SaaS BI - Crossroads

We have to take serious look at SaaS BI. We see them make lot of noise and fall apart when it comes to deliver the promises they make. Some times they even lack basic direction.

One thing is for sure. SaaS BI needs serious transformation. In their strategies, technologies, operations and more importantly in the way they manage their finances.

There is always notion that SaaS BI vendors have created that they bring in low cost advantage and rapid deployment. By playing on cost and speed they seem to have lost some potential innovative approaches they can bring to the table. Not that every one are doing the same but most of them still talk about cost and speed. This approach has been commoditized. I guess its time for SaaS BI vendors to innvovate in their offerings. Bring in new dimension with respect to value add. Not just COST & SPEED.

Lets ask one basic question?

Why do traditional datawarehouse implementations fail?

All of us can write a book on the reasons. If we implement SaaS BI with same traditional BI technologies or mindset will they succeed.

Nope.

We are in world where users want to consume information in most simple manner. Amazon, Twitter, Facebook have changed world perception of IT systems. Most of the vendors still lock them in Traditional BI mindset. That needs to change and when it changes consumers will love it and they will flock to it.

off late we see lot of jargon predictive analytics, enterprise mashups, columnar data, in-memory data etc etc.

Lets see some of these in my next post.

MI and BI

I met senior official of data management group of Pharmaceutical Company as part of my consulting engagement. He came up with requirement called consumer analytics. Different pharmacy chains their products in market. He would like to get POS data from these chains, cleanse it, analyze it and mine the data to further insights. As we know there is no customer in this kind of situation, its traditional business intelligence coupled with market intelligence seems to be solution.

I always feel that very soon there seem to be convergence with BI and MI. By definition BI is with in walls of business where as MI is out side information.



If BI can be integrated with MI and analyzed it would solve lot of problems for businesses. This is more of case with situation I am mentioning above. Technically I am looking for SOA enabling external MI to be consumed and integrated with internal BI. There are lot of databases and market information available out side such as IMS for Pharmaceutical sector. I see most of these are still desktop applications that needs to be downloaded and installed. If these can be consumed as web services then accessing MI would be easier for companies.

As I work through my consulting engagement through available resources, I look forward to have a day where key MI tools deliver data as web services.

Specialty BI

As I work with CoE for SaaS and Cloud Computing at Bodhtree Consulting Ltd, I work with several starts ups which are mostly cloud based. There is one company which I feel is redifining the market in its area of operations.

And the company name is Analytix On Demand (AOD), LA based BI vendor.

AOD started as SaaS.

Delivered SaaS based BI services to its customers.

They have paying customers, good to hear that.

Story do not end there.

They strengthened the platform and started OEM deals.

They created industry specific verticals for clients with same base platform.

Is it not against cloud basics??????

Any technology guy would would yes.

But see the upside, they created platform and delivers it with successful business models.

This I guess is star strategy and I would like to categorize them as SPECIALTY BI vendors.

Vendors who are felxible to customer needs and understands market situation.

AOD with out hanging to technological fads is creating value in the marketplace.

They are strengthning platform and creating additional deployment and delivery models right from SaaS / OEM / Industry Specific Solutions.

And most of these are on cloud.

So I feel in these market conditions companies such as AOD who quickly adapt and add value to customers will sustain in longterm.