SAN MATEO, Calif.-- Cloud9 Analytics, the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence (BI) applications, today announced the Cloud9 Pipeline Management Suite, the industry’s most complete BI solution for sales teams. The suite’s personalized applications -- Pipeline Accelerator, Forecast Accelerator, and Cloud9 for Excel -- grow revenue by reducing risk and increasing productivity at every level of the sales organization.

According to a recent McKinsey & Co. report on a survey of B2B sales executives, improving sales pipeline management results in a 2-10% increase in revenue. With this opportunity in mind, Cloud9’s Pipeline Management Suite delivers role-based applications that drive effective opportunity management, more accurate forecasting, and simplified exception management.

“I’ve managed sales teams for the past 15 years, so I know firsthand the pain resulting from incomplete pipeline views, handicapping team forecasts and waiting for Ops to deliver the reports we need,” said Swayne Hill, CEO of Cloud9 Analytics. “The Pipeline Management Suite, with its role-based approach to BI applications, eliminates the guesswork by delivering actionable views on historical trends, future projections, and up-to-the-minute ‘what’s changed’ calculations directly to users’ fingertips in just the format they need to help them do their jobs. And for the sales team, that means increased revenue.”

Designed for sales teams using salesforce.com, Cloud9’s new suite addresses the individual needs of sales managers, sales operations, and executives to improve performance and promote collaboration across the sales team. Cloud9’s applications require zero installation, zero maintenance, and zero IT support, delivering value directly to business users in just 24 hours.

“Our sales have gone up every month since we started using Cloud9,” said Ray Taylor, senior vice president of sales at Signature Worldwide. “While we don’t attribute our growth exclusively to Cloud9, the shared visibility that we delivered to the team with the Pipeline Management Suite paved the way for the collaboration necessary to achieve these results.”

Where Did That $1,000,000 Go? Pipeline Accelerator Reveals “What’s Changed”

Pipeline Accelerator equips sales managers with self-service access to real-time information on changes in the pipeline and historical trend data so they can deal with issues before it’s too late. Key features include:

    * Easy Access: Embedded in salesforce.com so there’s nothing new to learn; custom fields and role hierarchy are inherited automatically
    * What’s Changed Insight Views: Know what factors impact success with up-to-the-minute information on what’s changed in forecast and pipeline data between any two points in time
    * Key Deal Monitoring: Watch-list tracking with reports sent via e-mail or to a mobile device to alert users anytime, anywhere of changes in critical opportunities for real-time pre-emptive exception management

“Everyone’s always asking us ‘what’s changed in the forecast from last week?’ – including our CEO,” said Richard Guest, vice president of sales operations at GENBAND. “At any point in time the funnel might change from $30 million one week to $26 million the next, and although that’s a big change, it can be hard to find, especially if the change is made up of several different opportunities. In the past, it could take us many hours of creating reports to find where changes had occurred, but Pipeline Accelerator lays the answers right out for you: what’s changed, when, where, why and by whom - in a matter of seconds.”

Worried About Hitting Next Quarter’s Number? Forecast Accelerator Improves Accuracy

Forecast Accelerator automatically identifies and analyzes historical patterns of team performance so that managers and executives can predict sales performance accurately and allocate resources most effectively for a higher win rate. Key features include:

    * Instant Handicapping: Automatic application of performance patterns by rep and team improves forecast accuracy and promotes efficient staffing and resource allocation
    * Historical Trending: Insights into goal attainment and pipeline conversion rate trends encourage accountability
    * Slippage Tracker: Month-to-month pipeline slippage trends identify over-optimistic ‘close date’ patterns and/or poor sales cycle management

“What you sell is no longer the secret weapon to winning,” said Jim Dickie, managing partner of CSO Insights. “The companies that are winning today are those that can best use the lessons of the past to take control of their future. By mapping historical patterns of performance to forecasts, organizations can identify potential shortfalls before it’s too late and make better decisions – rather than guesses – about the next steps in the selling process.”

Drowning in Spreadsheets? Cloud9 for Excel Liberates Sales Operations

The quickest and easiest way for sales operations to view current data against the backdrop of history, Cloud9 for Excel delivers unconstrained access to the industry’s first on-demand CRM data warehouse. Cloud9’s breakthrough data warehouse “in the cloud” captures a customer’s full data history, including both standard and custom data objects, and automatically adapts to ongoing changes made in salesforce.com. Key features include:

    * Ease of Use: Visual report builder add-on to Excel with familiar drag-and-drop interface
    * Endless Possibilities: Unrestricted tables, joins, sub-queries, and custom functions allow sales operations to create all the reports that can’t be built in Salesforce
    * Seamless Sharing: Publishing capabilities enable operations to share reports with online Pipeline Management Suite users for quicker responses to ad-hoc requests while retaining administrative control through automatic application of Salesforce security

Cloud9’s Secret Sauce: A Data Warehouse in the Cloud

Cloud9’s Pipeline Management Suite delivers on the company’s vision, also announced today, for a new class of BI: on-demand, role-based applications that meet the distinct needs of individual business users across sales, marketing and support and facilitates collaboration blurring the traditional functional boundaries. Powered by the industry’s first truly on-demand analytics platform, Cloud9’s applications deliver value directly to the business user at a significantly lower cost than other solutions and adapt to rapidly-changing business needs.

“What we are doing at the technical level is a radical change from other BI applications,” said Scott Wiener, CTO for Cloud9 Analytics. “The secret sauce for Cloud9 is what we call our ‘data warehouse in the cloud.’ It contains the same rich data and functionality of a traditional data warehouse, but it’s available as a service over the internet to our customers so they don’t need to build anything on their own. To get this level of business intelligence before, companies had to spend significant money and time building and managing the data warehouse infrastructure. Now, they get that same power with the flick of a switch. It’s a major shift in the industry and we’re the first to deliver it.”

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.