Bitam came to discuss EPM products in a Software as a Service model, BI industry in a bad economy, and the future of EPM in US and globally. Leading the discussion is
Manuel Lopez, COO and Professional Services and Consulting.
Bitam's mission is “To improve business performance transforming valuable information into better business decisions" focusing on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). I like taglines... Bitam's tagline is "intelligent knowledge you drive." With 57% of their employees in the research area, Bitam has a high emphasis on research rather than sales.
They became globally oriented about five years ago and placed an emphasis on the US about three years ago. Privately held and conservative financially. Privately held. 30+ consecutive quarters of profitability. When asked about 1Q09, Manuel said that this quarter 'should be' profitable. Headquarters in Reston, VA, Tampico, Mex, and Madrid, Spain, with their origin from Tampico.
They have 1,500 customer, with 100+ of them in SaaS.
View customers. 97% loyalty rate based on maintenance renewals. 20% switch from other BI products. Most customers in Latin America from Mexico to Brazil, along with Spain. When asked how they have some many customers, Manuel said, "We are easy to do business with. We take the risk from the customer by doing more up front." It is impressive that 75% of their customers are small-medium businesses (with annual revenue less than $500M).
Manuel was asked about their uniqueness of their offerings, "Bitam started with the business problem, formulated a business strategy, designed a complementary methodology, and then developed homegrown products to support that methodology."
The biggest competitor was characterized as 'ignorance'. When pressed about major BI tool vendor, like Cognos, they has an 80% win rate when the customer is deciding whether to buy Bitam or the other vendor. When pressed further about customers already having a major BI tool, Manuel said that most customer are stuck in reporting and are 'ignorant' of dashboards and other EPM areas. Claudia asked who is your typical customer, business or IT. Manuel responded that it is usually the business where their value for EPM is more apparent.
Manuel argued that Bitam's value proposition is:
- High user adoption rate
- Up to 50% reduced implementation time
- Up to 75% reduced Support cost
- Up to 75% lower TCO
- Easy to do business with
- Open technology for seamless integration
Merv made the point that most of this value proposition is not a value proposition from the customer's perspective.
Covered a case study for Home Depot. Reduction of IT support from 4 dedicated to Cognos to 1 at 50% for Bitam. 100+ stores track sales, shipments.
Bitam recently acquired
KPI Online, an OEM customer who took Bitam into SaaS delivery to 100+ subscribers.
After the break, we got into Bitam's notions of
Knowledge Intelligence. Then, Manuel demo-ed their product set, starting with strategic planning using
Stratego. From the strategy, Bitam can monitor
performance. From performance to
scoring individual's performance to those strategic objectives. Can then display as
dashboards. By right-clicking on any KPI, the user can bring up the Knowledge Intelligence component that will display the
Probable Causes. Under each cause, are suggestions for possible solutions. Next to the solution is a button to Add Initative, which creates a project to execute on that solution.
