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August 02, 2007

BI as a Service: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Hamilton Beach-Proctor Silex, a major consumer appliance manufacturer, facilitates its market research through SaaS-delivered applications provided by statistical tools vendor SPSS.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Tracy Trawick, consumer insights manager for Hamilton Beach, who talked about her company's mixed use of SaaS and on-site business intelligence tools.

Hamilton-Beach's market research department primarily relies on on-site software, but began tapping into SPSS's SaaS-based platform to cover a growing workload that end-users simply don't have time to sort through. "All the data manipulation on the back end is supported by SPSS," Trawick said. "We're using it for very template-based iterative projects so we don't use up a lot of programming time. I don't have the time to learn the logic and the programming tools."

Trawick uses the SPSS SaaS platform to create and launch consumer market research surveys, and manipulate the data as it comes in. However, she still employs SPSS on-site software for more complicated projects.

Does the BI as a service trend have legs? Our blogmate here at BI in Action, Madan Sheina, recently took a hard look at the trend. Can it work? Or, as Madan put it, is it wheat or chaff?

While SaaS is still a nascent trend in BI, it is gaining in popularity, especially among small to medium-size businesses, Madan said. However, BI SaaS vendors face Microsoft in the market. Plus, Madan said, "moving to SaaS is not as easy as simply having your BI software hosted." Data security is a huge issue, he notes. Customization is another. "Vendors offering their BI solutions as SaaS must also overcome the significant hurdles of data privacy, reliability of service, working out commissions for channel partners, and grappling with a new sales model."

Another ebizQ colleague, James Taylor, also talked out BI and analytics delivered via SaaS in a recent post.
James notes that decision management can be delivered via SaaS, noting that his company, Fair Isaac, offers such capabilities. "SaaS BI is interesting as a way to provide support for those decisions that could not be automated 100%," he says.

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