Recently Boris Evelson with Forrester Research released a report titled “BI In The Cloud? Yes, And On The Ground, Too”.
As part of his research, Boris conducted a survey as to why firms did not engage the services of a SaaS business intelligence provider. Interestingly enough, most of the concerns were ones that AOD and some of our competitors can easily dispose of.
There were about 10 concerns, but most replies were included in the top six concerns. Below I will outline the concern and give a sensible reply to those concerns.
Security Concerns
Almost 50% of the respondents cited this concern in their reply. Speaking for AOD, we are SAS70 II compliant to the point that HIPPA compliant hospitals are among our customers. There is nothing more private than hospital data. In addition, our entire business hinges on making sure our one system works well. Your internal IT team likely has multiple systems to manage. So there is a chance we are more focused on application concerns; including security.
Integration Challenges
Respondents were concerned about the ability to integrate. Actually, this is an area where AOD excels. We have many pre-built connectors across all types of systems. In addition, our team has over a decade of experience working with blue chip companies on extremely complex data integration projects across all types of “traditional” BI platforms and software.
Total Cost Concerns
Based on our aforementioned experience implementing traditional BI solutions, this is not a legitimate concern. Traditional BI solutions are about 10-20x the cost of our SaaS BI solution and take a long time to implement. You can read more in our white paper. Also, if you are questioning the value of Business Intelligence, then please click here and we’ll send you a copy of Aberdeen’s recent report on the subject.
Lack of Customization
Most serious SaaS BI players have addressed this concern with a strong “Self-service” model. In the case of AOD, the release of our V3.0 self-service application with drag and drop customization, this concern has been met directly, allowing users to customize on the fly and save to build internal report libraries. In addition, our experience has shown us that the biggest challenge with BI initiatives is not delivering functions, it’s adoption by end users. The beauty of SaaS BI is that you can almost entirely focus your staff on adoption instead of project management and requirements definition.
Application Performance
The great thing about a business intelligence system is that it does not require mission-critical performance. It just needs to work when you access it and be consistent. Our system does run quickly and is designed to be available at all times. In addition, should you decide that time is critical we can certainly set-up the system to be real-time. More importantly, you want to make sure that your data is accurate and can be depended upon. Performance issues are rare in the age of high processing power. Data issues are commonplace.
Difficulty of Installation or Risk of Migration
There’s nothing to install. Sound good? In terms of migration, all your data will be standardized or normalized inside of our system. We can always give you back your data. In fact, we’ll provide you an active backup just as a failsafe.
As you can see, the scenarios depicted above are not a legitimate reason to abstain from SaaS BI – certainly none justify spending millions on customer built BI when you can have SaaS BI for thousands. Of course, there ARE some situations where you would be better off with an in-house, custom system and we’ll be the first to inform you of that situation when it occurs. We have seen from experience other SaaS vendors that drove themselves into the ground trying to be “all things to everyone”. We believe that we are “most things to most companies” but there are highly specialized scenarios where you might want to consider an in-house solution.
