Ashe on SaaS

While SAP has been busy publishing integration roadmaps (and occasional apologies) for the company formerly known as Business Objects, the good folks at IBM have been fairly quiet about their plans for my Canadian friends at Cognos. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Cognos will become just another piece of IBM’s Information On Demand infrastructure (as outlined in this slide).

Well today ZDNet published an in-depth interview with Rob Ashe, who is now the GM of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management business unit. In the interview, Ashe highlights IBM’s independence from transactional systems (such as SAP’s BusinessByDesign, er I mean BusinessByTwoTen). When asked about the intersection of SaaS and business intelligence, he has this to say:

“BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS. Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application where everyone does the same basic things, BI uses a different model every company. The one to many model doesn’t work. That being said there are other aspects of SaaS that make sense for BI. These SaaS vendors accumulate data. We have 30 OEMs that use SaaS offerings to share to reflect data back to customer.”

This is not a surprising viewpoint, given that IBM is primarily focused on managing data, but he completely misses the opportunity for BI to evolve from being tools and plumbing for IT to manage and maintain, to become simple to set-up and simple to use business analytic applications that deliver built-in domain expertise and best practices. With its’ focus on configuration, not customization, the SaaS model is uniquely suited to deliver on the promise of analytic applications. Yes, there will certainly will be challenges along the way, but it sounds to me like the Cognos crew, despite having acquired Celequest and made a few announcements about their Salesforce integration, is now content to simply tip-toe around SaaS as they are slowly consumed by IBM’s information management framework over time.

posted by Darren Cunningham at 1:34 pm

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