SAN MATEO, Calif., June 25, 2008 -- Cloud9 Analytics, the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence (BI) applications, today announced its vision to deliver a new class of BI: on-demand, role-based solutions that meet the unique needs of individual sales, marketing and operations professionals and facilitate collaboration across traditional functional boundaries. Cloud9’s Pipeline Management Suite, including Pipeline Accelerator, Forecast Accelerator, and Cloud9 for Excel, is the first in a set of business intelligence applications that personalizes analytics so that users receive the information they need when they need it, and it is pre-configured for more immediate results.

Redefining Business Intelligence

Cloud9 delivers BI applications as a service over the Internet and makes them available directly to end users in just 24 hours with nothing to install or maintain, and no need for IT support. During the first major push around SaaS innovation, the business world witnessed salesforce.com’s success in empowering a vast sales operations and administration community with CRM applications that are accessible and easy-to-use. This same community is starved for a BI solution that not only follows the salesforce.com example of delivering on the promise of SaaS, but goes further to provide intelligent business insight to anyone, anywhere. Cloud9 Analytics is meeting this need with its on-demand, role-based business intelligence applications.

“We are leading the charge to transform BI as it’s been known,” said Swayne Hill, chief executive officer, Cloud9 Analytics. “Historically, Business Intelligence vendors empowered ‘knowledge workers’ with tools and technology, but these traditional on-premise systems are costly, time-consuming and do not keep pace with business demands. While early generations of SaaS BI addressed some of the infrastructure and cost issues, they are still just tools and technology, still inaccessible to business users. At Cloud9 we’re focused on delivering immediate and on-going value to the business with on-demand applications, finally delivering on the SaaS promise.”

The Role-Based Approach – Applied Use of Technologies

Cloud9 Analytics’ role-based approach not only personalizes the delivery of business insights, but also gives each user the information needed to collaborate more effectively with other team members. The company’s flagship offering, Cloud9 Analytics Pipeline Management Suite, is designed for sales teams using salesforce.com and includes Pipeline Accelerator, Forecast Accelerator, and Cloud9 for Excel.

With Pipeline Accelerator and Forecast Accelerator, sales managers gain instant visibility into changes and emerging trends across all sales opportunities, forecasts, teams and individuals. Cloud9 for Excel gives sales operations a visual report builder add-on to Excel with access to an on-demand CRM data warehouse that automatically inherits changes made in Salesforce. Cloud9 for Excel also enables online report publishing for immediate viewing. As a whole, Pipeline Management Suite takes BI to the next level – the applications are preconfigured to interpret data based on all available history, custom fields, and personalized pipeline segmentation.

“Pipeline Accelerator gives me just the right information in just the right format,” said Cloud9 Analytics customer Ray Taylor, senior vice president of sales at Signature Worldwide. “Cloud9 Analytics had already thought it all through. We didn’t need to have a lot of meetings to discuss the information I wanted to get out of Salesforce. They know what people like me want to look at.”

Seizing the Market Opportunity

Cloud9 Analytics is leveraging its recent innovations to seize the SaaS BI market opportunity – according to analyst estimates, SaaS is the highest growth segment for enterprise software and the market is expected to reach $19 billion by 2011. The company has recognized that the shortcomings with traditional approaches to BI and analytics are rooted in the data rather than the tools – tracking metrics over time not only requires a strong data warehouse, but also the ability to get the data to the people who need it, in the way that helps them most. As the first company ever to completely automate the generation and maintenance of a custom data warehouse foundation for BI applications, Cloud9 Analytics is delivering sophisticated applications in an easy-to-use, role-based format and without the high cost of traditional data warehouse projects.

"Analytic applications today are about the applied use of intelligence tools and technologies, and one of the clearest ways to deliver information in context of how someone does their job," said John Hagerty, vice president and research fellow, AMR Research. “Today’s companies need applied BI analytics that help them understand not just what happened yesterday or last week, but what changed and why. Vendors that already deliver this perspective drive competitive advantage for their clients."

“At Cloud9 we’ve figured out that when you pre-configure BI applications, rather than deliver simple reporting tools, you actually get to help solve business problems,” said Scott Wiener, CTO, Cloud9 Analytics. “And because we’re doing this with on-demand delivery and agile software engineering, new features show up for our customers every single month and no one has to upgrade, migrate or retrofit anything. We’re adding value immediately, and by eliminating the need for infrastructure and IT investment, we’re taking the pain out of BI.”

About Cloud9 Analytics

Cloud9 Analytics delivers easy-to-use business intelligence applications directly to sales, marketing, and support organizations as a service over the Internet. The company’s first offering, the Cloud9 Pipeline Management Suite, reduces revenue risk, increases team productivity and provides shared visibility for collaboration at every level of the sales organization. Powered by the industry’s first truly on-demand analytics platform, Cloud9’s applications deliver value in just 24 hours and require zero installation, zero maintenance and zero IT support. Cloud9 Analytics’ customers include market leaders such as Ryder, Data Domain, Coremetrics and GENBAND. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California. For more information, please visit www.cloud9analytics.com.