Will SMBs Be the Driving Force Behind BI on the Cloud?

Excellent Question! Soumadeep hits at a strategically important question.

If anything, SMB will be the motivating force and lifeblood behind BI in the cloud. Every SMB can make use of BI and Data warehousing but cannot afford an enterprise rollout.

First is the cost of the software itself. Add to it specialized skills necessary to set up, roll out, test and deploy these solutions.

BI in the cloud will allow them to start small at very small costs and then expand as neccesary. If it doesn;t work it may not have cost them too much!

I saw some data from a noted analyst firm recently. It indicated that of the three company sizes polled (under 5,000, 5,001 - 19,999, 20,000+) the largest company group had the highest adoption and interest in cloud. While this was not BI specific it was certainly counter intuitive to me.

They explained that large companies are in an eternal struggle to contain costs. They are looking at the cloud for ways to handle peak processing loads instead of scaling up to handle the load only to have that capacity sit dormant.

It is an interesting question. The general assumption is that SMBs are the primary users of on-demand and in the cloud BI offerings. But when we look closer, many large organizations deploy these offerings at the departmental level. That being said, I do think that the perception of mid-market needs and the ability to deploy solutions quickly with less costs up-front do help propel the overall use and expansion of BI in the cloud.