Software as a Service Meets Business Intelligence: Page 2 of 2

And for companies in which cost and speed of deployment limit BI deployment, software as a service offers a way to make information available to more employees. Responses to Ventana Research's surveys show that less than one-fourth of companies have deployed BI to front-line workers and less than one-sixth have deployments in the supply chain or customer operations. BI SaaS can provide timely information about causes and impacts of business events to a broad spectrum of stakeholders whose decisions can drive improvements in performance. To accomplish this, organizations need to assess the use-case scenarios of business users to ensure that BI SaaS can meet their needs.

Of course, BI SaaS comes with its costs. Although SaaS can help companies get past the barrier of initial startup costs, the total cost over the lifetime of the application can be as much if not more than deploying internally. Ventana Research recommends that companies regularly review and evaluate their BI SaaS costs to ensure the arrangement is delivering full benefit for the price. Before handing over internal IT management, Ventana Research recommends that companies evaluate BI SaaS vendors' knowledge of their vertical industry, the horizontal business function and technology best practices to make sure they can address them as effectively as internal staff does. And as they deploy BI to more users and functions, in which they likely will have a mix of internal and SaaS BI, IT organizations should evaluate the BI SaaS vendor's architecture to make sure they and internally deployed BI systems can work together.

Assessment

Ventana Research believes BI SaaS can help companies lower costs, speed deployments and broaden usage of business intelligence software. But before going ahead, we recommend companies evaluate the trade-off between initial and total costs over three years and the return on investment; they also should consider the security implications of where the hardware physically is located, who has access to the servers and data, and the impact of these factors on data governance and regulatory compliance. Further, we recommend that organizations evaluate how a vendor's SaaS architecture fits with their IT standards and its interoperability with their internal systems.