Edward Schlicksup of Delivered Innovation recently caught up with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink, the leading provider of SaaS business intelligence solutions. PivotLink’s approach to business intelligence is a paradigm-shifting model within the BI industry. By combining advanced technologies like in-memory analytics, columnar data storage, cloud computing, a SaaS delivery model and unique methodologies, PivotLink helps organizations gain greater insight into the massive volumes of data increasingly at their disposal – in a highly secure manner.
Give me a little background on PivotLink – how and when did the company form?
Ching Wan founded PivotLink in 1999 after a decade long career as a BI practice lead at Cambridge Technology Partners. Ching founded PivotLink on a simple powerful idea: it should be easy for business users to securely analyze any data, any way they want and share their insights with colleagues and partners, wherever they are.
Myself and Ching Wan, along with a fast growing team have established PivotLink as one of the most innovative and trusted SaaS BI services for accessing, analyzing and sharing business insight.
When and how did you first become aware of The Cloud?
After eight years as the EVP of Sales for VeriSign, which grew from $30M to over $1.5B over an eight year period, I left VeriSign in 2005 to become the CEO of Postini, the leading Cloud/SaaS-based email security company. Postini grew to over 30,000 customers, 10 million users and we sold Postini to Google in September of 2007. After that I joined PivotLink, because I believe the BI industry is ripe for transformation to the next generation Cloud/SaaS model.
What do you envision to be your most popular product in 2010?
PivotLink’s award winning SaaS BI platform serves over 15,000 users across industries to support departmental and enterprise-wide business intelligence needs; i.e. analysis, reporting, dashboards, and collaboration. We recently upgraded the platform’s dashboard capabilities with enhanced drag-and-drop functionality, drill down capabilities and an enhanced UI.
We also launched a new family of products for Sales, Marketing, and HR that provides dynamic, on-demand solutions that enable business users to actively monitor, analyze and report at every level across the business. Fully integrated into the PivotLink platform, it will include everything users need to go from data to decisions in minutes or days instead of weeks or months.
What are the most common obstacles to bringing a company onto The Cloud?
Integrating data from multiple resources, ensuring data quality, security and gaining end user acceptance of the new BI delivery mechanism. Setting up data feeds from on-premise sources into a cloud-based solution is not an impossible obstacle (in fact it is becoming increasingly automated) but it does require thoughtful planning, the involvement of IT and assuring customers that their data will be secure. And they want to know that they can get their data back if the service were to be terminated (which we of course do).
Secondly, end users were not previously involved in the BI development/deployment process until the tool appeared on their desktop. Now they have the opportunity to be involved in the process, define what data sources they need and get them more quickly than ever before. Being able to administer BI in a self-service manner takes some getting used to. Because we are schema-less (and the market to date is trained up/expects to do analytics in a cube) business users need to wrap their heads around a more flexible model of analysis.
What are the most common reservations companies have about The Cloud? How do you address those?
Customers often have reservations that you can’t do BI in the cloud because they have so much trouble doing BI on-premise. Given the complexity of data involved with a BI implementation, it seems that SaaS BI is too good to be true. We have 15,000+ users on PivotLink who use our tools everyday to make BI more integral to their jobs. A significant percentage of our customers serve as references during the selling cycle. The voice of our customers goes a long way to inspire others users to join the SaaS BI revolution.
Secondly, security. When customers realize their data is going to be moving into another environment the security flag comes up. PivotLink takes data security very seriously and has the same rigorous security controls that financial institutions and publicly traded organizations go through. Our SAS 70 Type II certification typically appeases any security concerns companies have about doing business with us.
What does SAS 70 Type II Certification really mean for your customers?
SAS 70 Type II certification demonstrates our total commitment to constant improvement and delivering value to our customers. To date, PivotLink is the only SaaS BI service that is SAS 70 Type II certified. With more than 15,000 users worldwide, it’s absolutely essential for our customers to trust PivotLink’s ability to unequivocally protect their data. Completing the audit provides further validation and assurance to our customers.
Note: To learn more about PivotLink’s SAS 70 certification process and accomplishments go to http://www.pivotlink.com/sas-70
When companies approach PivotLink, do they even know exactly what they’re looking to find? Do they often find an answer to a question they didn’t know they had asked?
The SaaS BI market is evolving, but people still think it is “too good to be true” so we do a lot education in our sales cycle right now, plus our website is populated with valuable educational resources.
Companies don’t always know that they are looking for a SaaS BI technology solution per se, but they do know they suffer from issues like 1) it takes too long to get data and reports delivered to the business for effective decision making, 2) IT is backlogged with requests from the business to make changes to existing DWs and 3) both IT and the business struggle to keep pace with the dynamics of business today and the tsunami of information that floods into the business on a daily basis. When companies approach us, they are driven by the desire to cost effectively automate a lot of the reporting and analytics that suck up a lot of precious IT resources and don’t want to commit a massive capital expenditure to solve the problem.
What are some of the product features that PivotLink is most proud of?
We are proud of our in-memory columnar storage, schema-less analytical engine (our secret sauce!). We are also proud of our ability to securely handle large volumes of data and sources across large volumes of users (with various levels of skill). Beyond that we are passionate about the user experience and recently released some exceptional user interface innovations, which you can experience in our dashboards.
What types of business analytics did companies find difficult to access prior to PivotLink’s SaaS BI?
Before PivotLink, the types of analytics that requires combining data sources and reporting across large volumes of data were a serious challenge. The other kind of analytics that seemed elusive were analytics on historical changes to transactions i.e. order transactions in ERP and pipeline changes in Salesforce.com.
Do you find that you still have to sell the concept of “The Cloud” or is cloud computing reaching critical mass in your markets?
The cloud is well understood amongst the BI aware crowd. SaaS BI continues to steadily gain adoption in the BI marketplace thanks in large part to the speed with which it delivers an ROI. While adoption has not yet reached critical mass status, we are hopeful that it will continue to flourish as more and more companies realize its benefits.
What product or feature will do the most to increase The Cloud’s public visibility this year?
We think it will be the ability to share insights dynamically between colleagues inside and outside the organization and use that to inform decision-making. Insight as a service (IaaS) is the new BI Greenfield.
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