The Birst Team recently returned from the Midsize Enterprise Summit in LA, which focuses on IT managers and decision-makers for midmarket companies. We expected to hear many tales of woe - midsize organizations are often large enough to have decently sized IT teams and a deep understanding of technological complexity and capability, but really not enough resources to go around. It can sometimes feel like the curse of knowledge - you know enough to realize that you're in a tough situation, but you don't have the resources to get out of it.
And the squeeze has only gotten more intense over the last 12 months, as IT teams have had to grapple with economic realities, streamlining teams and budgets. Of course, the list of demands on IT rarely goes down, leaving the team feeling beleaguered.
So we were expecting to see some signs of wariness in the attendees at the event. What we found, however, was a souped-up crowd of IT executives ready and eager to tackle their 2010 projects, and open to new ideas about the best way to do so. The on-demand business intelligence story, with its message of powerful analytics, fast deployment, and affordability, really found a receptive audience at the event. (It also didn't hurt that we had a fun giveaway that even our competitors were asking for.)
So it was nice to see this conference demolish another myth about SaaS - that IT departments don't like SaaS and won't approve it. On the contrary, these IT execs were excited about the possibilities of SaaS and how it can help their under-resourced IT teams accomplish more without heavy capital investment and implementation time. It's nice to see these forward-thinking execs yet again proving the conventional wisdom wrong.
(Birst has already demolished one of the most pervasive myths - that enterprises don't buy it. That's news to our customers Securian and RBC Wealth Management.)
