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« BI as a Service: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? | Main | By the way... » August 06, 2007To SaaS or Not to SaaS? That is the Question for BI Vendors
Speaking at the recent Pacific Northwest BI Summit, Claudia Imhoff weighed the advantages and disadvantages of delivering business intelligence through the Software as a Service model. (Podcast available here as an audio download.) Claudia observes that in most cases at present, BI over SaaS is mainly operational versus strategic, and the growth of SaaS-delivered BI in a strategic sense is an open question. She states that there are four primary advantages to BI vendors (and ultimately to end-user customers) in going the SaaS route: For one, the vendor has to support one platform and one version of their software, versus multiple OSes, paltforms, and versions. "That’s a pretty impactful thing in a software business," Claudia says. "The decrease in development costs can be significant." In addition, SaaS deployments provides the vendor "real insight into how customers are using their software. "What features are they actually using, and which ones do they never touch? They get to see every move, every feature, every function that is being used by their customers.… ...any vendor would kill to have that kind of information." In addition, Claudia continues, the software can remain light and agile. "Vendors don’t get trapped into this feature-bloat thing," she observes. "In a traditional model, a software vendor has to keep coming up with new features and new functionality so they can sell another version." Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
