Gian Trotta: Welcome to a very special podcast series. I'm ebizQ's Gian Trotta. Joining us today is Lyndsay Wise, a frequent and popular guest on previous business intelligence-related podcasts and Webinars. She joins us today to talk about how BI is reaching and benefiting more mid-market companies. Thank you, Lyndsay, for taking time from a busy publishing and travel schedule to join us.

Lyndsay Wise: Thank you, Gian.

GT: Lyndsay, right now we seem to be at a crossroads or a watershed or you might say, a cross-watershed -- how is market consolidation changing BI deployments?

LW: That's a really good question, actually. There are about three ways that market consolidations are changing the face of business intelligence deployments. So, the first one is that with consolidations, vendors are actually embedding business intelligence solutions within their service offerings. And if they're not, they are creating adapters so that organizations can add to business intelligence functionality to their current solutions.

So, for example, an organization can embed BI and analytics into their overall CRM ERP or financial systems. So because of this, No. 2 is happening: smaller and newer entrants to the market are emerging that focus on more best-of-breed solutions such as operational BI, etc. So organizations are able to pick and choose the solutions they want and how to apply business intelligence into an organization.

And No. 3 is that not only are newer vendors coming along, but the expansion of business intelligence towards SaaS-based solutions to allow hosted offerings that can be deployed at a departmental level. And the reason why these solutions or these changes in the market are enabling organizations and more mid-market specific organizations to use BI is because, one, their price tags are lower and two, there's more areas and solution types that organizations can look towards as opposed to just tier one type business intelligence solution that might not suit their needs.

GT: Right. So, see, there are a number of choices here. What benefits and pitfalls are these mid-market companies finding because of these deployments?