Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were at Siebel through that acquisition?

Brad Peters: No, I wasn’t. You could see the writing on the wall. Analytics was exploding. We were doing really well, but the rest of the company was not doing so well. It was actually shrinking. You could tell that the company was on a collision course with something else. It just wasn’t adapting to newer technologies and architectures. There were a couple of observations that came out of that experience. We had this analytics product that was doing really well, which was basically tackling the idea that normal business people in organizations need data to make decisions and that seemed to be something that was insatiable and was going to continue to grow for some time. There was huge demand for that. >>>

Pre-IPO MuleSoft Makes SaaS Apps Talk to One Another

According to research firm IHS, worldwide enterprise spending on cloud-related technology is projected to triple over the period 2011 through 2017. The market is estimated to be worth $235.1 billion by the year 2017. In the current year, global business spending on infrastructure and services related to the cloud are projected to grow 20% over 2013 to $174.2 billion. As the adoption for cloud services increases, organizations are also looking for services that help with the integration of not only traditional legacy on-premise applications and software with the cloud, but also the integration of multiple upcoming technologies.

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Birst’s beginnings had many of the same principles that we espouse in 1M/1M, engaging customers in paying relationships early on being the foremost. Today, the company has raised four rounds of venture capital, and is growing fast as a regular Silicon Valley-style pre-IPO company.

Sramana Mitra: Brad, let’s do your back story first. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? >>>

Oracle Continues to Build Their Cloud Portfolio

According to IDC, worldwide spending on public IT cloud services is projected to grow 23.5% annually over the period 2013 through 2017 to be worth over $107 billion in 2017. The market was estimated to be worth $47.4 billion in 2013. The growth in cloud markets is estimated to be five times that of the IT industry’s growth. In response to the trend, all IT majors have focused their efforts in offering cloud-based subscription services.

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Adobe’s Subscription Service Delivers

If analysts had any doubts about Adobe’s (Nasdaq: ADBE) capabilities of delivering on the cloud, they have been put to rest. In the recently reported results, Adobe has demonstrated how to successfully migrate from a software sales model to a cloud-based subscription service model.

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Castlight Health Vaults with a High Value IPO

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, healthcare spending in the US is projected to be worth $3.1 trillion this year, of which $620 billion is paid by US employers. Despite this significant expenditure, the healthcare industry in the country is plagued with inefficiencies and extreme variations in price and quality of health care. A major factor for these inefficiencies is the inadequate availability of information, especially with respect to the price and quality of health care, which makes it difficult for employees and health care providers to make wise health care choices.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 5)

But I would think that there’s tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to kickoff very specific use cases within an industry or between a couple of technologies and build complete solutions. For example, something around the idea of connecting SMS types of technologies to other forms of broad-based marketing such as email, analytics between SMS campaigns, and web analytics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 4)

My perspective in what’s happening in the cloud is reasonably deep because I’ve been living in it for so long. The three trends that I see at this point won’t probably be new to you. The way that I packaged them might shape what it is we’re doing here for Scribe. Number one is the tsunami that is the cloud. It is growing exponentially faster and especially within the last year. Despite all the negative stories regarding concerns of privacy, security, and the bias against using cloud in certain geographies, there’s an acceptance now that the value of cloud is so overwhelming that it seems like some of these concerns are just eroding. The ubiquity of the cloud is all but assured. That’s the number one driver. >>>