Is a SaaS based BI Solution Really Viable?

September 24, 2008 by: Peter B. Giblett

According to Gartner 25% of all software will be delivered through an SaaS based service by 2011. At the same time Business Intelligence usage is expected to rise 130% by 2010. Many SaaS vendors are currently planning to incorporate BI in parallel to their applications, some are partnering with BI vendors to make this happen.

The average medium to large sized corporation has over 1,000 applications active in its systems landscape. Small corporations will have a a much more limited application set, but few are managed through a single super-application. Traditionally BI solutions are corporate in nature and pull data in from all areas in order to build one, corporate-wide, single version of the truth.

Software vendors hope that by enhancing their applications with BI will extend their scope into new user communities. One key aspect of SaaS is that data is held by the service provider and not by the client company. For the average corporation how is it possible to utilise a SaaS based BI solution, when there is no such thing as a single corporate application?

The SaaS solution can enable to track metrics associated with the application, but how can complex metrics can be offered when the data resides in other systems?

It is proposed that a SaaS vendor can deliver BI at a fraction of the cost traditionally associate with BI deployment, however the most that can be deployed is single application reporting. Multi-application BI still requires someone to collect all relevant data into a corporate repository – the single version of the truth. This requires regular data updates, quality management etc.

According to ‘information-on-demand’ provider Blink Logic SaaS based BI can provide:

Cube creation
Tailored reports and visualisation
Quality checks
Timely and accurate data

The key challenge is pulling together all relevant data into a single location. When the corporate data exists in a variety of applications this is no less of a project challenge that it would be in a traditional environment.

Peter B. Giblett