Software strategies and more…

I am a huge fan of BI as a Service.

I first started thinking about BI-a-a-S when I attended a FAST Search and Transfer analyst conference back in 2005 when they were talking about BI applets rather than search applets. Their vision at the time was that BI needed to be web enabled and customizable by the user of the data and the job at hand. In January 2008, FAST was gobbled up by Microsoft (a BIG SAP miss in my humble opinion) and its enterprise search thought leadership seemed to dissipate.

But the need for web-based enterprise business intelligence has continued to gain momentum. Both the need and opportunity for this technology has recently come back into the limelight with the Economist article Data, data everywhere and has been furthered in blogs like Retention and Compliance: The other side of the big data problem by Ramon Chen. Its my opinion if you combine these with social business trends as cited by Michael Fauscette in his recent blog post Applying social to business , web-based BI is well placed to automate and make search intelligent to hone business and customer experiences - all the while taking advantage of the dynamic storage and processing power coming on-line from a wide variety of infrastructure as a service offerings.

I expect savvy organizations will pay close attention to BI-a-a-S and how it allows them to make sense of their markets, customers and processes. I also foresee BI co-existing as both on-premise solutions and web-based depending on need and scale requirements, thus being more of a software+services solution rather than an either or solution.

Note: Microsoft promises we’ll see much more of FAST technology in the new version of SharePoint which is sorely needed given the poor search in previous versions.