Cloud based
Business Intelligence (BI) is widespread today and is being used by many
organizations globally. It is a revolutionary concept of delivering business
intelligence capabilities “as service” using cloud based architecture that
comes at a lower cost yet faster deployment & flexibility. Software as a
Service (SaaS) BI is also being used by many small and medium sized enterprises
who seek to speed up their businesses with BI and analytics tools.
According
to a recent 2012 Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market
Study of 859 respondents, there is a current strong investment in cloud based
BI and growing interest in tapping into the cloud’s benefits; while a Gartner survey throws the fact
that almost one-third of the BI platform users surveyed (27 percent, to be
exact) are using or planning to use the cloud / SaaS model to expand their
business intelligence capabilities in the next 12 months. These statistics strongly suggest that cloud
based BI implementation is on an upswing among organizations.
On the
other hand, past few years has seen not as much of BI adoption in the public
cloud when compared to other applications. Business managers in some organizations
fail to see the value of cloud. But this might not always be the reason behind
delay in adopting cloud BI. Simply put, it might even be issues related to data
integration, visualization and security in cloud BI as these are some considerations
frequently cited when moving on cloud. While the market is still confused
about the Cloud and SaaS offerings, understanding why businesses adopt cloud
for BI might help make wise decisions.
According to a recent research by Gartner, there
are three major drivers for cloud BI adoption among organizations which are as
follows:
Time Saving
Cloud based BI is deployed faster and provides insights and value in lucrative
ways. It comes much adaptable for those enterprises whose IT expenditure runs
on inadequate budget or higher workload.
Cost Concerns
Companies that seek Business
Intelligence to save long-term operational expenses must go with cloud BI. These
solutions might not be cheaper when compared to on-premise non-cloud models and
might need huge capital investments; however on a long term, they help
organizations in reducing operational costs, IT support expenses and much more.
Expertise Backing
If there is any lack of IT expertise in business that needs assistance
in managing BI and analytic systems, companies may choose third-party BI apps
on cloud that come along with cloud and tech-savvy professionals who can help deal
with skill shortage issues.
Many
small organizations in the current scenario perform their work on cloud and develop
their business sooner, which consecutively becomes a huge threat to larger
organizations. With major advantages that cloud BI has to offer, we can see that
many companies will implement cloud BI strategies to make comprehensive analysis.
Businesses already using cloud
BI must come forward and share their experience along with upbeat and negative
feedback naming process efficiency, effectiveness and advantages gained
compared to competitors and other benefits.
In the end, are you planning to take your current business intelligence
and analytics on cloud? If yes, what’s your consideration for implementing cloud
BI?
