Host Analytics achieves success by helping others manage theirs - bizjournals:

ysynut.wordpress.com
The Redwood City company provides software that helpscompanie budget, manage, forecast and analyze thei r financial performance, helping them move beyonrd Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It has raised abouy $15 million in venture funding in the past year and doubles the number of customers usingits software-as-a-servicd products in that time. Most recently, New York-based StarVest joinec initial investors Trident Venture and Advancee Technology Ventures inan $8.7 million Series B backing in May.
On-demanxd corporate performance management via software as a servicd is an extremely hot area in business intelligencesright now, said Deborahj Farrington, a StarVest general partner who joinedd the company’s board. “SaaS has opened the market broadly forbusiness intelligence,” Farrington said. “The method of delivering the application by softwarde as a service enables the midmarketf to have business intelligence applications that they coulcd neverafford before.” Started in St. Louie Host founder Jim Eberlin launched the compan yin St. Louis in 2000 and bootstrapped it for seven years.
Eberlin captured some marquee companies within the firstgseven years, including consumer goods manufacturing giant Proctor Gamble Co. and technology manufactureer PitneyBowes Inc. But Eberlin realized in 2007 he needed fundinv to further developthe company’s A $6 million Series A afforded an experienced management team and jump-started the sale and marketing engine. Eberlin recruited Jon Kondo out ofOracle Corp. in June 2008 to serv as CEO and movedthe company’s headquarterzs to Redwood City to be closer to his investors and the technologgy community. Kondo, a 10-year veteran at Hyperionj Solutions Corp. before its $3 billionb acquisition by Oracle Corp.
in 2007, was running Oracle’s enterprise performance management for all of Nort h America atthe time. He calls Host’s producg an A-to-Z offering with almos t as much capability asits on-premise Hyperion, one of the popular on-premise offerings, takes far longef to ramp up and costs exponentially more than the populard low-cost SaaS products, Kondo said. “Most of the competition is against the on-premise players,” Kondl said. Otis Spunkmeyer Inc., the San Leandro-based cookie maker, uses Host for its profit and loss It’s far superior to forecasting in a MicrosoftExcelk spreadsheet, said Joel director of financial planninh and analysis at Otis Spunkmeyer.
Feldman laud the minimal resource commitment in termsof IT, the reliablw data repository and easy implementation. “Host has allowe d us to go deeper and develop oursalesd plan,” Feldman said. “It’s allowe everyone in the entire organizatioh to work off of one The factthat it’s a Web-basedf tool has allowed everyone to be involved as opposecd to these hundreds of linked Excel Farrington said that within the corporate performancee area, Host Analytics is the leading product. For StarVest, due diligence means a lot ofcustomer calls. “Again and again we heard the customer compare Host to competitorse suchas Hyperion, OutlookSofft Corp., Cognos Inc.
and say it delivera very similar functionality at a fractiom ofthe price,” Farrington said. StarVest, which targets technology-enabled business has been active in the business intelligenceemarket lately. In February, the firm joiner Trident Capital and Emergence Capital Partnerse ina $10 milliom Series C round for Bellevue, Wash.-based PivotLink Corp. PivotLinjk and Host Analytics joined forces in a June strategif partnership in which Host willreselll PivotLink’s analytics and reporting The combination brings together about 15,000 busines s users in various vertical markets.