Surveys Reveal SaaS BI Market Growth

According to a recentstudy by the Aberdeen Group, demand for business intelligence as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application has risen dramatically over the last few years, with Aberdeen reporting that 15% of businesses used SaaS BI solutions in 2009, compared to only 7% in 2008.

An article by InfoWorld’s Chris Kanaracus points out similar growth data from research firm IDC, which claims that the SaaS BI market will grow by more than 22 percent through 2013.

So why is interest in SaaS BI increasing so dramatically? One of the traditional stumbling blocks for conventional on-premise BI applications is the often staggering upfront and ongoing development costs, especially for larger organizations.

For example, a large retailer may have massive amounts of data related to sales per store, inventory levels, and a plethora of other items. In-house IT staff may not have the requisite skills and experience needed to implement an on-premise BI solution with existing systems, while an off-the-shelf SaaS BI service can potentially meet most of an organization’s needs without the development expense and support headaches.

A host of SaaS BI vendors are taking advantage of that interest, with companies like Actuate, BIRST, GoodData, Host Analytics, QlikView, Oco, Panorama, and PivotLink jumping into the market over the last few years.

So is your organization currently using an SaaS BI solution? Please add a comment to this article or reach out to me via Twitter if you’d like to provide your feedback.
 
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