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.

For instance, a company might want only front-end tools to exist in the cloud, while entire data warehouses remain on-premise. The dirty little secret SaaS vendors don’t tell you: you can have your cake and eat it, too.

A solution like our own NovaView offers a customizable hybrid of services that combines on-premise and traditional cloud platforms for allowing each business to function in its unique way. Using a hybrid platform helps organizations bypass moving large data warehouses to the cloud while offering limitless collaboration potential – something businesses don’t get with a pure on-premise solution.

Remember: while SaaS offers your organization capabilities beyond your on-premise solution, you don’t have to choose between one or the other. Explore the market; the flexibility of a hybrid solution could make BI data accessible to even more information workers.