BI at Your Service

Enterprise business applications like ERP and CRM were the buzzwords at the

beginning of this decade with organizations jumping on the bandwagon to

implement these solutions. Over time, enterprises felt the necessity of

reporting and so the tools for it, and thus BI solutions became a priority for

businesses. Last year, as per Gartner's survey, BI was on the top to-do list for

CIOs. And as a result, the industry has been witnessing organizations

implementing BI Solutions. Although, during these years, another technology that

also brought a revolution was Software-as-a-Service. Enterprise applications

like ERP, CRM, HRM were offered as On-Demand services. Now BI has followed the

suit, and is being offered as a service.

Today, the market for BI as a Service is a miniscule as compared to the

overall BI platforms market. However BI as a Service is set to gain traction and

will largely be driven by cost, time and accessibility factors. As we know, in

the On-demand model, the cost shifts from being a capital expense to operational

expense, and the solution can be delivered quickly and efficiently. Industry

verticals like retail and manufacturing are more likely to adopt BI as a service

model. Even the midsized organizations who have limited IT budgets and resources

that need a quick deployment of BI platform would be adopting SaaS based BI

model faster than larger organizations.

Does BI on SaaS make sense?



BI as-a-Service or “BIaaS” brings forth terms like “On-Demand”, “Pay as you
grow”, “Cost Effectiveness” and so on, that are synonymous now for any SaaS

based business application offering. For an organization that is looking to

implement a typical BI solution would mean to deal with issues like

datawarehouse, data mining, master data management, etc. While with BIaaS, the

organization won't have to bother about all those and just have to subscribe to

the service, and they would be all set to go. Benefits like quick deployment

time, reduces costs and limited IT resources requirements for implementation and

management are the primary benefits that a business reaps from a SaaS based

service. In times when organizations are eyeing to be more cost effective,

moving infrastructure use from a capital expense to an operational expense would

help an organization in cutting down overall cost of BI implementation by almost

90%.

Most BI as service offerings are hosted applications. The customer has to therefore provide data to the service vendor, which raises the questions on data security. You must ensure that only that data that is required for specific reporting is provided to the vendor- for ex, if granular level financial information is not required, then the same should not be provided. Stringent Non Disclosure Agreements have to be formulated and strict data governance policies and procedures need to be followed. Process integrity for each process needs to be defined and maintained. Data encryption and dedicated bandwidth are also important to ensure faster adoption of the On-demand BI model. Typically aggregate level reports and dashboards that do not warrant any analytics (like the ability to create ones own report or have multi-hierarchical drill downs) can be offered on the SaaS model. Operational reports that generate a huge volume of data or reporting for legal and compliance purposes will tend to follow the On-premise BI model. N.K.Subramaniyam, Executive Director, Operations & Technology, Saksoft

BIaaS comes as an answer to an organization for cost effective and fast

deployment for BI solution. The advantages of BIaaS are obvious for an SME. By

knowing the predictable monthly costs of BIaaS offering instead of large upfront

expenditure of BI solution, small businesses can for first time acquire rich

functionality of reports and dashboards without having to spend a fortune if

they would have opted for an On-premise BI solution, and thus improve decision

making through broader, easier, timely access to accurate data.

BIaaS, besides mid-sized organizations, would be advantageous for many

enterprises across industry verticals too. But that may not be the case with

financial services. While financial services industry has been the early adopter

of Business Intelligence as a practice, moving to the on-demand model from the

on-premise model will need a paradigm shift in the business intelligence model

as there are concerns on data security and regulatory and compliances issues

with putting data with a third party server.

How would BIaaS work?



BI as a Service has several options. The service vendor can set up his own

BI infrastructure and provide that as service following a typical SaaS model.

While, someone can provide a platform such as of Amazon or Microsoft Azure to

host BI application, using these technologies, the customer can either deploy

full stack data warehouses, or pay based on transactions.

In effect when a customer subscribes for a SaaS offering it is understood

that the organizational data would be hosted at the service provider's

infrastructure. This somewhat does not hold true for BI SaaS model. This is

because, SaaS BI will usually work on data that is provided to it, it would

either be uploaded or accessed from a system, be it an on-premise or another

SaaS based system. This means that, an organization that subscribes for the BI

service could be having BIaaS as part of a bouquet of enterprise applications

that the vendor offers, or alternately the service subscriber can also upload

the data as files on which the SaaS BI would do the reporting job. The exchanged

data could be from Oracle database or from Excel file; it can be of flat file

format too for instance CSV format.

