That’s a question we are constantly asking and can only speculate at this stage. For various reasons we don’t believe so but time will tell. Having provided BI solution to the mid sized space , and specifically working with FD’s and FM’s of businesses, for as many businesses as we have, we have learnt that there are different BI profiles of businesses in the mid tier space, some of which simply will not shell out any cash for a BI solution – regardless of how reasonable we (as the vendor) think the price is. However, these guys do want some form of BI even it is just automating their monthly management pack and eliminating the routine grind of repetitive export to excel and manual manipulation to get the workbook complete.
So we anticipate our SaaS solution to be a good “entry point” at low risk for those punters that want to test the BI waters and then as they are enlightened as to what BI can do for them and their business we can upgrade them through our stack. BI is also very much a “seeing is believing” sales game and the cost of sale of trying to get out to do demonstrations on client sites is not viable when you have low ticket prices. SaaS allows proof of concept demonstration on live client data at little or no cost. Right now our call is that SaaS is a logical and natural product extension on our existing business model – time and the market will tell.
