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.