The ability to exchange database files or integrating on-premise application

with the SaaS BI negates the assumption that SaaS BI would work on SaaS based

applications only. The con for BIaaS as compared to

On-premise BI would be that as a customer has to upload the information on

periodic basis, the reports and data analytics does not reflect real-time

transactional information and hence a latency is there, which is not the case

with on-premise BI solutions.

BI On Demand offers similar features to the on-premise BI solutions thereby giving customers the choice in how to deploy and consume business intelligence. At the same time, the SaaS offering can be fully integrated with the on-premise applications thereby ensuring a comprehensive BI strategy that can develop and evolve with the customers' needs. Any business Intelligence solution — not just a SaaS-based solution - would require integration across various platforms. SAP Business Objects solutions are integrated across various platforms as well. For instance, the SAP Business Objects On-Demand has a data integration hub which uses an automated process to move data from an enterprise's data sources into its own fully supported and hosted data warehouse. Incoming data can include both on-premise and third party sources. Further it also allows you to build a universe on top of the data warehouse that assigns business names to database objects. Sanjay Deshmukh, VP, Business User and Platform, SAP India

Alternately a service provider may also offer standalone BI service as a

“Managed Service” wherein the information is available in the customer's

On-premise data warehouse, and the vendor will generate the reports and

dashboards that can be accessed by the business users on-demand. Here the data

is not stored in the cloud, but remains in the customer's data centre and the

vendor just offers data management services.

BIaaS offerings



Software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI, On-Demand BI, Subscription based BI, Hosted BI,
BI in the Cloud are all different terms that go hand in hand. The low-cost

offering of BI solution on a SaaS based model does not mean slimmed down

features or below par performance when compared to the traditional on-premise BI

solutions.

Like on-premise BI solutions, the On-Demand BI offerings also offer analytics

capabilities besides reporting facilities. While BI tells us 'what' happened,

Business Analytics tools that rely on statistical and quantitative analysis and

predictive modeling, and helps to understand 'why' a certain thing occurred or

'how' a certain decision would impact. Having such BA capability helps an

organization to have better decision making capacity with the dynamic business

environment.

In contrast to self hosted BI solution, where scaling up can involve issues

like budget approval, equipment purchase, and operations overhead. The BIaaS

facilitates affordable and easily available infrastructure with specialized

managed computing resources that are provided by the service vendor. These

resources are available as 'always on' and are ready to scale as per the users

demand.

Security Concerns



BI is something that incorporates data privacy and validity. With the

concept of BIaaS, data validity, data quality and data security becomes a major

challenge. Apart from that organizations are entrusting critical information to

the service providers that their data will be held secure and private. An

organization would be using BI to evaluate their KPIs. These KPIs give gist of

the organization's business performance.

BI as a Service” trend is suddenly accelerating. The primary driver being that low capital expenditure budget available. So the way you place BI as a service offering is to structure it as operational expenditure rather than a capital expenditure. But five to six years back, you had to have a capital expenditure allocated for the BI project, since most of the organizations didn't have the capability for that, now an operational expenditure is the solution for them to adopt BI. And in that scheme of things, BI as a Service where you just pay as you use is gaining momentum. Primary driver for this acceleration being; one, ability to bring down the ownership cost. Second, if you segment BI as a standard reporting related application or data-mining related application most organizations do not have capability to buy an expensive statistical tool so they are better off leveraging BI on a SaaS model. In the current matured model in which BI as a Service is emerging is where the information will reside with the service providers. Derick Jose, General Manager, Knowledge Services, MindTree

An organization would not be willing to host such sensitive information with

service providers. Hence, convincing organizations to share their data is a key

challenge. Service providers have to assure them for data privacy and security

along with high percentage of system uptime. Organizations would still be

skeptical of hosted offerings, but many who had expressed apprehensions earlier

end up choosing an On-Demand solution, mainly because of cost advantages. While

others have adopted the On-Demand model as they have found it to be a better fit

for their business requirements. An on-demand business intelligence solution

provides tremendous additional benefits of scale and efficiency, lower cost, and

better consumption of on-demand derived data sources. If security is a concern,

that's all the more reason to turn to a trusted provider and market leader in

the BI as Service domain.

SaaS technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and customers are

becoming more mature in their acceptance and adoption of these solutions. If we

compare SaaS with e-commerce, a few years ago we would never have submitted our

credit card details online but now we do so as part of everyday life and much of

our banking is also done online. This is attributed to the fact that service

provider himself ensures the utmost protection of their customers' information.

BIaaS is expected to bring in the change to the economics of Business

Intelligence. It will make BI and analytics available to all operational users

of an organization and hence and will promote pervasive use of BI.