The Aberdeen Research Group has recently released a new report on SaaS Business Intelligence (SaaS BI), “Fast, Affordable, Agile – The Case for SaaS BI.”
The results confirm the benefits of SaaS BI – faster decisions, lower IT costs, and more pervasive use of business intelligence.
For example, companies that use SaaS BI are 50% more likely to have self-service BI users than organizations that adopt traditional, on-premise BI. The implications of this are significant. That’s a lot less people lining up outside the overworked IT guy’s door, hoping to get new reports. And that’s a lot more people able to come up with quick answers themselves, so that they can take action. It all adds up to a more proactive organization, doing more with less.
A couple more of Aberdeen’s takeaways, quoted directly from the report press release:
- SaaS BI opens up business intelligence to new user populations -- In addition to helping small organizations overcome the initial cost and IT burden of traditional BI approaches, several factors are driving adoption of on-demand BI in large organizations, including: tight budgets, long, resource-intensive deployments for conventional approaches and diverse needs of many workgroups (tied at 38%). Aberdeen adds, "the single biggest factor is that conventional BI tools are simply too complex and hard to use," (58%) which it views as "a clear indication that the relative simplicity of SaaS BI tools presented via a browser is a strong driver of adoption."
- SaaS changes the economics of BI deployments -- Aberdeen's study notes several economic advantages of SaaS BI over on-premise alternatives, including more flexible pay-as-you-go licenses and subscriptions, faster time to value, eliminating the expense of hardware investments, and availability of pre-packaged key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that "can significantly help in cutting the time and cost involved."
- SaaS encourages agile and flexible BI solutions -- Aberdeen concludes, "a number of capabilities that contribute to agility are related to self-service business intelligence -- the ability for business users to find the information they need without repeated trips to the IT department for assistance."
In a nutshell, with SaaS BI, more people get insight, BI costs less, you see value more quickly, and your solution is more responsive to your needs.
This allows new organizations to get BI that didn’t have it before, as analyst David White noted, "SaaS BI fosters self-service in many ways. It provides increased ability to automate the generation and distribution of reports, drill-down capabilities and the creation of automated alerts. It's also clear that Software-as-a-Service is finding favor with new user populations. Smaller organizations that need a step up from the humble spreadsheet and larger organizations that need to provide BI to underserved employees are both driving adoption."
For a free copy of the report, click here.
Birst is a co-sponsor of this SaaS BI report. We hope that you enjoy it. Get it soon. The free download expires on October 31, 2010.
