LaunchPoint, a provider of information-centric enterprise business solutions and services, announced today the close of a private Series B financial raise of $3.5 million, bringing total corporate investments to $6.7 million. Backers include the roster of existing LaunchPoint Series A investors and new private contributors.

Founded in 2008, LaunchPoint has served 30 customers through its two divisions: Ajilitee, a consulting and services firm that specializes in agile analytics, business intelligence, cloud enablement, and information management; and Discovery Health Partners, a provider of intelligent healthcare cost containment solutions that include subrogation, coordination of benefits and dependent eligibility verification. Customers include leading healthcare payers, provider networks, academic medical centers, and self-insured corporations.

In 2011, LaunchPoint revenue grew by ten-fold and its customer base doubled. LaunchPoint now employs more than 40 people. This latest financial raise will be allocated toward new customer onboarding and continued software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution development.

It is said that 2012 is the year of BI or Business Intelligence. As SaaS companies mature and release robust APIs, data is becoming more accessible and usable, especially in understanding usage statistics and in some cases business data integrated across multiple systems. 

RJMetrics a new player on the scene has raised $1.2 million in seed financing from Goldberg, and early-stage venture capitalists, including SoftTech VC, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Zelkova Ventures, and other angel investors such as Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg.

Provides Visibility Into Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Product Management for SaaS Companies

Our friends at Totango, a provider of a real-time customer engagement platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, announced the release of SaaS Executive Dashboard, the simplest way to plan and track key business metrics of SaaS companies. The new offering captures SaaS best practice metrics and formalizes them into a free tool much needed within this emerging industry.

The term 'Big Data' has become almost ubiquitous in discussions surrounding the future of data visualization and  business intelligence. Although it is used in a range of different situations, the expression has become an umbrella term to explain the steep increase in the amount, and the variety of data now produced. Whilst many recent statistics simply cover the amount of data produced, The University Of Texas recently conducted a study sponsored by Sybase to examine the the possible benefit to companies if this data could be utilized.

The study is based on 150 Fortune 1000 companies and thus the results are very vague. That said, the study comes up with some interesting findings. With a 10% increase in the userbility of it's data, the average Fortune 1000 company from the sample could increase their return-on-equity by 16%. Some of the other key finds are neatly summarized in the stylish infographic we found on ReadWriteWeb below.

The study further highlights the need for companies to turn their data into dollars. Bime lets the small guys unlock the value of big data!

We constantly hear about how much data we are creating every day – check out this interesting little infographic by which puts some of those numbers in perspective.

This ‘data explosion‘ is one of the reasons companies need tools like Bime – new innovations have enabled more and more data to be managed and supported, and this data needs to be analyzed in order to produce value for an organization.

Start analyzing now.

CIO Insight recently published a slideshow about application adoption trends over the next year. According to a recent survey from SnapLogic, of which over 110 CIOs and other top execs took part, CIOs and other senior tech executives continue to pursue BI, analytics, productivity/collaboration, financial, sales and social media tools, as they strive to integrate IT with their organization’s strategic objectives.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

PivotLink, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), announced the immediate availability of PivotLink 5, the latest release of its market-leading SaaS BI platform. PivotLink CEO Bruce Armstrong unveiled the news at the 2011 PivotLink User Group Conference in San Francisco this week, where over 50 customers and partners from retail, manufacturing, technology, transportation and other industries are sharing success stories and demonstrating their use cases on the new platform.

PivotLink 5 bolsters agile business intelligence by helping users see more using on-the-fly visualization, do more in the streamlined administration interface, and share more by taking PivotLink to go on leading mobile devices.

Aberdeen Research are one of the research firms that have been following the SaaS Business Intelligence trend for a while now. They recently published a paper called “SaaS Business Intelligence: Driving Agility through Self-Service“. The paper ultimately recognizes the fact that the increased adoption of SaaS in the business intelligence field validates that it is increasingly becoming a viable option for BI deployment in all types of organizations.

Instead of giving you a long-winded written summary of the report, we’ve decided to pick out some of the more interesting numbers!

We Are Cloud Launches Bime – Global Business Intelligence to Succeed in the Age of Big Data

Bime with QueryBlender Lets Companies Mine Their Own Business, Mix and Match Data Sets to Turn Questions into Valuable Insights

DEMO FALL 2011, SANTA CLARA, CA, September 13, 2011 —We Are Cloud, the “ICT European start-up of the year,” today announced the release of Version 3.0 of Bime, the global and elegant business intelligence (BI) service for the age of cloud computing, at DEMO Fall 2011.