BI On Demand / SaaS BI is a great way particularly for small and medium size companies to get the low hanging fruits of business analysis/reporting without spending a huge amount of money and IT effort. This gets companies started down the path of Business analytics within a couple of weeks.I think it is flawed to think that this model makes more sense primarily if the data sources are “SaaS” based but I think even for on premise data sources, leveraging SaaS based BI can help companies start down the path of business analytics without needing to put together a whole BI competency center, which most SME’s are not going to be in a position to do that anytime in the near future.
The tools are quite powerful and cater to many relevant use cases at companies particularly SME companies. There are quite of few solutions out there in this domain, will look through them over the next couple of days. Lets start with SAP BI On demand, Recently was trying out the solution and liked quite a few things about it. The approach to this solution seemed to be report sharing solution to external stakeholders like salesperson, customers , distributors etc. But it can be lot more than that particularly for SME’s.
The one thing I really liked about the SAP Bi On demand solution was the iPhone app – SAP Business Object explorer.It provides some nice visualizations for the data that is loaded into the on-demand warehouse right on my mobile phone.
I was able to get some data from an ERP load it up into a personal account and get the data on my iPhone in a matter of an hour (of course there are some restrictions on the size of data in these personal accounts). But I think it was pretty neat say to be able to deliver analytics / reports to a complete sales force with a couple of days efforts.
Below is a video testimonial for SAP BI on demand
More on SAP BI on demand to follow, Want to see when we are going to see the impact or benefits of SAP's business analytics 4 solution launch ( in the next couple of days).
But I think we are going to see a lot of innovation from the SaaS BI / BI ondemand space trickle back down into , On Premise solutions. I like what I am reading from companies like Chart.io
data visualization will still help uncover important nuances. Maybe not all, but you’ll discover lots of useful insights and be guided toward the relevant next steps for analysis.
, Excel is horrible for developing data insights. Avoid it. It’s simply not good at all for discovery. I see data visualization, instead, as being key for the first steps. So if you’re running a business and you’re not asking “Where are the data visualizations?” then you’re doing something wrong.
More to follow….
Prashanth Rai
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