Bimotics – What’s In a Name?

On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, we got to have an interesting conversation with a so-called “cloud evangelist”, a charismatic character who preached the good word of all things tech and cloud solutions in particular. During the course of our discussion, he was interested in how we became so passionate about building Bimotics and how our unusual name came to be.  After hearing our answer, he encouraged us to share it with our customers.

Our Name

Bimotics stands for business intelligence automation. We got the name by taking the abbreviation for business intelligence, “B.I.”, and merging it with the word “domotics” which is the word for home automation.  We chose this name because it embodies what we set out to achieve -- automating the  processes required to bring fresh, easily identifiable, and actionable insights to companies. Efficiencies gained from this automation allow Bimotics to provide powerful yet affordable solutions to small and medium sized businesses. The same principle applies to our developer tools which automate the steps needed to build big data solutions.

Our Logo

The concept behind our logo is pretty cool, if not slightly nerdy.  As an analytics company, we wanted to show something of a bar chart, incorporating colors often used to denote visualizations like green, yellow, and red.  At the same time, we wanted to capture the heart of Bimotics analytics by depicting various data sources, represented by colored boxes, knit together. That’s our logo on the surface.

Looking under the hood however, reveals our inner geekiness.  Embedded in the logo is the binary code for “B.I.”. The yellow box is in the 2nd position representing “B” and the red and green are in 1st and 8th position which stands for “I” (the 9th letter in the alphabet).  

We are a technology company through and through, and it is reflected in our name, our icon, and everything we do! 

About our tagiline: Good to know!

Bimotics – What’s In a Name?

On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, we got to have an interesting conversation with a so-called “cloud evangelist”, a charismatic character who preached the good word of all things tech and cloud solutions in particular. During the course of our discussion, he was interested in how we became so passionate about building Bimotics and how our unusual name came to be.  After hearing our answer, he encouraged us to share it with our customers.

Our Name

Bimotics stands for business intelligence automation. We got the name by taking the abbreviation for business intelligence, “B.I.”, and merging it with the word “domotics” which is the word for home automation.  We chose this name because it embodies what we set out to achieve -- automating the  processes required to bring fresh, easily identifiable, and actionable insights to companies. Efficiencies gained from this automation allow Bimotics to provide powerful yet affordable solutions to small and medium sized businesses. The same principle applies to our developer tools which automate the steps needed to build big data solutions.

Our Logo

The concept behind our logo is pretty cool, if not slightly nerdy.  As an analytics company, we wanted to show something of a bar chart, incorporating colors often used to denote visualizations like green, yellow, and red.  At the same time, we wanted to capture the heart of Bimotics analytics by depicting various data sources, represented by colored boxes, knit together. That’s our logo on the surface. 

Looking under the hood however, reveals our inner geekiness.  Embedded in the logo is the binary code for “B.I.”. The yellow box is in the 2nd position representing “B” and the red and green are in 1st and 8th position which stands for “I” (the 9th letter in the alphabet).  

We are a technology company through and through, and it is reflected in our name, our icon, and everything we do!

4 ways to getting Sales Analytics through The Trough of Disillusionment

One of Gartner’s proprietary research methodologies is the so called “Hype Cycle”, which attempts to measure on a curve, where a technology or technological term is in its popularity maturity cycle.  The main components as you would expect are 1) the sharp rise as visibility increases and the technology is the talk of the town, 2) the peak, 3) the trough of disillusionment where the technology’s value delivered does not exceed the early excitement generated, 4) climbing the slope back upward as the hype wears off and the technology proves its worth, and 5) finally the plateau where the technology has matured and is in better line with consumer expectation.

Late last year, there was a lot of buzz about how Big Data is hitting its peak where its benefits and value are near-term overstated and expectations are highest.  After its rapid uphill climb, Big Data is for the first time looking down the other side of the slope and now it will have to prove value against dissenters and trek to the other side of the valley.  Information Week, had a pretty interesting article about it here.

What struck me the most was the steep descent of Sales Analytics and Gartner’s expectation that it will be mired in the trough of disillusionment for the next 5 years . I find this to be a shame as so much work and investment is going into sales analytics, and results thus far are not living up to the hype.  

Having worked in enterprise business analysis, I have seen firsthand the behavior, characteristics, and technological limitations of sales users -- and it drove the vision to start Bimotics.  With that, I have gathered insight about the subject of Sales Analytics and sales dashboards and have listed a few suggestions that may save the subject and get the group as a whole over to the slope of enlightenment!

1. Speed things up! - With the volume of relevant data and analytics, it is easy to make users wait for the information to load. Sales people are stereotypically impatient with shorter attention spans, so if you want them too look at analytics don’t make them wait.
2. Clean it up! - Sales dashboards and analytics should look as polished as the sales materials that sales reps give to to their customers. I found usability is profoundly important with this user group.  Do not expect them to click around to look for something.
3. Show the money! - Sales dashboards and analytics that don’t show the monetary impact are just not interesting to sales representatives who are generally incentivised by commissions and making a revenue quota. Blending information on commissions, pipeline value, opportunity size and bookings will certaining make the analytics more interesting and valuable.
4. Encourage sharing and collaboration!: When planning a sale to a Sales Executive, a rule of them is to highlight how easy it is to share and communicate. This is because being able to work as a team and communicate to others is very important to sales.  Analytics and insights from a sales metric should be captured in the tool itself and sharable with a team.

Small business Buying Behavior: Evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership vs ROI

Expanding on the insights garnered from our target customers at the expos earlier this month, I learned that total cost of ownership (TCO) could be the differentiating factor when small businesses consider Bimotics alongside other analytics software, especially among business owners.  TCO is a financial estimate intended to help determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or system.  For analytical solutions, cost to a business often includes software, hardware, and the IT resources need to implement and maintain them.  For a typical business intelligence system, the TCO can run easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bimotics understands that TCO is actually a barrier to adoption for small business.  That is why we are focused on an affordable subscription model where we take on the cost of IT resources and the maintenance of it, and offer our package at a substantially lower cost.  Our TCO as well as purchase price is considerably lower compared to enterprise level technology providers while providing the essential analytics that businesses demand.  In the future, we are looking to run several experiments in order to further characterize price sensitivity.  

We recognize that measuring TCO is a very important conversation to have since analytics software in general is faced with a return on investment (ROI) dilemma, i.e. “is the software we are purchasing worth the cost?”. You see, the benefits of analytics, metrics, charts and business intelligence are not always easily measurable.  Indeed, agreement regarding the dollars saved can be disputed and debated depending on who is doing the measuring.  

For those stuck in the middle of an ROI debate, price, operational efficiency, and TCO play a critical role in the decision making process.  Affordable solutions like Bimotics virtually end this debate.  We firmly believe that the long-touted value of business analytics is nearly indisputable, with proven benefits and insights which can in turn improve everything from revenue growth to sales force development, from marketing to supply chain.  Finding an analytics package that does grow your business with minimal TCO is a key to success.