cloud Computing World Series Awards.

To find out more, visit: http://bimeanalytics.com.

Register for ICT Spring Europe 2012 using the exclusive Bime invitation code: RADE12

And don’t forget to visit our friend’s booth CAPSEO ! Here is their fun newsletter about the event !

Last week, as part of an express N.American tour, Rachel attended the Interop Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas as a speaker. Hosted in the famous Mandalay Bay Hotel, the event brought together players from SaaS / IaaS / PaaS / telecom. etc.

We presented alongside Ju-Kay Kwek, Product Manager of Google Big Query… Why?… Because we were one of their first BigQuery partners (the official BigQuery launch was a week earlier).

Using Bime’s front end business intelligence and analytics over BigQuery allows the possibilty to immediately analyze huge volumes of data in the cloud. We did live demonstrations, showcasing the combination of BigQuery and Bime to create queries on a dataset of 450 million lines, online, on the fly and all in the cloud. Each query took around 3-4 seconds to execute (without any prior aggregation).

Find below our pitch in the event programme and some photos of the event. You can read Rachel’s full report on the event on our French Blog.

Big Data Analytics and BI in the Cloud
Location: Lagoon D
Google has used Big Data, analytics, and massive computational power to create a data-driven and agile business. With cloud services like its recently launched BigQuery product, it is enabling, for many businesses, Google-scale data analytics on billion-row data sets for the first time. This session will focus on why Google developed these technologies and how Google products like App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery can give you simple, reliable and effective tools to leverage the power of data. It will also look at real-life use cases, their business impact, and what businesses can learn from this.

Speaker - Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager, Google
Speaker - Rachel Delacour, CEO, Bime

Upcoming US & Canada Dates

7-8th May: Interop – Enteprise Cloud Summit – Las Vegas – We will be presenting with Ju-Kay Kwek from Google.

8-9th May: Meetings – Seattle

10th May: JusticeBC Data Dashboard Project Recognition Event – Vancouver

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2-10th June: French Tech Tour – Silicon Valley

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27-29th June: Google IO – San Francisco

Big Data allows users to upload their data to Google and perform business analytics in the cloud. Google are offering up to 2 terabytes of storage and provide processing on up to 1000 queries per day. As Google state in their blog post, the release of Big Query is:

“….an important milestone in our effort to bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud”

We share this vision and are excited about the potential of bringing cloud based analytics to the masses. Earlier this year both our CEO, Rachel Delacour and Big Query Product Manager, Ju-Kay Kwek spoke on this topic at the GigaOM Structure:Data event in March.

Harnassing the power of Big Query users can create data visualizations and dashboards in Bime based on millions of rows of data. This creates exciting oppurtunities for smaller companies who have large data needs but do not want to make the large investment in the required infrastructure. As Rachel Delacour, said during her presentation at GigaOM Structure:Data:

“small businesses can relax about the skills gap”

Read the full GigaOM article on Google Big Query here.

In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!

As part of an Open Data initiative, Patrick Buisson, Marketing Manager of Europages wanted to make this data available to all their users online. Much of it has gradually been made avaialable to users: the visits by country, the keywords used, the searches by industry etc. Europages looked for a cloud based tool to make their customers by business sector data available (in the spirit of online and dynamic accessibility). Europages realized this aim choosing Bime.

The number of views and clicks on listings in each business sector are now displayed on the Europages website in an interactive embedded Bime dashboard. Users can quickly identify the minimum, average and maximum returns for Europage customers in each business sector across different subsription packages. Using the interactive clicker at the side they are able to find their specific industry and can quickly find out the possible ROI they could expect from one package to another. The visualizations show customer data from a rolling 12 month period and can easily be kept up to date to reflect the latest customer trends.

An example of the visualizations created can be viewed on the Europages website http://corporate.europages.co.uk/measure-your-return-on-Europages.html.

VIEW OTHER BIME CUSTOMER USE CASES HERE

Cloud Adoption by SMBs

Small-businesses seem set to adopt cloud services in a big way over the next few years. In the US last year the SMB cloud services market grew by 25% to $15.1 billion. According to the same SMB Insights report, summarized on smallbusinesscomputing.com, worldwide this figure is set to reach $68billion by 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 26%. With SMBs usually characterized by their strict budgeting, the low capital expenditure and high scalability of cloud services allow SMBs compete with their much large competitors. Additionally smaller companies are three times less likely to ever set up their own servers. Again, the low maintinence, low infrastructure approach of cloud services suits SMBs. No longer needing to worry about regular server updates, this frees up the IT team to concentrate on innovation.

Small Apps the oil in the engine

Using ourselves as an example from our HQ in Montpellier we now have customers across the globe. Taking a snapshot from a short period of our web traffic this morning, we had website visitors from 71 different countries (see below Bime visualization below). In the office we utilise several cloud apps, Bime (of course) to analyze our web analytics, marketing and financial data, Salesforce for CRM, Dropbox for storage and Google Apps (soon to be trying out Google Drive) to name but a few. Using these apps and with the help of our partner network we are able to serve customers in 5 continents and because of their scalability, as our company grows so do our apps.

Website Visitors from a short period this morning. Google Analytics data visualized in Bime.

We recently came across this great infographic from Mavenlink providing a nice summary of some of the applications that allow small businesses to function (although we would like to see BI / analytics tools as a category, incrasingly a vital part of the SMB app landscape).

Small Business Apps