Cloud BI Becoming More of a Priority on Enterprise Agendas

 As businesses rush to cut the time and financial costs of software implementations, business intelligence (BI) is emerging as one of the greatest applications of interest around and the cloud is receiving an ever growing amount of buzz. But hype continues to rule the day over reality as demonstrated by a Saugatuck Technology research report which found that only 13 percent of global enterprises used cloud BI or analytics in 2011. However, the revealed that BI will also be one of the fastest-growing apps available in the cloud through 2013, to the tune of an 84 percent annual growth rate. This same period is expected to see an annual growth rate of 44 percent for cloud CRM automation, a 54 percent rate increase for cloud HR/talent management, and a 61 percent rate increase for customer service/support apps.

Saugatuck’s head of research, Bruce Guptill, elaborated on the growing interest in BI software from the cloud saying, “When adequately developed and implemented, the software tends to deliver immediate, real and recognizable business benefits to its users. Those benefits may be as simple as providing awareness of specific business process and resource costs; they may be as complex as economic models for market change and opportunity shifts. But they provide real-time or near-real-time business data in contexts that were otherwise too difficult or expensive to derive using previous methods.”

He continued by noting that cloud BI is capable of generating mass appeal since it is less expensive and quickly to adopt it across operational areas, processes and functions than on-premise solutions.