"The Nine Substantial Benefits of Software-as-a-service Business Intelligence"

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"Birst is Cloud BI. Also known as "SaaS BI" or "on-demand BI," Cloud BI simply means that Birst is offered as a subscription service delivered over the internet instead of as an on-premise software installation. As a Cloud BI solution, Birst is faster to get deployed, lower cost, and demonstrates a far more rapid time to value than an on-premise solution."
Source: Birst

Resources Related to The Nine Substantial Benefits of Software-as-a-service Business Intelligence:

• Business Intelligence (BI) (Wikipedia)
• Software as a Service (SaaS) (Wikipedia)

The Nine Substantial Benefits of Software-as-a-service Business Intelligence

Executive Summary

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in the Cloud offer a timely and cost-effective resource for businesses of all sizes to maximize their business potential while minimizing costs. Relative to traditional business intelligence solutions, Cloud BI solutions - also known as Software-as-a-Service or On-demand solutions - offer substantial business benefits, including:

• Increased Access
• Faster Return on Investment (ROI)
• Lower Implementation Costs
• Lower Ongoing Costs
• Easier Budget Approval
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Greater Visibility
• Low Risk - High Reward

To make the most of Cloud BI, businesses should look for a solution that offers a breadth of features that are quick to deploy, scalable, and easy to use. To find the best solution for them, each business should consider their own unique needs with respect to:

• Multi-source data capability
• Analysis and Reporting
• Scalability
• Automation
• Flexibility

Once these needs are determined, the best match can be found among available Cloud BI vendors. Industry expert David Raab also recommends considering the following characteristics before selecting a vendor:

• Technology
• Terms of Service
• Professional Services Offered
• Pricing
• Financial Stability

Ultimately, no matter which vendor is chosen, any business is likely to benefit from the use of a Cloud BI solution. Through the Cloud model, BI is becoming much more accessible, less expensive, and less risky, while the benefits are made more compelling for all.

Cloud Business Intelligence
The ability to pay for analytics capabilities as a monthly or annual service, instead of purchasing, integrating, and maintaining software on your own. It is generally more cost effective and rapidly implemented than traditional solutions.

Why Cloud BI?

In a difficult economy, smart businesses are pursuing every available opportunity to maximize performance and minimize costs. Business Intelligence tools - used to analyze data, identify trends, and support business decisions - continue to gain in popularity among companies of all sizes as they seek to optimize efficiency and effectiveness and gain a competitive edge. While large investments in conventional on-premise Business Intelligence solutions are impractical and unattractive to most businesses at this time, the allure of Software-as-a-Service or Cloud business intelligence (BI) solutions has never been stronger.

Cloud BI solutions, which are hosted by service providers and accessed by users over the Internet, offer all of the benefits of traditional BI solutions while substantially improving the economic bottom line. Cloud solutions provide powerful and flexible business insight, but are faster, easier, and less costly than custom "behind the firewall" solutions. The business benefits of Cloud BI are compelling and real. Relative to traditional business intelligence solutions, Cloud BI solutions offer the following business benefits:

INCREASED ACCESS, MAXIMUM RESULTS

Lower cost and higher ease of use get Business Intelligence tools into the hands of those who can make the biggest impact
Conventional solutions tend to be expensive and IT resource intensive, limiting their availability to dedicated analysts who are spread thinly across the many business units that they serve. Cloud solutions are easier and less costly to deploy and require little special expertise to operate. As a result, they are more accessible to non-technical users throughout the organization. Analysts and others who struggle with Excel spreadsheets when making sales forecasts, planning resource utilization, or servicing customer accounts can use Cloud BI tools to do analysis and reporting quickly and easily, even when using ad hoc tools to explore data for even greater insight. Across the organization, these functional specialists can use BI analysis and reporting tools to uncover opportunities for performance improvements and functional efficiencies that are hidden in the data.

"As intouch Group grows, Birst can easily scale. . . and its Cloud offering ensures that we pay for only what we need today."
—Josh Kaplan
CEO, intouch Group

FASTER ROI

A faster "time to value" allows for a quicker return on investment
Cloud BI solutions offer quick deployment and easy changes. Unlike traditional BI implementation, which can take 12 to 18 months or longer, Cloud BI solutions can typically be up and running in just a few weeks. This is because there is no additional hardware to install and no database to set up. With the solution up and running sooner, companies can start reaping a return on their investment more quickly, decreasing the time required to see value from the implementation.

Ongoing maintenance and customization is also faster and easier. Since all of the hardware and infrastructure is maintained by the vendor, all software upgrades and architecture changes are handled by the vendor and delivered to the customer automatically. Customization and changes to the reporting and analysis tools can be handled by end users with limited, if any, use of IT resources.

