Advantages and Next Stages of Enterprise SaaS Business Intelligence

In an excellent article in InformationWeek, Doug Henschen wrote about the four technologies that are reshaping business intelligence (BI):

• Predictive analytics enables users to forecast results such as future revenue, number of items sold, etc.
• Real-time monitoring provides immediate information about current transactions, call volume, etc.
• In-memory processing allows data sets to be stored in RAM for quick queries and results.
• Software as a service (SaaS) provides on-demand access to business intelligence applications via web services.

The benefits of SaaS business intelligence include rapid and flexible deployment, and lower cost as compared to on-premises business intelligence systems. With SaaS BI, end users can be up and running within days, making queries that provide insight for decisions, forecasts, and reporting. The web interface of SaaS also provides extended availability over installed software, and the ability to make business-intelligence applications available to a greater number of users due to low maintenance requirements and cost. SaaS BI also avoids the expensive and time-consuming requirement of building a data warehouse, where data is copied from production databases for queries.

While SaaS BI has advantages over costly, time-consuming and less flexible on-premises systems, there is no single SaaS BI vendor that provides the entire BI stack, as illustrated in the below diagram from Forrester Research. There are also many companies entering the SaaS BI market due to the low cost of developing, delivering and maintaining SaaS software. Furthermore, the recent demise of LucidEra, a leading SaaS BI provider with excellent products and customers, increased concerns about the viability of SaaS vendors in general.

Enterprises need help in identifying, selecting, vetting and integrating the various SaaS BI products to create a SaaS BI solution that addresses their business needs for flexibility, availability, cost containment, and, most importantly, business insight.  The next steps for enterprise adoption of SaaS BI include the SaaS market intelligence they need to make informed choices for SaaS BI solutions.

What are your views about the advantages and next stages of enterprise SaaS business intelligence?