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According to Mercurial co-founder and managing director, Adam Hawkins, moving to a cloud platform provides the company with the 'ability to implement solutions and service our clients much more rapidly, with the added benefit of the security and integrity that cloud services provide.'
Hawkins says that the upgrade has provided multi-browser support to Mercurial's clients widening the variety of devices that can be used to access the information held within the cloud such as notebook, tablets and smartphones.
He also says that the company's clients rely on their business solutions to drive top and bottom line business performance through increased customer awareness, business risk and opportunity identification, and the quality and velocity of commercial decision making.
'Over the past few years, local companies have felt the pressure of influences such as the global financial crisis and government cost controls, and have had to re-engineer a lot of their sales, marketing and management processes as a result.
'Traditionally companies can spend weeks compiling multiple information sources for their sales and commercial operations. Using the WebFocus business intelligence tool, our industry expertise and our delivery over the cloud we have built MiPortal, which gets best practice, decision ready intelligence out to the sales field in a matter of days, giving them a significant competitive edge,' Hawkins added.
According to Hawkins, Mercurial's clients have 'come to realise that business data loaded on to a salesperson's laptop or tablet computer is far more vulnerable than information held securely within the cloud.'
Mercurial's services were initially built on an ASP model, with users logging in to their own physical partitions in Mercurial's data centre to retrieve live information via a web browser. Hawkins says that, in the past few months, the company has worked closely with Information Builders to re-architect its services based on a 'true cloud-based computing model, eliminating the need for physical servers, and broadening the reach of the service to users on multiple platforms and mobile devices.'
Information Builders' vice-president Asia Pacific, Rob Mills, said the nature and basic delivery of Mercurial's service remain the same, but 'what's different now is the ability to take that service to a much broader audience over the Cloud.'
'Other vendors have long spoken about the migration of BI to the Cloud, and the delivery of BI services to mobile users, but we've been doing these things with WebFOCUS for years, and Mercurial is now the only company I'm aware of that can demonstrate a live cloud-based BI service with tangible customers in Australia.'