LOWER IMPLEMENTATION COSTS

Limited up-front costs and IT resource requirements
Cloud BI providers manage all of the back-end systems for their service as well as host their applications, so customers are spared the hardware and setup costs associated with having a BI solution deployed - there is no hardware to buy, no software servers to purchase and set up. In addition, because software-as-a-service BI solutions can be set up in a fraction of the time of traditional solutions, the time and resources required to deploy a finished solution are dramatically reduced. Therefore, up-front costs for implementation are significantly less than traditional solutions. Low cost also makes these solutions less risky to implement and easier to budget, generating a higher ROI.

LOWER ONGOING COSTS

No fixed investment, pay only for what you actually use
Cloud BI vendors typically charge a subscription fee which provides an all-in cost for the right to use the application service, maintenance, and support. This subscription is usually based on the number of users who will interact with the system, the volume of data analyzed and a support plan. This pricing approach ensures that customers pay only for what they need, as they need it - so the customer retains financial control of the project and maintains the flexibility to scale up as their needs expand. Because the customer's solution is running on a shared infrastructure, this increased financial control and flexibility comes with lower ongoing costs. For most organizations, the cost to deploy an Online BI solution based on subscription licensing will be far lower than the cost of buying a conventional on-premises solution as there are no servers to maintain, no patches to install, no ongoing software maintenance to pay and minimal IT resources required. Additionally, ongoing maintenance and upgrades are handled by the vendor, minimizing cost and risk for the customer.

"As a Cloud solution that can be up and running in just days, it's almost 'no risk'..."
—Dave Thornton
President, precisionXL,
a Birst Partner

EASIER BUDGET APPROVAL

Operation Expense vs. Capital Expense (OpEx vs. CapEx)
Cloud solutions are paid for as subscriptions; their license cost is a monthly, predictable expense and not a large, up-front payment for licenses as with conventional software. Therefore, Cloud solutions can be typically purchased as an ongoing operational expense (OpEx) rather than a capital expense (CapEx). This makes these solutions particularly attractive in years, like this one, where CapEx budgets are under immense scrutiny.

SCALABILITY

Easily scale from small to enterprise level solutions
Cloud solutions are designed to support a large number of customers simultaneously, with capacity to spare. This means that any individual customer can quickly expand their Cloud solution by simply requesting a larger account size or more users. Unlike on-premise solutions, customers can expand their Cloud solution without having to buy and deploy more hardware or install different, larger software servers. Since the vendor is the one responsible for capacity, organizations can begin with a small number of users and a small set of data, easily scaling to an enterprise level platform, or anything in between.

FLEXIBILITY

Quickly adapts to changing business needs
Unlike traditional solutions, Cloud BI solutions can be changed easily, so non-technical users can quickly add new reports and dashboards, new data sources, and new analyses. With traditional BI solutions, such changes could take weeks or months, and involve significant IT resources.

GREATER VISIBILITY

Easily share data and reports, even outside the firewall
Cloud applications are deployed over the internet, so that users can easily share data with others, both inside and outside the customer organizations. This makes it easy for users to share insight with remote offices, suppliers, field sales organizations, partners, and customers.

In addition, since these applications can leverage data from anywhere in the world, users can integrate data from multiple sources in different parts of the world, from other internal business units, and also from suppliers and partners in any company's extended value chain. This is especially important for any firm with multiple sites in different physical locations.

LOW RISK - HIGH REWARD

As a monthly subscription service, Cloud solutions offer a low-risk opportunity to acquire business intelligence without high costs, onerous commitments, or high resource requirements. The rewards of greater business insight, improved efficiency, higher productivity and lower costs make this a winning strategy for businesses of all sizes.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT BI VENDOR FOR YOUR BUSINESS

For Cloud business intelligence to be successful in your organization, it must not only deliver more value than the traditional behind-the-firewall approach, it should also offer a breadth of features that are quick to deploy, scalable, and easy to use. To achieve these key business benefits, organizations should consider whether or not they need the following key functional components of business intelligence:

• Multi-source data capability: Ability to consolidate data from multiple sources, such as sales, marketing, finance, operations, and HR.
• Full range of analysis and reporting: Ability to provide the full range of business intelligence end-user interfaces, such as:
  • dashboards
  • alerting
  • operational reporting/banded reporting
  • OLAP/slice-dice/pivot
• Scalability: Ability to grow with an organization in terms of scale and complexity (number of data sources, complexity of calculations, diversity of end-user scenarios)
• Automation: Automation to ease and expedite what have been historically the more painful and laborious aspects of BI configuration - data preparation, integration, and metadata management
• Flexibility: Flexibility to expand, enhance & customize applications as needed

If these criteria apply to your business situation, then Cloud BI is likely to be a good fit. How to find the right provider? Here are some decision criteria from industry expert David Raab:

No matter which vendor you ultimately choose for your business, Cloud BI is likely to have a fast and substantial impact on your business' bottom line. BI is becoming much more accessible, more flexible, less expensive and less risky for all. Cloud technologies are making it worthwhile for any size organization, from small-to-medium businesses to large enterprises to implement a BI solution that will lead to new insights and greater effectiveness throughout the business.

Birst, Inc.
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