I saw someone on another blog the other day say “think of SaaS like you do of bungie jumping, at first no one wanted to do it but now even your granny does it”, which I thought was a great way to sum up the rising tide of SaaS. I share this view and apply it to business intelligence as well. I see it like this – not even 10 years ago we were all trying to work out what “CRM” was apart from just another IT acronym, what value could there possibly be in having a piece of software to help you communicate with your customer? And now, raise your hand if you don’t have, or haven’t investigated purchasing a CRM application for your busniess – no one, I thought so.
Well I reckon look out for a wicked cocktail coming soon which mixes BI and SaaS. All boats, big and small, in the BI space, will be lifted by the SaaS rising tide. With the consolidation of BI in the enterprise space in 2007, coupled with the rise of SaaS as a possible standard for “cloud computing”, all BI vendors will be looking to capitalise on the frictionless deployment possibilities SaaS offers to reach a massive mid size audience which has a healthy and growing appetite for BI.