Podcast: The Converging Worlds of BI and SaaS

April 7, 2009

Jeff Kaplan has run the consultancy THINKstrategies since 2001. He says that the emergence of software-as-a-service (and its young sibling, platform-as-a-service) is a having a huge impact on the business intelligence market.

Kaplan maintains a blog at the THINKstrategies site. Following the podcast is the part of a late March posting that deals with BI and SaaS. The rest of the post can be found here.

Listen to the Podcast:

Is Business Intelligence a Viable SaaS Business? Forrester Research issued a new report suggesting, “The Sa aS BI space is largely unproven.” This came as news to a myriad of SaaS-oriented BI vendors listed on the SaaS Showplace. I’ve known and done business with many of these companies for the past three years. As I stated in 2007, and in numerous whitepapers and webcasts, SaaS-based BI solutions are perfectly designed to respond to the escalating pressures on companies of all sizes to better leverage corporate and customer data to improve their performance. Not only are they more economical and easier to deploy, but they are better architected to permit multi-user access across increasingly dispersed organizations. That is why the rising demand SaaS BI vendors are experiencing disputes Forrester’s findings.