SaaS is proving to be a well accepted approach to BI.  The most often cited reasons for the popularity are rapid deployment and lower up front and maintenance costs.  In fact for many small and medium sized firms SaaS BI with its web access and pay-as-you-go convenience offer perhaps the only way to get ‘leading edge’ Business Intelligence.  There are some promising vendor offerings, like Business Objects’ Crystal Reports ®  combined with Business Objects' ONDemand, which maintains and manages the customer’s data.  Large players, like Cognos, IBM and Microsoft have offerings.  Also,there are some smaller, niche players in the SaaS BI arena, e.g. LucidEra, Oco, Information Builders.   Some of these offer quite a wide range of BI services.   Most of the BI vendors also support and integrate with Salesforce.com, one of the acknowledged leaders in Customer Relationship Management /SaaS.   So, there are some excellent reasons to count on the success of SaaS BI, including lower costs and more rapid deployment, as well as, a growing number of vendors and BI SaaS offerings.

Can these SaaS BI vendors offer comprehensive and complex BI?   Yes, definitely.  If company data is entrusted to a third party, there are few limitations to the complexity of the BI which can be generated.   Two of the open issues which should be noted are:  1. Logistics - What about integration with data which has not been entrusted to the third party, and 2. Data Security, which is perhaps the most critical issue. Has data security been fully addressed and resolved?  What is necessary to ensure that a company can trust that their data will be safe?

Dorothy Miller

dmiller@bi-metrics.com

With a crush of pressure to cut costs, companies increasingly are turning to BI software to gain insight from the reams of information they already possess. Read 2009: Year of BI Software? for more info on BI.