On-Demand BI Curious?

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence got a lot of attention last week over at CIO.com. If the concept of business analytics being delivered as an on-demand service is still foreign to you, or if you’re simply on-demand BI curious, be sure to check out this article, Business Intelligence and On-Demand: The Perfect Marriage? Thomas Wailgum reviews a couple of case studies and addresses some of “the lingering fears” in IT. Key points made by the industry analysts include:

• “The increasing speed, power and availability of on-demand solutions are narrowing the performance gap between on- and off-premise application implementations.” David Hatch, Aberdeen
• “Mid-market companies lack the sunk costs that large enterprises have already invested in a BI infrastructure. They have similar requirements to integrate, report and analyze data from numerous systems, but they don’t have the staff or infrastructure to pull it off.” Kurt Schlegel, Gartner

Thomas Wailgum also published a 2nd article on Friday called, What You Need to Know About Business Intelligence TCO. In it he cites research from David O’Connell at Nucleus Research, who calls “non adoption” the real hidden cost of a BI implementation. He has this to say about the faster implementation times and lower starting costs of the SaaS model:

• “Flexibility like this is important. Without it, potentially high-ROI projects that should be pursued die on the white board during the cost analysis.”

It’s great to see the shift to on-demand business intelligence getting more and more attention from industry analysts and from publications such as CIO.com.

posted by Darren Cunningham at 8:48 am

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