Software as a Service business intelligence (known as SaaS BI or on-demand BI) emerged in response to the complexity, resource drain, lengthy timeframes, and prohibitive cost of traditional enterprise software. Instead of purchasing, integrating, and implementing software themselves, SaaS BI customers purchase BI capabilities as a “service” from a vendor. The software no longer has to be implemented and maintained on the premises, but instead runs on servers in a remote location maintained by the vendor; the company accesses the service via secure internet connection. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and RightNow are examples of successful SaaS solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Lower upfront costs and resource requirements
SaaS solutions offer significant benefits over traditional software. Time to value is reduced, since SaaS requires weeks or months to implement, instead of years. Upfront costs are dramatically reduced, removing a lot of risk from software purchase decision-making – there is no software to buy, no extra hardware to buy, and far less implementation and ongoing effort involved. SaaS is typically priced on a subscription (usually a monthly fee) or pay-for-use basis. For this reason, SaaS solutions often are paid for as an operating expense instead of a capital expense, making it easier for SaaS BI projects to get approval.
Integrated, Automated Solutions – Faster and Easier Implementation
One of the keys to the lower cost of SaaS BI is the level of integration and automation that a SaaS BI vendor users. A fully integrated and automated vendor has already done the BI integration for you, and automated some of the most challenging and time consuming stages. Here is an example of how an integrated solution would look, in contrast with the traditional business intelligence requirements diagram from the last section.
The BirstApproach — Powerful BI That's Quick to Deploy and Easy to Use
Lower ongoing costs and resource requirements
SaaS also offers ongoing cost and value benefits. SaaS can be rolled out to a limited project at first, so that value and effectiveness can be quickly demonstrated. Then, it can be rolled out on an iterative basis, allowing other data sources and users to be added easily later. In this way, companies can prove to themselves the value before making extensive commitments, and high priority projects are easily tackled first, with less additional effort required to scale or extend a deployment. SaaS customers are often upgraded automatically by the vendor, so that individual companies no longer have to concern themselves with the time and cost of rolling out software upgrades themselves.
Flexible and easier to use – business users can serve themselves
SaaS solutions also tend to be more user friendly than traditional BI solutions, which were built expressly for the use of analysis experts within an IT organization. While the traditional approach allowed highly complex analysis to be done, it made IT into a critical bottleneck for achieving business reporting, since the number of trained users were limited in number and reported through the IT organization instead of a business function. SaaS solutions are often created to serve both business users and analysis experts, so that business users can receive the robust reporting and data exploration that they need, while experts can tackle more complex and involved inquiries.
