Is BI as SaaS a Good Fit for SME?

Here, we need to differentiate between hosted applications for BI on the cloud and usage of SaaS, which is a multi tenant version of any application on the cloud.  As a Software as a Service, BI works out even more cost efficient for smaller enterprises due to its multi tenancy environment.  Obviously the biggest cost saving comes from the lack of infrastructure demand, that too for an extremely efficient application that can add sterling value to the business processes.  Implementation costs for BI on SaaS are also close to zero, since no hardware is needed, and this is what drives up the TCO for IT’s increasingly shaky budgets.  Another advantage that BI on SaaS brings is the effective use of redundant sites, secure locations for storage of sensitive data that goes in for analysis.  These sites can be more easily canned for disaster recovery and BCP as well.

Says Vineet Dahiya, Director and Cofounder, InfoAxon a Delhi based Solution Provider, “SaaS is a very peculiar case of BI. I think there is lot of adoption.  For certain use cases where you are not bothered about how your BI data is getting produced or what is the size behind it but you are interested only in the visualisation or solutions that are on the surface, where you can allow lot of consumers to upload and get visualisation, I think SaaS has a bright future on that kind of a BI.”

Speaking of customised add-ons for BI on a SaaS model, he adds,”There is also another part of SaaS where BI will also accelerate because lot of customers are looking for SaaS based platforms to be developed for their business or deliver it on SaaS, but need to have an analytics.  So I think BI on those platforms will also accelerate.”

BI on SaaS also offers free automated upgrades and much faster, easier, and almost free maintenance.  Since the enterprise owns nothing, the provider takes the onus of ongoing upgrades in terms of technology as well as any incidences, with no cost associated for time, IT resources, or software/ hardware costs.  This also ensures a clear budgeting for the activity, without any risk of creep or crawl.  This pay for what you use model has myriad advantages, eliminating wastage while ensuring low operational costs.

Agrees Mohan Rajamani, Director, Cache Technologies, India,” BI Adaption on a public cloud is truly a boon for the Indian SME market.  Many non-IT companies can use it to derive significant analytics and make informed decisions based on the trends.  A SaaS option would be the best bet for this particular set of consumers, since building a dedicated BI app for the SME for their vertical is cost prohibitive and needs a lot of technical handholding besides the long timeframe involved in building those apps.“

In addition, the cloud is completely scalable and when you are sharing a small corner of it, the opportunities for growth are immense.  As a result, Big Data that leads to BI analytics has enough room to grow on a SaaS model.  The data analysed can be studied from a number of points, and can provide access to cross-location data that needs to be studied with new reporting features.  Since they are deployed on a virtual platform, this flexibility is inbuilt on SaaS platforms.

However, some channel partners do not think it is the boon it is made out to be.  Says Vikram Kole, COO, Maia Technologies, from Mumbai “BI on SaaS is at a very nascent stage. The technology is more or less still a challenge with respect to pushing data on cloud.  Even on cloud moving from capex to opex model, customers are looking for balanced ROI. They spend huge amount of money on premise on setting up BI. It involves 18 months of investment and the investment look larger when you go on SaaS, so people are hesitant. This is impeding the growth of BI on SaaS.”

What works, he adds, is that people are going for subscription model based on their infrastructure. “We see that BI on SaaS will be adopted in another 15-18 months. We have been in touch with Microsoft, Amazon but the market readiness actually has to move for the adoption. We are looking forward to enterprises to adopt the technology, as these applications are needed in their lifecycle. However, they look at the BI hosting on same premise rather than moving on cloud. “

 Mohan Rajamani feels that vertical analytics providing industry intelligence is the biggest advantage of using BI on SaaS. “For example, if there are 10 builders who are using a particular SaaS platform for BI at extremely low cost (not the one which is on a premium user fee) and they have agreed with the service provider to share generic data without revealing confidential data, a premium user can buy analytics which could give them the insights of specific geographies, sales trends, infographics collated across their specific industry vertical.  Using these they can make meaningful and informed decisions.”

These were just a few of the advantages that Bi on SaaS provides. On ground, this may be a small enterprise’s best bet for great data analytics and BI that can drive expansion and strategies to help growth.