Panorama Business Intelligence

The world of Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly attractive for many businesses as companies look for viable options other than continuously investing money into buying software that needs to be installed and maintained in-house .  Not only is SaaS becoming a viable option, it is also becoming a feasible alternative, in many cases, to traditional application software vendors.  There are numerous reasons that can help explain this phenomenon.  On the IT side of the equation, most CIOs are always on the lookout for ideal application delivery options and the ability to dramatically reduce large amounts of their budgets spent on IT-related administration and support is a very attractive proposition.  Furthermore, the cost of staffing and increasing IT-complexity makes a SaaS-based approach very appealing. On the business side of the equation, there are many cases where buying a service helps reduce the burden from IT when there is a need for a new solution to support the business.  

A great example of a SaaS-based solution is Google Apps.  Google’s solution compels companies to ask themselves why they would install a productivity suite when they could just use it as a set of services.  The uptake on Google Apps has been tremendous and the potential for both improvement and growth can be seen (500,000 companies currently using it worldwide with 3,000 added every day).  Another example of a remarkable SaaS-based solution is Salesforce.com. With one million users, their value proposition is based on the fact that an organization need not purchase and install a cumbersome CRM system that will cost a fortune to maintain.  Rather, use it as a service and keep your headaches to a minimum!

Until today, SaaS-based options have really only been adopted and utilized by small and medium sized businesses.  SaaS gives these companies a chance to benefit from a robust solution with a great economic value and quality of service that would normally be beyond their reach as a smaller organization.   

Larger enterprise organizations have shied away from SaaS for various reasons.  They like to manage their own applications and tend to be weary of hosting their data outside of their firewall where they cannot control it in a way that they would like.  However, are they missing out on some of the very attractive advantages of SaaS?  Aside from the cost of ownership, SaaS has many other advantageous facets including highly collaborative abilities, access-from-anywhere, constant updates of features and sharing.

Enterprise customers who are not ready to take the ground-shaking step of switching completely over to SaaS should consider new software solutions that bring together the best of on-premise and SaaS-based solutions. 

For example, Panorama Software has a new offering that blends, in a very innovative way, its on-premise and SaaS-based Business Intelligence solutions to bring together the value of both offerings.  Its on-premise solution gives organizations the ability to connect to corporate data natively without having to perform any data extraction or change any security already defined on the existing platforms.  This on-premise solution is extended using Panorama’s SaaS-based solution that integrates with Google Apps and thus lets users share and collaborate using a SaaS platform.  So a user working within Panorama using the classic on-premise solution can click on a “collaborate” button inside his/her report to share it with people inside or outside of the firewall (suppliers, partners, etc.) having to take only a subset of the data required to support that report.  This minimizes the need to put all of the company’s data in the cloud. 

For the enterprise market, SaaS has always been a great solution to appreciate from a respectful distance. In the years to come, enterprise companies will spend more and more in SaaS solutions.  However, while there are some wondrous advantages of a SaaS approach, it is unrealistic to think it would be possible to try to shift everything over to a SaaS solution.  However, it seemed inevitable that a solution would arise that would present the best of both worlds.  For companies who feel that a SaaS solution is just too aggressive an approach, Panorama NovaView offers a compelling proposition: take the value of SaaS features but minimize the risk by anchoring it to an on-premise solution.