SaaS

SaaS takes on business intelligence

(INFO WORLD) - When considering strategic business intelligence needs, would you put your faith in the cloud? The idea made sense for Distribution Market Advantage. For Creativity Inc., not so much.

The profiles of these two companies draw a clear line between where the nascent BI-as-a-service offerings fit — and don’t fit — in business today. At one end of the spectrum, Schaumburg, Ill.-based DMA has no in-house BI expertise and needed to rapidly develop a Web-accessible BI dashboard for a narrowly defined purpose. On the other, Van Nuys, Calif.-based Creativity has developed its own in-house data warehouse and business analytics expertise. It mines that data to develop highly customized metrics that provide a competitive edge in developing and marketing new products for the consumer crafts market.

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But even Creativity’s vice president of IT, Jim Mulholland, who decided to pass on BI SaaS (software as a service), sees the game-changing potential of BI as a service: its ability to rapidly deliver a standardized suite of analytics tools that give users most of what they need without the time, expense and hassle of developing a BI infrastructure internally. BI in the cloud could be “the next killer SaaS application,” he says.

However, the technologies — and the business models behind them — are still evolving. “It’s still an embryonic market,” says Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director for on-demand services consultancy ThinkStrategies Inc.

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