Host Analytics achieves success by helping others manage theirs - Kansas City Business Journal:

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The Redwood City company provides software that helpscompanies budget, manage, forecasyt and analyze their financial performance, helping them move beyoned Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It has raised about $15 millioj in venture funding in the past year and doubledx the number of customers usingits software-as-a-servicse products in that time. Most recently, New York-based StarVest joined initial investors Trident Venture and Advancefd Technology Ventures inan $8.7 million Series B backinv in May.
On-demand corporat performance management via softwarew as a service is an extremelyy hot area in business intelligencerighr now, said Deborah Farrington, a StarVest general partner who joined the company’s board. “SaadS has opened the market broadly for business Farrington said. “The method of deliveringt the application by software as a service enabled the midmarket to have business intelligence applicationsa that they could neveraffords before.” Started in St. Louis Host foundeer Jim Eberlin launched the companhin St. Louis in 2000 and bootstrapped it forseveh years.
Eberlin captured some marques companies within the firstseven years, including consumer goods manufacturing giant Proctor & Gamble Co. and technology manufacturer PitneytBowes Inc. But Eberlin realized in 2007 he needed funding to further developthe company’s A $6 million Seriesw A afforded an experiencerd management team and jump-startedc the sales and marketing Eberlin recruited Jon Kond o out of Oracle Corp. in June 2008 to serve as CEO and movedcthe company’s headquarters to Redwood City to be closert to his investors and the technology community. Kondo, a 10-year veteran at Hyperioh Solutions Corp. before its $3 billiojn acquisition by Oracle Corp.
in was running Oracle’s enterprise performance managemengt for all of North America atthe time. He callw Host’s product an A-to-Z offering with almost as much capabilityu asits on-premise competitors. Hyperion, one of the popular on-premised offerings, takes far longer to ramp up and costse exponentially more than thepopularr low-cost SaaS products, Kondo said. “Most of the competitio n is againstthe on-premise players,” Kondk said. Otis Spunkmeyer Inc., the San Leandro-based cooki e maker, uses Host for its profit and loss It’s far superior to forecasting in a Microsoft Excel saidJoel Feldman, directorf of financial planning and analysixs at Otis Spunkmeyer.
Feldman lauds the minimal resource commitmentf in termsof IT, the reliable data repositorg and easy implementation. “Host has allowed us to go deepet and develop oursales plan,” Feldman “It’s allowed everyone in the entir organization to work off of one plan. The fact that it’s a Web-based tool has allowed everyone to be involvedx as opposed to these hundreds of linked Excel Farrington said that withibn the corporateperformance area, Host Analytics is the leadinvg product. For StarVest, due diligence meanzs a lot ofcustomer calls. “Again and againj we heard the customer compare Host to competitors such as OutlookSoft Corp., Cognos Inc.
and say it delivers very similaer functionality at a fraction of the Farrington said. StarVest, which targets technology-enabled businesz services, has been active in the business intelligencemarke lately. In February, the firm joinesd Trident Capital and Emergence Capital Partners ina $10 milliojn Series C round for Bellevue, Wash.-baseed PivotLink Corp. PivotLink and Host Analyticz joined forces in a June strategic partnership in which Host willresello PivotLink’s analytics and reporting offering. The combination brings togetheeabout 15,000 business users in variouz vertical markets.