BI: one of fastest-growing cloud SaaS solutions

The Business Intelligence is one of the kind of applications with a greater growth potential to move into the cloud-based computing, according a new study, from research company IDC, entitled Worldwide Business Analytics Software-as-a-Service Forecast, 2008-2013. Search CIO published today an article commenting about this study. The study finds that the number of business analytics SaaS users will grow rapidly from a small base, however market revenue will remain low relative to on-premise software throughout the forecast period. According the study, over the next five years, the business analytics software-as-a service (SaaS) market will grow more than three times as fast as the total business analytics software market with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013.

According the SearchCIO's article, of all the apps moving into the cloud - email, customer relationship management, disaster recovery (DR) and so forth - BI is the one causing the most commotion. That's because traditional BI vendors got too comfy with their six-digit contracts and forgot to innovate, experts say. Meanwhile, upstart BI SaaS solution vendors are coming out with on-demand services that combine BI with data integration. The article mentions several examples of companies that are using BI SaaS solutions.

The article also mentions another recent IDC study: Improving Organizational Decision-Making Through Pervasive Business Intelligence: The Five Key Factors That Lead to Business Intelligence Diffusion. According this study, the evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence and analytics solutions is growing. Business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytic application, collectively business analytics, technology and processes are being deployed to support decision-making. The study included in-depth interviews with 22 companies and a survey of more than 1,100 additional organizations in 11 countries. It found that making BI available throughout an organization means much more than distributing reports to all stakeholders. In some cases, BI solutions are deployed to automate an existing way of making decisions; in others, BI solutions are deployed to change the way decisions are made - on the basis of fact, rather than opinion.