BI Blogs

If you’re new to the topic of software-as-a-service business intelligence, check out this BeyeNetwork article: “Two Converging Trends for Software as a Service Business Intelligence.” Based on research from Howard Baldwin and Leslie Ament from Hypatia Research, the article provides an overview of why more and more line of business executives are turning to SaaS BI. According to Hypatia’s research, IT is increasingly unable to give LOB projects a high enough priority leaving LOB managers struggling with spreadsheets “frequently containing inconsistent data.” The SaaS BI vendor benefits are summarized as:

• Expertise in data integration
• Prebuilt templates and dashboards (although she doesn’t mention analytic applications)
• Reduced risk
• Reduced cost
• Improvements in security

The conclusion?

“The popularity of SaaS business intelligence is driven purely by lower cost, ease of use, rapid deployment and perception of faster time to return on investment.”

While I agree with the majority of the points made in the Hypatia report, I think there are a few additional benefits of the SaaS model as it relates to business intelligence:

• Simplicity: As LucidEra’s founder Ken Rudin summarized in this post, “On-Demand is a Mindset, not a Feature Set.” The SaaS mindset is “service oriented rather than product oriented, and it has simplicity, the end-user experience, and end-user value as the critical focus areas.” I like the way that Morph Labs puts it in their Simplicity is Spelled S-a-a-S post: “Not only does it eliminate a lot of the tedious process of setting up stuff especially for non-geeks, it also follows the principle of ‘offering what would only be the features of most value as well as frequently used’.” Unlike traditional enterprise software, the question isn’t about what features should we add, it’s about what features will actually be used.
• Adoption: With a subscription pricing model, vendors must have a laser focus on adoption and customer success because, as noted in the salesforce.com whitepaper “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful On-Demand Companies, “lack of user adoption directly impacts revenue.” Utlization has long been a major challenge of on-premise BI implementations, whereas with SaaS, as Neil Raden points out in this paper: “very nearly by definition, there is no shelfware: participation  can be easily monitored and measured in an on-demand environment.”
• Return *Before* Investment: For years BI vendors have been working on ways to calculate the ROI of BI projects. The challenge, as summarized by Gartner’s Bill Hostmann, is this: “How do you understand that somebody used information to make a decision that then improved a particular business process? How do you go about quantifying that in some sort of direct financial terms?” LucidEra’s Pipeline Healthcheck is designed to quantify the impact of having the right sales analytics in 48 hours. Instead of spending months building the BI infrastructure, thanks to the SaaS model we’re able to bring in an organization’s CRM data, run it through our on-demand BI platform, and identify potential opportunities and risks that can be quantified immediately. Phil Waynewright recently wrote about the Pipeline Healthcheck and the concept of SaaS return *before* investment. His conclusion? “The really good thing about this approach is that it focuses the discussion on the business results, not the technology.”