Using SaaS BI to Complement Enterprise BI

By Mike Beckerle / August 25th, 2009 / Comments Off

Many people think of SaaS BI as ideal for small businesses that can’t otherwise justify the investment in BI infrastructure. Yet, those of us in the industry find that the adopters of SaaS BI are larger businesses, who uniformly all have internal BI infrastructure already.

Why would this be?

Well it turns out that Oco’s SaaS BI is being used by large businesses in a strategy we call Complementary BI. This is using a mix of various BI technologies in tactically compatible ways. For example: pretty much every large DW/BI project has a big backlog of underserved users. Successful BI/DW systems have some folks they are serving well, but always have others who are still hungry for the information they need. These users are underserved for a number of reasons. They may be a recent acquisition, and their data source systems are not integrated into the enterprise DW yet. Or this integration may not be planned, but rather may be awaiting an ERP consolidation instead. Alternatively, users can be underserved due to knowledge gaps: where IT folks lack the depth of understanding of these specific business needs, and symmetrically, the business users lack the IT and data sophistication to provide self-service.

In any case, these underserved people need information to run their part of the business well, and this is where SaaS BI comes in. SaaS BI can be used as a complement to existing BI systems, to provide a BI solution while central IT clears other critical backlog such as going through a complex ERP consolidation. Or a SaaS BI provider like Oco – which provides not only state-of-the-art tools, but embeds tremendous business knowledge in its solutions – can be used to help close a knowledge gap.

Enterprise DW systems can provide data inputs to SaaS BI solutions, or can be consumers of information integrated by them. So SaaS BI solutions that include data integration can be used as a way to extend one’s data integration leverage while providing an interim solution to a business need at the same time.

You can find out more about how Oco SaaS BI solutions work in conjunction with the SAP Business Objects OnDemand infrastructure at an upcoming webinar….. Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how you might exploit this in a way that complements your other BI initiatives and gets good information in the hands of your business users quickly.