BI as a SaaS is nothing new, really. However, the interest in cloud computing, including SaaS, has made BI-enabled SaaS accelerate. That was the point of this recent article by Leslie Ament and Howard Baldwin.
"Acquiring business intelligence (BI) capabilities through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model versus enterprise business intelligence represents the inflection point of two separate trends in business. One trend signals the increasing importance of gaining insight into all manner of business events. These events encompass not just transactions, but patterns in activity as widespread as customer responsiveness, network management, supply chain performance, and fraud detection."
The idea is simple; it's cheaper and much simpler to leverage an on-demand version of BI technology than using one that's on-premise, that's pretty clear. However, the larger issue is the durability of that model in the context of BI which has a tendency to be more bound into the enterprise.
However, the article goes on to highlight some other advantages:
"With a SaaS application, companies can generally:
* Deploy applications faster (weeks rather than months)
* Reduce the cost of deployment (by a factor of four)
* Avoid the cost of hardware and associated maintenance and monitoring
* Eliminate the need for on-site expertise in the application itself"
Nothing new there, if you ask me. I think by now most people understand the benefits, of moving towards on-demand SaaS versus on-premise.
What does need a consideration is the strategic nature of BI, and the burning questions as to if this is a good candidate for SaaS. Most on-demand BI systems will have to reach back into the enterprise to see the data, thus integration can be somewhat of a challenge. Moreover, traditional IT is going to be a bit skittish about sending their information outside of the firewall.
Not to say that we won't see a ton of BI on-demand in the next few years, we clearly will. However, the larger question is: Is BI is a good candidate for a SaaS-delivered application? You have to look at your own needs and requirements to answer that.
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