Panorama Business Intelligence

The battle between on-demand and on-premise business intelligence solutions is heating up. As more and more BI solutions begin offering cloud services, the question lingers: is SaaS or on-premise BI more adept at satisfying an organization’s needs?

Let’s answer that question with another question: why choose one when you can have the best of both worlds?

Every business is different: different sizes, different shapes, different business needs. The real choice shouldn’t definitively be between on-premise and cloud BI; it should be between which components of your suite run on-premise and which components run inside the cloud.

Many of today’s SaaS vendors don’t offer you the choice. Because on-demand BI is still relatively new, it has been perceived as the future of BI. Unfortunately, many SaaS vendors are leveraging the popular belief that you must choose between one or the other to push cloud services on unsuspecting businesses. The truth is you can keep the on-premise components that work best for your business while adding on-demand components that complement your BI platform.
(more…)

The last 3 years were the most important years in the Business Intelligence market. Companies were acquired and merged, BI has become a strategic initiative to most CIOs around the globe and Microsoft has decided to make BI a strategic initiative for the years to come.

At first it seemed very confusing, Proclarity was acquired, PerformancePoint was released, Proclairty was then retired as a stand alone product and PerformancePoint become a component in SharePoint as opposed to a stand alone product…

While at first glance it might have all seemed as a zigzag on the Microsoft part, it is now clear it was all part of a well defined strategy lead by some of the smartest people in the BI space.

So why will Microsoft win? Because of 2 main reasons:
(more…)