Cloud computing has resulted in more South African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) rapidly adopting business intelligence (BI) solutions.
That is the view of Craig Albertson, director at SYMCO iQ, who notes that, previously, for local SMEs, BI had been about Microsoft Excel skills, with small businesses investing in products like Microsoft Access over the years.
"It's very manual, requires quite a high level of IT literacy, and is difficult to change on the fly," says Albertson. "BI was once only exclusive to large enterprise, but the economies of scale in cloud make it available to all," he adds.
He points out that mid- and upper-mid enterprises have invested in BI technologies like Business Objects and SharePoint. "But, once again, this is expensive to set up, not very fast at processing data, and not very flexible.
"To be honest, I'm not sure how you can run a business without some form of BI. Some people can do it mentally and/or instinctively, but you need to make meaningful decisions about your business all the time."
A recent BI survey conducted by ITWeb, in partnership with the PBT Group, revealed that the majority of local companies (32%) are considering hosting their data warehouses or BI in the cloud, while 13% noted they have a business case for hosting their data warehouses and BI in the cloud.
"Cost and disparate data (information in many systems) has been the barrier to entry for SMEs, but with the growth and understanding of cloud computing in SA, SMEs are now able to use technology that was once only for the large corporates," Albertson says.
However, he is of the view that adoption of BI in the cloud is not taking off as rapidly as expected, as large Internet service providers are not selling it in a hurry.
"You need to understand a bit about the customer's business sell and not its product sell. We already have communities within our customer base building industry dashboards to run BI with a very specific focus on the type of industry, like short-term insurance," he concludes.
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