Business Intelligence As A Service (BaaS)
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI, On-Demand BI, Subscription based BI, Platform based BI, Grid Computing BI, Hosted BI, BI in the Cloud are all different terms which go hand-in-hand.
Business intelligence As A Service (BaaS or BIaaS) benefits address various business user and IT challenges. What is Cost effective – “Pay as you go”, Scalable, Quick deployment – Fast time to value, No minimum order quantities, No Lock-in, Limited IT resource needs for implementation and management and Green with reduced carbon foot-print? BaaS is the closest that comes to answering the above Wish list and more so in turbulent times.
BaaS on cloud represents an infrastructure revolution, moving infrastructure use from a capital expense to an operational expense and cutting the overall cost by at least 90 percent.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as for individual users, the advantages of BaaS are obvious. It requires little or no capital expenditure, has predictable monthly costs instead of a large upfront payment, and less IT overhead. Individuals and small business can, for the first time, acquire rich functionality without having to make hefty investments.
BaaS offering has many advantages to many larger enterprises in many verticals. But the same may not be true for financial services companies due to data security. I doubt how much they would be comfortable putting their clients’ confidential and highly sensitive information into a data centre owned and managed by someone else. In addition, regulations make it very difficult for them to follow this model.
There’s a point here to make for ISVs; getting a customer on SaaS model may be fast as compared to license model, but getting out just as fast cannot be ruled out. License based model is an addiction—customers get hooked. Once customers have invested in licenses, it’s difficult and expensive to switch over. License based software model is like Titanic. It’s not easier to jump the ship and switch loyalties.
Offering a low-cost BI solution does not mean inferior quality architecture or below par in performance. BaaS cost effectiveness and quality can be achieved with the understanding of specific critical customer needs in BI segment and creating the design accordingly. BaaS can be engineered by designing the slimmed-down version of information needs and prioritization of key business users needs.
BaaS on cloud will change the economics of business intelligence (BI) and enable to reach to masses and bring BI from few expert few to large operational users. BaaS will spread BI solutions for decision making beyond the boundary of company, out to its vendors and partners. BI will soon become people’s BI.
But what should be the approach to host BaaS. Can a virtual server like Amazon which is quite stable, matured and ready to host be considered OR an upcoming Microsoft Azure Service Platform be right for BaaS.
I invite your comments on this. Please share your thoughts with the readers of the Business Intelligence Blog.
Posted on April 9th, 2009 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Emerging Trends
A colleague told me about this BI blog. Glad I checked it out. Looks to be very useful. Forrest M
Business Intelligence is something that works with data privacy and validity. With the concept of providing BI as a service, data quality, validity and privacy becomes a very big issue. BI is usually used to give KPI’s which give jinx of business performance and it will be very difficult to convince people to share KPI with service providers. This will be useful for SMB’s who cannot afford to have Datawarehouse and BI system in their organisation for the cost that it incorporates. However convincing them to share their data is again a very big challenge
Hi,
I require figures on ‘how BaaS is gaining ground.
Is there any kind of study or research available with you on BaaS.
Thanks
Seema
@Seema, I invite you to join BI Group on LinkedIn by visiting the following link. BI-Group is a forum for discussions, news, articles, trends in the BI space.
http://www.maia-intelligence.com/bi-group.htm
Hi
Is Real Time BI a future Product Possibility?
While the concept of BaaS is great, it is difficult to get the buy-in required from the customer. The situation today is like the chicken and egg story.
ERP SaaS model took some time to be accepted, though it is mostly in the western hemisphere where it is working. This phenomena is yet to be seen catching up in the Asian region. If the customer here is so finicky about his transaction level data, imagine the challenge for getting him to allow his business consolidated data to be hosted with a service provider. This needs a sea change in perception and is bound to happen with time.