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January 22, 2009
Why Web-based Business Intelligence Software?
In the last few years, there has been a race towards web-based business intelligence software. Legacy BI companies that had started out with desktop applications started to slowly adapt their product to the web, while numerous upstart BI companies popped up whose mission was to provide the market with web-based BI solutions built from scratch. Is there a reason why desktop BI applications became near-obsolete in favor of web-based solutions?
There are several, but with a few caveats.
First of all, there is the issue of accessibility. With a web-based BI solution, users are not tied to their office PC or even to their laptop computer. With the better web-based solutions on the market, all users need to access their reports is a device featuring Internet connection. This frees them to move around, travel, visit clients, etc., while having complete access to real-time data.
Then, a web-based solution has easy, familiar navigation. Unless your users have lived in a cave for the past ten or so years (no reference to arch-villains real or imaginary), they will be familiar with the Internet. And accessing their web-based reports and dashboards will be as familiar to them as surfing the web, finding reviews of their favorite restaurants or getting directions on Google Maps or Mapquest. In other words, a web-based solution is much less intimidating, especially to nontechnical users.
Also, a web-based solution created from scratch will have all its components running on the same technology, which we call in BI jargon a "unified BI platform." The caveat here is that there are actually precious few web-based solutions that were in fact created from scratch to run on the web on the same technology. For the ones that are, the benefits are very obvious: IT has to get familiar with a single model that will work similarly for different solutions (e.g. managed reporting, ad hoc reporting, ETL, etc.). Conversely, a web-based solution that is a mish-mash of different technologies forces IT to go in different directions to maintain the different platform components, resulting in more expense and inefficiency.
Also, the better web-based reporting solutions are much easier to upgrade when new releases are introduced by the vendor. In some cases, the vendor sends the upgrade automatically over the web, and you don't have to recreate or manually update any of your reports. This works just like when, say, Mozilla Firefox (my personal browser of choice, also because I dig the name) sends out a new release--all you have to do is click on "yes" and you have the new version with all your cookies, bookmarks and favorites saved.
So are there any drawbacks to web-based reporting and analysis solutions? Well, it depends. The much-maligned desktop applications did have something going for them: that feel of a dedicated tool, powerful and flexible and optimized for the purpose for which it was intended. Some of the less sophisticated web-based applications kind of make you miss that. However, the better ones give the interactivity and the flexibility of a desktop application, while incorporating all the advantages of web-based reporting that I have just listed.
Posted by Hound of the BI-skervilles at January 22, 2009 9:30 AM
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