Companies choose SaaS-based BI

business intelligence (BI) over traditional on-premises BI, GigaOM reports.

BI, or analytics software from such companies as BusinessObjects, MicroStrategy or Oracle, helps companies make sense of their data - to visualise what's happening with sales or marketing pushes, for example, and to make sales forecasts.

But now those legacy players, which are all adding their own SaaS capabilities, face new SaaS-oriented rivals like Birst, Jaspersoft and Cloud9Analytics. And Google has gotten into the act with Google Analytics.

Nearly one-third of organisations use or plan to use cloud or SaaS offerings to augment their core BI functions, Gemini reveals.

According to a survey of 1 364 IT managers and business users of BI platforms in the fourth quarter of 2011, only 17% of organisations have replaced or plan to replace parts of their core BI functions with cloud/SaaS offerings, notes Gartner.

However, almost a third (27%) already use or plan to use cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months.

The main benefit of adopting cloud BI is that capital expenditure can be moved to operational expenditure, says Ian Bertram, Gartner's managing VP, but notes that this is only a minor advantage, ZDNet says.

“From a feature and functionality perspective, there is no real benefit with cloud BI. And from a total cost of ownership perspective, it costs just as much, if not more, than on-premise BI,” he explains.

He says the decision to adopt boils down to whether a company is willing to devote time and resources to move its data onto the cloud, as well as set up the necessary security measures and contingency plans in case something goes wrong.