traditional business intelligence software

Traditional business intelligence solutions are delivered as enterprise software– that is, software solutions that are installed on your company premises, by your IT team or by 3rd party consultants, and managed by your IT team or consultants over time.

• The software is expensive, often requiring hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in upfront costs.
• Implementing the software is also expensive; in addition to the cost of the people, it often requires additional hardware purchases for the software to work, such as hardware servers.
• The implementation period could be long and complicated.
• Maintenance and support costs are lower than upfront costs, but also can be expensive.

The Purchase and Integration Puzzle

In addition to this, a single BI "implementation" might actually require the purchase and integration of multiple software stages — software for extracting data, integrating data, storing it, analyzing it, and then reporting on it. This complexity is the driver of the time and cost.

Here is a diagram of a typical traditional business intelligence solution implementation:

The Traditional Business Intelligence Approach

Studies Highlighting the Challenges of Traditional BI
Businesses highly valued the analysis that they could get from traditional BI, so they were willing to invest in the time, software, hardware, and human resources required to make it happen. But these high costs also made it difficult for anyone but the largest companies to buy it, and even then, those companies had difficulty expanding the solution to realize more value.

Some recent analysis conducted by independent analysts shows the challenges faced by traditional enterprise software BI implementation:

• Average implementation time¹:
  • 17 months in total; 5 months to deploy the first usable analytic application
• Mean annual expenditure on BI software²:
  • $1.1 million for companies with >1,000 employees
• Project success rate¹:
  • 31% success rate, at best
• Ability to meet needs — getting the right data to the right person²:
  • Only 36% are confident that reports and dashboards deliver the right data, to the right person, at the right time

¹DM Review & IDC Business Intelligence Survey, October 2006, 2004
(Material on implementation time not available in 2006 survey)
²InfoWorld & IDC Business Intelligence Survey, October 2007

Continue to Software as a Service (SaaS) or On-demand Business Intelligence