Top 5 Things that made 2015 Awesome (AoF Edition)

Well technically the site is still up, content intact, and the blog still receives over 10K+ visitors each month. For those who are freaking out, we can assure you that we have no intentions of removing the site or content in 2016. We can’t even explain the heartache of saying goodbye to our beloved Xcelsius community. From our legendary Xcelsius Gurus parties at ASUG conferences, to all of the amazing customers and partners that supported us, it was truly some of the best years of BusinessObjects. Launching our new Analytics on Fire blog was an enormous relief and gave us a new home.

While everyone didn’t make the transition with us (mostly due Xcelsius dying), our hope is that we can regain their loyalty in 2016. To date, we have 20K+ followers in our community and growing. The ability to finally transition to our new home here at the AoF blog made 2015 awesome!

The number one question people have asked us for the last four years is, what do you guys do? We took this to mean, ‘How do you make money?’ A good question, when all that was visible was our blog. We’re proud to say that BI Brainz (our new name) is now a global BI consulting firm operating in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and the Middle East. While we always worked with some of the biggest brands in the world such as Ericsson, Shell, Nestle and many more, we finally consolidated under a single brand, BI Brainz. The new name reflects our continued focus to balance left and white brain thinking when it comes to enterprise analytics projects and success.

Since our launch, we almost doubled in revenue (with a lot of work that is). In 2016, we are going to be making a few more changes to make our services more accessible to customers, so stay tuned! However, birthing BI Brainz made 2015 an awesome year for our clients and partners!

We are no longer a technology focused community, but we can’t help but keep close tabs on what’s happening in the BI tools world. One article from MIT back in Nov confirmed that there are 500+ BI tools on the market and counting! In the SAP world, we watched user adoption of legacy BI tools like Xcelsius continue to tank in 2015. Meanwhile, SAP newest BI products Lumira and Design Studio struggled to keep up with Tableau.

This signaled our need to expand. After keynoting the Microsoft PASS BA conference in March, I am now a board advisor for their BA community. Excel has a billion users. We see this as an excellent opportunity to bring our enterprise knowledge to the table and expand our community. We also have invites to other hot communities (no tools named) that we’re eyeing for 2016. This means more diversity for you. Having access to this new community made 2015 awesome!

It’s no secret that as Xcelsius fanatics, warming up to SAP BI4 flagship product Lumira has been a painful and slow road. However, when we saw SAP Cloud Analytics at the SAP Teched 2015 conference in Las Vegas last October our heads almost exploded. We just could not believe it was an SAP product. While it has taken SAP forever to get to this stage (maybe Hasso demanding the digital boardroom had something to do with it), this tool is something we look forward to in 2016. It’s still too early to determine how it will perform in the market; though we do think SAP customers finally have something to look forward to. BI Cloud revenue only accounts for 7% of all BI revenue sales to date, but kudos to SAP for leaping into the market with a solid product.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to request your SAP Cloud Analytics login (average wait is 4-8 weeks if your not a customer though).

The one thing that made 2015 awesome was you! From your heart warming emails about career changes to your constant engagement on social media to visits at our booth to share your stories, we do love and appreciate you. You have no idea how far that support goes. It helped us to decide to relaunch this blog and continue to deliver amazing free content.

While we evolved in 2015, in 2016 we’re working hard to take it to another level. Hint: We will be 100% digital! To kick off the new year, please do invite your friends to join and follow us.