SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us

Simple business decisions, each of which impacts a company's performance and efficiency, are made every day, at every level of an organization, by workers in every department. But conventional business intelligence (BI) tools are often not available to most decision makers and are typically designed for use only by trained business analysts. Software as a service (SaaS)–based BI tools are designed to help the millions of people in non-IT "lines of business" (LOBs) who struggle every day with the task of mining Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and other unstructured data sources when performing everyday tasks such as making sales forecasts, planning for resource utilization, or servicing customer accounts. Especially in this time of limited budgets and uncertain futures, inexpensive, easy-to-deploy SaaS BI can help companies put easy-to-use data mining and reporting tools for smart decision making into the hands of more employees and uncover the real "geniuses" of decision making hidden in every department.


Benefits of SaaS BI

BI offerings delivered via the cloud provide tremendous additional benefits of scale and efficiency,lower cost, and better consumption of cloud and local data sources, and they are changing the way businesses license, deploy, and utilize BI to support decisions at their companies. Some benefits of SaaS BI are as follows:


Access by more employees to more data. Key beneficiaries of the trend toward SaaS BI have been the millions of people in non-IT lines of business who struggle every day with the task of mining Excel spreadsheets and other unstructured data sources when performing everyday tasks such as making sales forecasts, planning for resource utilization, or servicing customer accounts. Users of LOB applications produce the production data that drives BI requirements, and the powerful BI reporting and analysis capabilities are especially impactful in the hands of the users who created the data, resulting in greater adoption and utilization. Every business can be more efficient by putting better reporting and analysis tools into the hands of the LOB and departmental employees who are the subject matter experts in their domains. SaaS BI can make their jobs easier by providing browser-based access to sophisticated but easy-to-use data mining and reporting tools and uncovering the "geniuses" of decision making hidden in every department.

Business optimization for hard times. SaaS-based analytics can help companies be more resourceful in volatile times by helping them identify cost savings, efficiencies, and opportunities for process improvement they may have otherwise "missed in the data."


Faster "time to value" for a quicker return on investment. Implementations of SaaS BI solutions can be far faster and less expensive than implementations of conventional solutions. Consider that building a traditional BI solution with a data warehouse implementation, data normalization, and data marts for data staging by query systems typically requires between 6 and18 months, sometimes longer. By contrast, SaaS BI deployments typically require 2 to 4 months, and SaaS vendors cannot book revenue until the implementation is complete — a situation in which both buyer and seller are equally incented to decrease what some vendors call "time to value."

Streamlined architecture, with zero infrastructure. Unlike on-premises BI systems, SaaSbased BI is hosted by a vendor. Users access the various modules (for example, analysis,reporting) securely via any Web browser. From a systems architecture standpoint, this method is optimal because it does not impose an ongoing computing burden on back-office production systems, and because the application is hosted by the SaaS provider, users do not need to maintain an onsite data warehouse. Users conduct their secure sessions via a Web browser, so there is no client software to install, and users are always assured of running the most recent, optimized version of the application code because SaaS applications are not "rolled out" like conventional applications; they are simply upgraded and optimized on an ongoing basis.



Ability to tap operating expense (opex) budgets versus capital expense (capex) budgets. Because SaaS solutions are licenses as subscriptions, their license cost is a monthly, predictable expense and does not require a one-time up-front payment for licenses as conventional software. Further, the ongoing support costs to run associated hardware, management, and integration tools and middleware and hire and train staff members to support on-premises applications are substantial, and nonmaintenance support costs are typically booked as capex. Because these budgets will be flat in 2010–2011, SaaS solutions give users a chance to get access to BI and analytics tools much faster, using opex funds that might reside in their LOB budgets.

Better alignment of business goals. Business units consuming IT resources sometimes feel discordance between the technology they know they need to have to produce good business outcomes and the tools their IT staff has the skills and bandwidth to deploy. But IT is typically a cost center, and its priorities don't always align with LOB requirements. SaaS-delivered BI helps business units get business done and helps align the goals of the business unit with its technology tools.