SaaS BI: SMBs Find SaaS-based Business Intelligence cost effective

Increasingly, companies are turning to Business Intelligence software to help them get better insight into their company, their customers, and their competitors so that they can make better business decisions.  BI will merge the worlds of internal financial and sales data with data collected externally from market research and other public sources, and from that combination, let companies question, explore and display different views of the data.

But what happens when you take Business Intelligence and you offer it via subscription with a SaaS model?  You get a compelling solution for many small and medium sized businesses.  Traditional Busienss Intelligence is one factor that keeps many companies away.  58 percent reported that their impression of traditional Business Intelligence solutions was as being too complex.  But adding a SaaS twist to the deployment is beginning to change people’s minds.

The SaaS BI market is growing rapidly.  A recent Aberdeen report found that the number of SaaS deployments across all organizations increased from 7% in 2008 to 15% in 2009.

SaaS BI is catching on because:

– No Capital expenditures. No big up-front payments  before any results can be seen.   Companies pay per seat for only those users that need or want to use the product.   This lets companies experiment relatively inexpensively with small numbers of users that can act as early scouts for evaluating  software before recommending that the business move forward with adding more users.  And scaling back or turning the service off altogether is always an option.

– No IT headaches. Companies don’t need a dedicated IT staff to support them in getting the system set up.  No need to think hardware and network.  Instead the focus can be on the solution.

– Project size is no problem. Small projects with data of interest to only one or two users can be undertaken cost effectively.  There is no need to purchase software with a high price tag for a short-term or small scale project.

– Easy browser access. It is easy to make BI results available to anyone with browser access.  Visualizations can often be mashed up and embedded in other web pages or portals so that the information and results can be shared easily.

The results of the Aberdeen study confirmed that small and medium sized companies that previously would have been priced out of business intelligence are now beginning to try out cost-effective SaaS applications.  The report finds that easy-to-use Web2.o-style SaaS applications have won over many SMBs.  Over half (52%) of SaaS BI users are organizations that have less than $50 million revenue.