Cloud BI has Arrived.  Cloud BI is poised for accelerated uptake.  Adoption of cloud BI can take many forms.  Some companies have taken their on-premise BI software licenses to the cloud where their vendor now offers the software on a marketplace or their own hosted private cloud.  Some have dipped a toe in the water by licensing cloud databases for EDW expansion or backups while others have purchased pure play cloud BI products that only run in the cloud.

Figure 1. Are you planning to increase or decrease your use of the Cloud for BI in the next 12 months?

If your organization isn’t already leveraging the Cloud for some aspects of BI and analytics, chances are pretty good that someone in your company will make a purchase in the near future. Lets look at a few reasons why Cloud-based BI and analytics increasingly matter to IT and business leaders: 

Simplicity & Entry Costs. Cloud BI and Analytics enable BI in places where it couldn’t exist before.  Too expensive, not enough skills, or simply overkill… CEO and department heads that once felt on-premise BI options weren’t a good match are seeing how far things have come.  Gone are the days are entry points requiring a combination of six-figure database, ETL, and BI licenses, infrastructure upgrades, and a full-time team to maintain it.  On-premise hardware platform requirements are down to zero, required user sophistication has dropped off a cliff, and annual licensing fees for a user can start at what you’d pay for a tablet. In some cases, you don’t even have to speak to a sales person…just have a credit card number ready. If you always thought BI was out of reach, check out the growing list of Cloud BI and Analytics offerings from new as well as established vendors.

SaaS API Integration. Data from SaaS API’s are growing like weeds.  For businesses that grew up on SaaS applications for everything from HR to CRM and Accounting over the past decade, their department users are outgrowing the built-in reporting provided within each application. 

But gaining different and deeper new insights require integrating data from the API’s of each SaaS application. Not helping the situation is how IT, in most cases, did not play a meaningful role in selecting, operating, or supporting these applications.  As a consequence, they are now in a tougher position to advance the status quo. A new class of Cloud BI offerings may be the best answer for harnessing insight from data across all of them…thus, a dynamic that’s fueling growth for Cloud BI vendors. 

Furthermore, because the structure and the naming of this data are well known, some Cloud BI vendors such as GoodData, Domo, and DataHero have gone beyond just connecting to these sources by automagically formatting data and preassembling key metrics….addressing, and perhaps prolonging, the “No IT” realities typical in many departments who have adopted SaaS applications.

Agility and Flexibility. Cloud BI offers speed in ramping and scaling BI and Analytic infrastructure. Enterprises with large, mission critical data operations in particular stand to benefit the most from leveraging Cloud BI delivery models. That’s because BI vendors such as Microstrategy and IBM can now host and support entire BI environments on massively scalable grid computing environments.  The elasticity of cloud environments such as Amazon’s EC2 means memory, storage, and CPU upgrades take place in minutes with only few mouse clicks.  Relinquishing compute resources is just as easy and you can still keep the data in the cloud. BI leaders should evaluate how Cloud BI technology and delivery models can increase architectural flexibility and deployment agility.

But since most companies have legacy BI and data environments that won’t go away soon, BI and data leaders can pursue incremental approaches where components migrate to the cloud over time.  Another way to start leveraging Cloud BI benefits entails purchasing a new cloud tool to address a specific initiative such mobile dashboards and reports. And this won’t become an island solution as most Cloud BI vendors offer the ability to tap on-premise data sources even allowing customers to mitigate risks by specifying how long their data stays in the cloud.

The Next Big Cloud App is BI and Analytics. The Cloud is originating more and more of the data we consume for BI and Analytics.  The ease by which Cloud BI solutions allow users to achieve insights from API data alone will accelerate adoption in the near term.  Business and IT leaders have an opportunity to leverage and integrate these technologies into evolved data strategies and more agile organizations to achieve new BI and analytics breakthroughs.

Eckerson Group will continue to play an active role in this evolving segment of BI and Analytics.  In future posts, I look forward to sharing additional Cloud BI insight…what’s new and different, deployment models, governance impacts, buying criteria, and more.