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April 27, 2007
63% of Companies Want On-Demand BI
I recently came across an interesting survey released by InformationWeek that showed almost two-thirds of companies, some 63%, are likely to deploy a software-as-a-services (SaaS) BI solution in the near future. And, even more compelling, 27% said they were "extremely likely" to do so. It's great that companies have woken up to the promise of on-demand BI, but, if you read further into the InformationWeek study, it's hardly surprising why that's the case.
Take, for example, the answers to the question: "What stands in the way of enterprise-wide adoption?" Half of respondents said "integration and compatibility problems", while 48% cited "ease of use issues. Some 38% said "software licenses are too expensive", 33% said "training staff is too time-intensive and costly", and 28% said "scalability issues" held them back from fully deploying BI in their enterprises.
All of those perceived problems are solved with an on-demand BI solution. As I talked about in my post earlier this week, an appliance-based BI solution goes a long way in lowering total cost of ownership, and the same goes for a SaaS solution. On-demand BI lowers TCO precisely because it eliminates the costly and time-consuming issues the companies cited in this study: integration headaches, complexity, expensive software licenses, staff training programs and scalability issues. With an on-demand BI solution, these issues become non-issues.
You just "plug in" the appliance or turn on the SaaS solution (no complicated integration required); dashboards are easy to use, even for non-IT staff; there are no software licenses to pay; there is little or no training required (because on-demand BI solutions are, as I just said, easy to use for non-IT employees); and on-demand BI is infinitely scalable (because you can always add another appliance or increase the number of users on your SaaS contract).
And when these issues are eliminated, costs go down, way down. Which is why on-demand BI also solves another of the problems that companies cited in the study as a reason they've held back on BI deployments; some 45% said there is "no clear ROI" on BI projects. When implementing BI is as easy as turning on a SaaS service, ROI becomes a lot more positive.
Posted by Diaz Nesamoney at April 27, 2007 10:15 AM
Comments
Agree. My company (IBM) is also pushing very hard to the on demand direction.
Posted by: Will Cho at May 15, 2007 2:32 PM
