Comments on: Companies get SaaS-y with business intelligence

By: David

David — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:31:07 +0000

As far as the ROI on cloud vs. in-house, you obviously need to run the numbers. For small to mid-sized businesses with no in-house expertise with the tool, it often makes sense. The biggest hurtle is usually more political, with the idea of IT losing control of an application and more importantly, the data security.

By: Jim Lewis

Jim Lewis — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:20:00 +0000

In my opinion, this article is spot on. When we started developing our service at http://www.Brightmetrics.com we had the choice to develop a premise or SaaS based product. We went with SaaS for many reasons. One of the main reasons was the ability to easily push this information out to the edges of the organization. Typical premise solutions require centralized infrastructure (both technical and personnel) to manage. With SaaS we can make it easy for anyone in the organization to access the information in the way they need it from anywhere.

It’s really about putting the power in the hands of the data consumer rather than the historical model of that power being wielded by the data creators.

And IT departments that strive to be strategic, and add value to their organizations are embracing this model. Whereas IT staff that want to create fiefdoms and be the owner of everything technical will be relegated to dinosaur status over time largely because of this type of trend.

By: Barb Darrow

Barb Darrow — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:47:54 +0000

it’s been interesting watching vendors go back and forth on this SaaS vs. on premises cost question. In the early days Msft used to say salesforce.com crm was cheaper than Msft crm up until the third year, at which on-prem crm was cheaper. It stopped saying that when it started offering its own hosted crm, however.

By: Ben Taub

Ben Taub — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:27:10 +0000

I think a key phrase here is, “Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions”. In other words, SaaS BI is more a departmental thing than a corporate things. BI is frequently an application that departments use to gain some freedom from what they see as the constraints of corporate IT. The SaaS model makes this easier for them to do so.

By: David Beyer

David Beyer — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:36:08 +0000

Agreed Rachel :)

By: Rachel Delacour

Rachel Delacour — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:11:37 +0000

“Its cost models rather show that SaaS can be cheaper over the first five years but not thereafter.” … remember that with a Cloud BI solution, you’re always in the very last version of the solution while you don’t pay for upgrades like in the traditional on-premise BI world. It has to be taken into consideration before saying that SaaS BI apps can be more expensive thereafter…and Gartner knows it !