The Clear Advantages of SaaS BI

I had the opportunity to review some SaaS BI statistics last week as part of a webinar we presented in conjunction with Michael Lock of Aberdeen Group.  Michael had some great material and the highlight for me was the survey data that demonstrated the value of SaaS BI versus other forms of BI.  As examples:

• the % improvement in customer retention was 2.9x better in companies using SaaS BI;
• the % improvement in new pipeline accounts and closed contracts were both > 3x better in companies using SaaS BI;
• the ease of expansion and adding new users was 2x better in companies using SaaS BI;
• the time to deploy the BI project was > 3.4x longer using other forms of BI compared to SaaS BI;

These are great statistics based on an Aberdeen survey with 280 or more companies responding in each category.

  With these types of results you might wonder tow things:

• why are the numbers so good for SaaS BI?
• why isn’t every company jumping onto the SaaS BI bandwagon?

Let’s look at each in turn.  Firstly I believe the strong numbers are a direct result of the following attributes of SaaS BI:

• True SaaS (multi-tenant etc.) can scale easily, linearly and cost-effectively, allowing many more people in the organization to take advantage of timely, relevant information to make better decisions, more quickly;
• This means whether on front-line customer service, or in sales, or in shipping etc., people are reacting to issues more quickly and more effectively leading to better customer satisfaction, retention, sales and other outcomes;
• If the SaaS solution has embedded knowledge (such as myDIALS Performance Modules) the time to deploy and deliver value is extremely quick and provides best practices;
• SaaS BI can be disruptive and innovative vendors such as myDIALS are leading the charge on this disruption in terms of the business model, cost-effectiveness, target audience, immediate and continuous data availability, and the incorporation of Web 2.0 and analytic capabilities;
• Rather than simply hosting traditional BI in the cloud with the inherent heavy and batch-update architectures, SaaS lends itself to Operational BI solutions that operate in near-real-time or right-time, that include collaboration, alerting, sophisticated analytics, real-time scenario analysis and that support a continuous improvement approach to operational performance management.

As for the second question, why aren’t more companies jumping onto SaaS BI, I think this is simply the natural evolution of new technology adoption.  We have seen the adopters take the leap and soon the early majority is starting to follow.  I think increasing adoption will come as part of the continuing evolution of the SaaS ecosystem. As vendors work together to provide integrated, complementary solutions (such as the partnership between myDIALS and NetSuite) more companies will feel more comfortable moving to SaaS for all or the majority of their computing needs.

I’m excited by the fact that third-party analyst research demonstrates the real value of SaaS as an operational BI platform and I believe over time SaaS BI will be the standard delivery model for operational BI rather than on-premise or appliance-based solutions.